After finishing a core deck I hit the usual wall: my cards were fine, but I had
almost no native input to mine sentences from. Buying manga volumes locally runs
$10–13 each, which is enough friction to kill the habit. So for the last few months
I’ve been buying used Japanese books out of Japan’s domestic secondhand market
instead, and the numbers turned out good enough that it changed how much I read.
Posting the field notes in case anyone else is stuck at the same point.
What things actually cost (domestic used market, mid-2026)
- Single used tankōbon: ¥110–¥300 typical, ¥500 for recent or popular volumes
- Complete-run bulk lots (全巻セット): often ¥60–¥150 per volume on older long series
- Bunko paperbacks (文庫本): ¥110–¥400
- Book-Off’s ¥110 shelf is where most of my volumes come from; Suruga-ya and
Mercari JP cover the out-of-print stuff
The catch is that none of those shops ship overseas, and shipping — not the books —
is the real cost, so the whole thing only works if you batch. One book shipped alone
is absurd; fifteen volumes in one parcel is reasonable per unit.
Things I got wrong first
- Check furigana before buying. Shōnen/kodomo series (Yotsuba&!, Doraemon,
Detective Conan, most Shōnen Jump titles) carry full furigana; seinen titles
usually don’t. At an intermediate level that’s the difference between reading
and decoding. - Buy the bulk lot, not singles. Per-volume price on 全巻セット listings is
usually 2–3x cheaper, and it’s one shipment instead of five. - Condition grades are conservative. 可 (“acceptable”) has consistently been
fine for reading — yellowed pages, intact spine. Paying up for 美品 is wasted
money when the book is input, not a collectible. - Weight drives shipping, not volume count. A tankōbon is ~150–200 g. Bunko
are lighter and much better value per gram if you can handle unfuriganaed text. - Search in Japanese. Searching “manga” returns English-market listings;
searching 古本 / 中古 / 全巻 returns the actual domestic supply, which is where
the ¥110 shelf lives.
How it feeds Anki
My loop is: read a physical volume → photograph the pages I stall on → OCR them
(mokuro plus Yomitan handles printed manga well enough) → make sentence cards with
the panel as the image field. Having the original page on the card front does more
for my retention than an isolated sentence line, and it makes the card obviously
worth keeping when it comes up in review.
Rough check: a 15-volume run of a series I could actually read cost about ¥2,400 in
books plus shipping, and produced somewhere north of 600 mined sentences. Against
the same series bought new in English-market editions, it isn’t close.
Curious what everyone else reads at the mining stage — series with furigana and
short sentences (4-koma especially) have been far more sustainable for me than the
“just read a light novel” advice I started with.