Mekuru app icon Mekuru

Learn Japanese by reading the manga and novels you love

Tap any word in a speech bubble or a vertical novel and see what it means, fully offline. Translate the sentence, save the word, and send it to Anki.

Get Mekuru on Google Play Read the documentation

iPhone and iPad: coming soon to the App Store. Until then, join the beta on TestFlight (iOS 26 or newer).

Mekuru showing a dictionary entry for a word tapped inside a manga speech bubble

Built for reading Japanese

Stay in the story, not in a dictionary app

Mekuru is a reader made for Japanese learners. Open a manga or a novel, tap the word you don't know, and keep reading. Your books, dictionaries, saved words and reading progress stay on your device.

See Mekuru in action

From the page to your flashcards in a few taps

A manga page in Mekuru with the word 大人 highlighted in a speech bubble and its dictionary entry below
Tap words inside the manga Give My Regards to Black Jack SHUHO SATO
Akutagawa's Rashomon in Mekuru's vertical layout with furigana over the harder kanji
Novels the way they're printed
Mekuru's dictionary showing 待つ after the conjugated form 待っていた was tapped
A dictionary that knows grammar
Mekuru's Free books screen listing popular Aozora Bunko classics
17,000 free books to start with

One place to read and learn

Everything you need to keep turning pages

Manga you can tap

Open mokuro manga and tap words right away, for free. With Pro, on-device OCR reads the text of any page, offline.

Vertical novels

Read EPUB books in vertical or horizontal text, with furigana on all kanji, only above your JLPT level, or only on kanji you haven't learned on WaniKani.

Offline dictionaries

Install a full Japanese-English dictionary in one tap, add more languages, or import your own Yomitan dictionaries.

Smart lookups

Conjugated verbs and compound words lead to the right entry, with pitch accent and word frequency where your dictionaries have them.

Sentence translation

Stuck on a whole sentence? Translate it on your device, in the same sheet as the dictionary.

Free books

Start with over 17,000 Aozora Bunko classics and free graded readers, sorted by estimated level.

Vocabulary and Anki

Save words with the sentence you found them in. Send cards to AnkiDroid, AnkiMobile or AnkiConnect, or export CSV.

Your library

Import EPUB, PDF, CBZ and CBR files, sort them into collections, sync with your own Komga or Kavita server, and back everything up.

Free and open source

The reader, dictionaries and Anki export are free, with no ads and no account. The code is AGPL-3.0, with an optional one-time Pro upgrade.

Less dictionary, more reading

Start reading Japanese today

On Android now. On iPhone and iPad, try the TestFlight beta.

Install from Google Play