Issue 01 · Autumn 2026
Seven Viewpoints, One Morning: How 428 Made Shibuya Converge
428 wrapped five stories around ten hours of Shibuya and then told you to stop reading any one of them. Its director capped the cast at seven on purpose, and had the script written sideways along the clock. Both decisions are worth stealing.
Tools
Utilities we needed while reading Japanese, rebuilt as the smallest thing that does the job. No account, no database, no API, no token cost — the browser does everything, and nothing is uploaded.
| № | Tool | Does | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Kana Converter | Hiragana to katakana and back, with half-width and full-width handling. Paste any Japanese and read the result out loud before you commit it. | Free · offline |
| 02 | Gojūon with Pitch Accent | The fifty-six cells of the kana grid, each with its modern Tokyo pitch pattern, a sample word, and the mora count that makes the contour predictable. | Free · offline |
| 03 | Vertical & Horizontal Preview | Set one sentence both ways: horizontal left-to-right and vertical top-to-bottom, with ruby over the kanji. The difference is most of the argument for reading Japanese. | Free · offline |
From the editors
Cloveread is a magazine before it is a product. The reading tool that will eventually sit behind all of this is still being built, and we decided to start publishing anyway: a magazine that only appears when the product is finished is a magazine nobody reads, and Japanese literature does not wait.
About
Cloveread is a small magazine about Japanese works — novels, manga, films, games — and about the language they are made in. We write mostly about books, and we care most about the moment you meet one on the page.
Latest
| № | Desk | Story | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Games | Seven Viewpoints, One Morning: How 428 Made Shibuya Converge428 wrapped five stories around ten hours of Shibuya and then told you to stop reading any one of them. Its director capped the cast at seven on purpose, and had the script written sideways along the clock. Both decisions are worth stealing. |