赤い着物
In a rainy village, a little boy and a girl in a red kimono.
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Sample: three-line reading
Each word has its meaning in this sentence underneath, and each sentence has a full translation. Read the original and glance down only when you need to.
About the book
The passage follows a boy named Kyu at a rural inn on a rainy night, where lantern light, rain sounds, and passing travelers set a quiet scene, and a little girl in a bright red kimono arrives with her mother and lingers in his mind. The narration moves slowly, carrying the hazy, faintly melancholy feel of a child's perception.
Cultural notes (selection)
Background a translation can’t carry: social roles, history and allusions. While reading, tap “Note” at the end of a sentence to see them all.
A kuruma (rickshaw) here means a jinrikisha, and 「舵棒」 refers to the shaft handles the rickshaw man grips. When a passenger arrived at the door, the rickshaw man would first set the shafts down on the entrance stone, then help the passenger down from the carriage hood—a common greeting-and-seeing-off routine at inn entrances of the time.
丸髷 (まるまげ) is a hairstyle worn by married women since the Edo period, with the base of the hair bun coiled into a drum shape. Even after the Meiji era it remained the everyday hairstyle of married women in the countryside.
A 番傘 is a coarse umbrella made of a bamboo frame covered with paper and coated with persimmon tannin; it is thick, heavy, and cheap, and was used on rainy days mainly by students and the lower classes, in contrast to oiled paper umbrellas and Western-style umbrellas.
About the author
Riichi Yokomitsu (17 March 1898 – 30 December 1947) was an experimental, modernist Japanese writer. After his 1923 stories "Nichirin" ("The Sun") and "Hae" ("A Fly") appeared in Bungeishunjū, he co-founded the magazine Bungei-Jidai with Yasunari Kawabata and became known as a leading figure of the Shinkankakuha (New Sensation School).
How the glosses are made
Word glosses and sentence translations are generated in context by AI models (DeepSeek and Zhipu GLM), and every word is checked to have a gloss. AI can make mistakes; you can report problems from the book page.
FAQ
Is this the original text?
Yes. The library holds the opening section of the public-domain original, taken from 青空文库.
Do I need to pay or sign up?
Library books are free to read without an account. Other gloss languages and importing your own texts need an account and credits.
What level is it?
This one is marked “Intermediate”. Every word is glossed, so you can keep reading even with a small vocabulary.
Can I use another gloss language?
English and Chinese glosses are prepared in advance; signed-in readers can generate other languages.