The World of Despair. The Endless Summer Vacation. The Tragedy of Akane. If you spent time on the Japanese internet from the 2000s onward, you may have first encountered these names as “words you must not search” (kensaku shite wa ikenai kotoba) or as online “weird texts” (kaibunsho).
Yet at least some of these works existed before the culture of “words you must not search” took shape. Novels were posted on personal homepages built by their authors, linked from other sites, and gathered readers; there were even online literary prizes. Looking only at the works themselves in hindsight, these strange texts can appear to have been isolated in the dark corners of the internet. But when you dig up the pages of the time, a somewhat different landscape emerges. There were authors, sites, link pages, bulletin boards, submissions and criticism—small, but real, communities built around literature.
Nor did this history end in the 2000s. Shōsetsuka ni Narō, AlphaPolis, pixiv, Kakuyomu, note, Kindle: the routes by which individuals can publish unusual writing have, if anything, multiplied. This article traces underground literature on the Japanese internet not as a list of “scary sites” or “weird texts,” but in terms of where the works were placed, whom they were connected to, how they were discovered, and how they have survived. For an overview of underground literature in general, see “What Is Underground Literature?”.
Contents
- What Is Japanese Internet Underground Literature?
- When Personal Homepages Were “Places for Literature”
- Qbic and “Sesshō-mori”: Where Did The Endless Summer Vacation Come From?
- The Underground Writingarts Federation: The Internet Had an “Underground Literary Sphere”
- The World of Despair and Kyōki Tarō: Two Forms of Personal-Site Literature
- Other Works of Internet Underground Literature
- “Words You Must Not Search” Did Not Create These Works
- Sites Vanish, Copies Remain: How Is Internet Literature Preserved?
- From Personal Sites to Posting Platforms: From “Building a Place” to “Borrowing a Place”
- pixiv, R-18, and R-18G: The “Underground” Inside a Giant Platform
- Kindle and E-Publishing: When Weird Texts Become “Books”
- Has Internet Underground Literature Disappeared?
- Sites and Archives You Can Still Access
- Japanese Internet Underground Literature: List of Works and Sites
- Conclusion: The Underground Did Not Vanish—Its Places Multiplied
What Is Japanese Internet Underground Literature?
To begin with, there is no established literary genre called “internet underground literature.” Viscera understands “underground literature” not as a simple classification by content, but in terms of an “undergroundness” that arises from a work’s distance from literary institutions, markets, distribution, restrictions on expression, and social norms. The same applies to literature on the internet.
A work is not underground because it is cruel. Nor is it underground because it is sexual, or because it was written by an amateur. What we want to focus on here are literary practices in which works were published through routes different from established publishers and literary magazines, formed their own readerships and communities, and sometimes survived while remaining cut off from ordinary literary distribution.
For this reason, reading the texts alone is not enough when thinking about internet underground literature. We need to look at the authors’ homepages, neighboring sites, link pages, literary prizes, bulletin boards, reposts, mirrors, and archives as well. Not only the works but the very places where they were located are part of literary history.
When Personal Homepages Were “Places for Literature”
The prehistory of Japanese online literature includes pasokon tsūshin, the dial-up PC networks. Nifty’s official corporate history gives the launch of NIFTY-Serve as April 15, 1987, and the launch of its internet connection service as January 1996[1]. However, for works such as The Endless Summer Vacation, which we examined in particular depth for this article, we were unable to obtain logs directly confirming that they were first published on PC networks. It is with the personal homepages of the late 1990s onward that concrete provenance becomes easier to trace through primary sources.
Today, if you want to publish writing, you can simply register on a posting site and create a page for your work. On a personal homepage, by contrast, the author often assembled the top page, list of works, profile, content warnings, bulletin board, and link page themselves. In other words, while writing their works, authors were also designing the very “place” in which those works would be read.
This difference is not trivial. Personal sites had no unified format like today’s social media or posting services. Some looked like diaries, while others staged a taste for the grotesque or the fantastic across the whole site. The works, together with the diary, profile, bulletin board, and even the linked sites, could form a single creative space.
Qbic and “Sesshō-mori”: Where Did The Endless Summer Vacation Come From?
One of the works that symbolizes this era is The Endless Summer Vacation (Owaranai natsuyasumi). Today it is most often introduced in the context of “words you must not search,” but the entrance page of “Sesshō-mori” [Killing Forest], saved to the Internet Archive on February 9, 1999, clearly states that it is “Qbic’s homepage” (Qビックのホームページ)[2].
Furthermore, on the “Kichiku Shōsetsu-shū” [Brutal Fiction Collection] page as of May 8, 1999, The Endless Summer Vacation is listed as “by Qbic,” and the same table of contents includes several other works by Qbic[3]. In other words, at least as of 1999, the earliest point we can confirm, The Endless Summer Vacation was not an anonymous weird text whose author and host site were unknown. It was a web novel posted on the personal site of an author called Qbic.
Qbic also took part in the literary prizes of the Underground Writingarts Federation (Gensō Itan Bungaku Renmei, literally “Fantasy and Heresy Literature Federation”) more than once. Silk Embrace (Shiruku no hōyō) was entered in the 1st Grand Prize for Fantasy and Heresy Literature, and Ball-Crushing Beautiful Boy Hell (Tamatsubushi bishōnen jigoku) won the grand prize at the 2nd. The call for entries for the 2nd prize gives a deadline of February 14, 2000, and states that the entries would be published immediately after the deadline. On the other hand, the Wayback snapshot of the results page that we have confirmed dates from November 23, 2001[4]. We therefore need to distinguish between “the pages show that the 2nd prize was held in 2000” and “the results page we can currently confirm was saved in 2001.”
Someone who can be perceived in hindsight as the author of “words you must not search” turns out, when placed back in the context of the time, to have been a web author who wrote multiple works and entered online literary prizes. The gap between these two perspectives is considerable.
The Underground Writingarts Federation: The Internet Had an “Underground Literary Sphere”
That gap becomes even clearer with the Underground Writingarts Federation. The old description page on Pandora, saved in 2001, displays the name “幻想異端文学連盟” (Gensō Itan Bungaku Renmei) together with its English name, “UNDERGROUND WRITINGARTS FEDERATION,” and shows Zappie Asano’s signature and a page date of February 10, 1999. The “WRITINGARTS” in the English name is not a dropped space; it is the original spelling on the saved page[5].
The description envisioned a place that included not only writers but also readers and critics. The old pages also show a “Grand Prize for Fantasy and Heresy Literature” decided with reader voting, submissions, relay novels, and links to other literary and creative sites. The old top page saved in 2008 also preserves a plan to turn the federation into a magazine and the progress of the 10th Grand Prize for Fantasy and Heresy Literature, but we have not been able to confirm the final results of the 10th prize[6].
What matters is not only that strange works were placed here. Works were solicited, read, and evaluated; winners were chosen; and links were made to other authors and sites. Even within what can be confirmed, these were not weird texts that happened to be scattered in a corner of the internet. A small literary sphere existed, in which works were made, submitted, read, and evaluated.
Of course, this single example cannot be generalized to the Japanese web as a whole in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But at least in and around the Underground Writingarts Federation, works that would later be cut off from their authors and communities and treated as “weird texts” were, at the time, situated within a literary network.
The World of Despair and Kyōki Tarō: Two Forms of Personal-Site Literature
Another work that cannot be ignored in any discussion of internet underground literature is The World of Despair (Zetsubō no sekai). The exact date on which it was first published has not been established by our research so far. What can be firmly confirmed is an author site under the name Miyatani (宮谷), saved on December 19, 2003, which contains entrances not only to The World of Despair but to several series, including The World of Light and Shadow (Hikari to kage no sekai), The World of Hope (Kibō no sekai), and The World In Between (Hazama no sekai), as well as a “Self-Introduction by Miyatani”[7].
Later, a mirror on ojiji.net appeared, as did “Keitai no Zetsubō no Sekai” [The World of Despair for Mobile Phones], which presents itself as a remake for mobile phones[8]. However, the author’s site, third-party mirrors, and later remakes are not the same historical source. When people say today that “you can read The World of Despair,” we need to distinguish which lineage of pages they are referring to.
Kyōki Tarō, by contrast, is interesting less as a case of a single work becoming legendary than as a case of an author maintaining their own site over a long period. The existing official site displays “since 1998-07-18,” and the author’s later “History of Construction” records the start in 1998, early works, the bulletin board, contributions to a hyaku monogatari (hundred ghost stories) project, site moves, and so on[9]. The caveat is necessary that this is the author’s own later record rather than a snapshot from 1998, but many novels remain on the author’s site to this day.
In The World of Despair, a single fictional world became strongly bound to the form of the personal homepage. In Kyōki Tarō’s case, an author’s long-term creative activity accumulated on a single personal site. The forms differ, but both were “the author’s place” in a sense different from today’s posting platforms.
Other Works of Internet Underground Literature
Around these, there are other works and authors now known only in fragments. The Tragedy of Akane (Akane no higeki) is preserved as a guest work under the former uziga.sakura.ne.jp/doku/html/guest/. The site’s list of works by author at the time, “Authors: Ka-row,” shows The Tragedy of Akane and the date “2000/06/28” under the entry for “Camu-sama” (カミュ様). However, the earliest confirmable Wayback snapshot of that list page itself is from 2005, so this does not mean that a contemporaneous snapshot from June 28, 2000 exists[10].
As for Kinō (鬼脳), in a profile on the current revival site of the Underground Writingarts Federation, Kinō recalls running “Kinō no Shikai” [Kinō’s Field of Vision] for about a year around 1998; after it vanished when the ISP went bankrupt, it was revived several years later. Several works are currently reposted on the same revival site[11]. Here too, contemporaneous materials from the old site itself must be distinguished from the author’s later recollections and community reposts.
Surveying this area, we can see that the forms in which works survive vary considerably. Some author sites still exist; some works can only be seen on the Wayback Machine; some were reposted by communities; some survived through third-party mirrors or remakes. There is no need to declare all of them a single genre. What matters, rather, is that texts that originally lived in different places later became easy to lump together as “strange writing on the internet.”
“Words You Must Not Search” Did Not Create These Works
The emblem of this reclassification is “words you must not search.” The Endless Summer Vacation was already introduced as “a word you must absolutely never search” on a personal blog on July 28, 2009[12]. And the “Words You Must Absolutely Not Search wiki,” as saved on March 15, 2010, lists three works side by side: The Tragedy of Akane, The Endless Summer Vacation, and Ball-Crushing Beautiful Boy Hell[13].
Yet The Endless Summer Vacation can be confirmed on the author’s site in 1999. For Ball-Crushing Beautiful Boy Hell, the call for entries for the 2nd Grand Prize for Fantasy and Heresy Literature gives a deadline of February 14, 2000, and the results page saved later confirms it as the grand prize winner. The Tragedy of Akane, too, was preserved on the web before 2010, the year from which it can be confirmed as a search-taboo word. As far as the order of the available sources shows, these works were not born from the culture of “words you must not search.” Works that already existed were later rediscovered as “things you must not search.”
In this reclassification, the context surrounding the works tends to drop away: the author’s name, Qbic; the homepage called “Sesshō-mori”; the Grand Prize for Fantasy and Heresy Literature; the other writers who took part in it; the neighboring sites linked to one another. Those relationships are stripped off, and only a single line remains: “searching this word is dangerous.”
This can be called a strange kind of canonization. Instead of being entered into a list of literary history, the works are entered into a list of dangerous words. As a result, while the titles alone become widely known, the literary and communal contexts in which the works were born are forgotten.
Sites Vanish, Copies Remain: How Is Internet Literature Preserved?
Even when a printed book goes out of print, a physical copy may survive on someone’s shelf or in a library. The web is somewhat different. A personal site disappears when its author stops maintaining it or when the hosting service shuts down. Sometimes only traces remain in search results, and the text itself can no longer be reached.
At the same time, digital data is easy to copy. A page may be saved to the Internet Archive; a third party may make a mirror; the author may move to another server; a community may repost old works; another reader may remake a work for mobile phones. For The World of Despair, we can confirm separate lineages—the author’s site, a later mirror, and a mobile remake. Kinō’s works survive through community reposting, and Kyōki Tarō’s through the author’s own moves and continued activity.
But the Internet Archive is not a complete record either. Its official help pages explain that there may be pages that were not crawled, pages with restricted access, exclusions requested by owners, and so on[14]. Therefore, the absence of a page from the Wayback Machine does not mean it “did not exist at the time,” and the date of the oldest snapshot cannot simply be taken as the date of first publication.
Underground literature on paper becomes rare. Underground literature on the internet either vanishes or keeps being copied. And the more copies there are, the more a new problem arises: which is the original, which is a repost, and which is an altered remake? Researching internet literature requires not only confirming that a text exists, but also confirming who preserved it, when, and from which lineage.
From Personal Sites to Posting Platforms: From “Building a Place” to “Borrowing a Place”
From the 2000s onward, the environment in which individuals publish fiction changed greatly. However, it is not accurate to simplify this as “the era of personal sites ended, and the era of posting sites began in the 2010s.” Shōsetsuka ni Narō (“Let’s Become a Novelist”) started in 2004, and there were other lineages of mobile and posting culture, such as Mahō no i-Land, which this article does not cover in detail. Personal sites, too, have continued to coexist up to the present.
What matters is that huge venues were added where people could publish long texts without building their own homepages. Shōsetsuka ni Narō’s current guide for authors gives examples such as works that failed in contests, works being published on other sites, “insanely long serialized works,” and works by people who are not good at writing, and explains that, as a rule, it does not refuse to host a work on the basis of its content alone, as long as it does not violate the terms of service[15]. This does not mean that Narō is an underground literature site. What matters, rather, is that a huge, mainstream posting infrastructure has a structure that gives even very long, niche, and non-commercial works the possibility of publication.
AlphaPolis developed somewhat differently. A corporate history derived from its securities reports shows the company’s founding in August 2000, the launch of a publication support service in September of the same year, a publication application system in January 2008, the Web Content Grand Prize in February 2008, and posting incentives from January 2015. Meanwhile, in an interview with a staff member by the magazine Kōbo Guide, it is explained that a system for posting fiction and manga directly on the site started in 2014[16]. It is an example of posting, reader evaluation, publication applications, contests, and commercial publishing overlapping within a single web ecosystem.
Kakuyomu began accepting works on December 28, 2015, and officially opened on February 29, 2016. Its current guidelines include self-ratings for sexual, cruel, and violent depictions, but these are R15-level content notices rather than a dedicated R18 section, and excessive content may be dealt with by being made private or deleted[17]. note is a general-purpose media platform that officially launched on April 7, 2014; although it is not specialized for fiction, serialized novels can be compiled using text posts and its “magazine” feature[18].
To put this change simply, it is a shift from “building a place” to “borrowing a place.” On personal sites, the author designed the top page, list of works, content warnings, links, and so on. On posting platforms, the operator designs the overall framework—search, rankings, tags, age categories, recommendations, reporting, conditions for removal—and the author places works inside it. It cannot be said simply that authors’ freedom has increased or decreased. The gatekeepers did not disappear; the gatekeepers moved.
pixiv, R-18, and R-18G: The “Underground” Inside a Giant Platform
This change is especially easy to see in pixiv. pixiv itself began in 2007, and its novel-posting feature launched on July 29, 2010. According to an official announcement on July 29, 2025, pixiv Novel had reached more than 1.07 million cumulative posters and 25.26 million cumulative posted works[19].
pixiv has two age-restriction categories, R-18 and R-18G. Its official help treats sexual content as R-18 and grotesque content as R-18G, and users under 18 are restricted from viewing them. Even users 18 or older must register their date of birth and adjust their viewing settings, and simply adding the tags “R-18” or “R-18G” does not apply the age-restriction setting[20].
On an old personal homepage, the author would prepare an entrance page stating “no one under 18.” Today, the giant platform provides those categories and viewing conditions as a system. Of course, a work is not underground literature because it is R-18, and pixiv itself is not an underground site. Still, it is interesting that sexual, grotesque, and niche creative work can exist as conditional zones within a huge mass-market service.
The “underground” once evoked small homepages outside the major services. Today, giant platforms themselves contain layers of differing visibility within them. Underground expression is not necessarily pushed outside the platforms.
Kindle and E-Publishing: When Weird Texts Become “Books”
Another major change is electronic publishing. The Kindle Store for Japan opened on October 25, 2012[21]. Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) provides a system through which rights holders can register a manuscript, cover, metadata, and so on, and sell e-books without requiring selection by a traditional publisher or a printed inventory. It is also possible under the system to publish content that has already been made available online, provided the rights requirements are met[22].
Here a third form appears, different from both personal sites and fiction-posting sites. The text becomes not a web page but a “book”—a product lined up in an e-bookstore.
Kiroku: document X
One interesting example is Asumi Shii’s Kiroku: document X (Kiroku meaning roughly “taboo records”). According to Amazon’s product listing, it is a Kindle work released on May 4, 2014, with the ASIN B00K4UWJ14, and the publisher field reads “A.SMITHEE.” The product description presents four pieces as its contents. What A.SMITHEE actually is, and whether this e-book was published using KDP, cannot be established from the public sources examined here. Given its relationship to the author’s name, it is conceivable that the name alludes to “Alan Smithee,” but this is speculation, and we do not use it as grounds for judging whether a corporate publisher exists[23].
The work is read as horror in the form of documents and records. In 2019, Machinery Tomoko took it up on the site Netorabo, discussing devices such as the way it connects from within the e-book to the internet. The “Horror Guide 444” in BRUTUS No. 991, “Kowai mono mitasa” [Morbid Curiosity], released in August 2023, introduced Kiroku as a mockumentary containing documentary records of incidents. Asamiya Unga also described the work as a hidden bestseller published on the web, discussing the fact that it was released only as an e-book and its structure using photographs and gimmicks. The web version of the magazine feature was published on December 5, 2024[24].
Furthermore, in its description of Asumi Shii’s Kaidandrome (Kaidandorōmu), published in 2026, KADOKAWA positions Kiroku and Kinshi as precursors that influenced contemporary mockumentary horror. This, however, is the publisher’s evaluation and does not establish the degree of influence as an objective ranking[25].
“Weird text” (kaibunsho) is not an official genre label used by the author. However, considering together its form of reading fragments of documents and records, a reading experience that uses connections to the web, and its distribution as an e-book, Viscera can position the work as an example of “weird-text-like electronic literature.” This is not an established category of literary history but an analytical label used in this article.
The Hikikomori Notes
Showing the possibilities of e-publishing from a different direction is MMM_Memento Mori Machina’s The Hikikomori Notes (Hikikomori no shuki). On Amazon it can be confirmed as a four-volume Kindle series released between 2020 and 2021, and the print edition published in 2022 runs to 602 pages and is listed as “Independently published”[26]. Checked against KDP’s official help, this print-edition label is consistent with the label used for KDP paperbacks, but we did not find public sources directly confirming the use of KDP for all four e-book volumes[27].
What we want to note here is not an evaluation of the work but its product format. Even a massive work spanning several volumes can be placed in an e-bookstore as a series. While Kiroku shows a weird-text-like form combining documents and records, The Hikikomori Notes is an example of how a massive individual work can exist as an e-book series. There is no need to treat these two works as the same genre. What matters is that e-publishing has made it possible to distribute works of unusual form and scale as “books” through routes different from traditional print publishing. For more on The Hikikomori Notes, see “What Is The Hikikomori Notes?”.
Has Internet Underground Literature Disappeared?
So, did the internet underground literature seen in the late 1990s and early 2000s later disappear? There are no grounds for concluding so. On the other hand, there are also no sources showing that the authors who were part of the Underground Writingarts Federation or “Sesshō-mori” moved en masse to pixiv or Kindle. Explaining it as an old culture relocating wholesale to a different place would also be too strong.
What can be said with relative safety from the sources is that the routes by which individuals publish writing have increased. On personal sites, authors make both the work and its place. On posting platforms, they place works inside a space provided by an operator. In e-publishing, they place them as products inside an e-bookstore. These are better thought of not as three mutually exclusive eras—a “personal-site period,” a “posting-site period,” and an “e-publishing period”—but as three publication routes that still coexist today.
With more publication routes, literature on the internet has not simply grown in volume. Long works, eccentric works, sexual or cruel works, and experimental works that once would have been tucked away deep in personal sites can now be placed inside huge posting infrastructures or e-bookstores. What follows is not a statistically demonstrated fact but this article’s assessment: while it is difficult to state objectively that the average “quality” of works has risen, Viscera believes that their quantity and diversity, and the range of polish that individual works can reach, have greatly expanded. Behind this lies an increase in the very infrastructure for publication and distribution that supports individual production—serialized posting of long works and series management, expression using images and external links, publication as e-books, and so on.
As a result, a somewhat paradoxical situation has also arisen. A work that once might have stood out simply because “there’s this bizarre novel on the internet” now sinks into millions or tens of millions of posted works. One could say that heterodox works have not disappeared; rather, the body capable of containing heterodoxy has grown enormous. The “underground” of the personal-site era was a small site at the margins of the internet. Today’s underground may exist deep within the search results of giant platforms.
Sites and Archives You Can Still Access
As of our check in September 2026, some of the sites and works introduced above can be viewed through author sites, revival sites, the Internet Archive, and so on. However, “readable now” is not the same as “the original from that time survives intact.” Author-run sites, revivals, community reposts, Wayback copies, and third-party remakes need to be distinguished.
| Site / work | Current status | Where to view |
|---|---|---|
| Kyōki Tarō | Current site run by the author | Official site |
| Underground Writingarts Federation | Current revival describing itself as a “revived edition of a nostalgic literary site” | Revival site |
| Underground Writingarts Federation: list of all works | List on the revival site | List of all works |
| Kinō no Shikai | Community repost within the Underground Writingarts Federation site | Kinō no Shikai |
| Qbic, “Sesshō-mori” | Wayback copy from 1999 | Snapshot of February 9, 1999 |
| The Endless Summer Vacation | Wayback copy of the author’s site | Snapshot of May 8, 1999 |
| 2nd Grand Prize for Fantasy and Heresy Literature | Wayback copy of the old site | Results page |
| Ball-Crushing Beautiful Boy Hell | Wayback copy of the work’s page on the old site | Work page |
| The World of Despair author site | Wayback copy of the author’s site from 2003 | Snapshot of December 19, 2003 |
| Keitai no Zetsubō no Sekai | Later third-party remake; a 2008 saved version can also be viewed | Current page / 2008 saved version |
| The Tragedy of Akane | Wayback copy of the hosting page from 2005 | Text snapshot |
When reading old web works, it is better to read current revival pages, Wayback snapshots close to the original period, and later mirrors or remakes separately. Even if the appearance and text are similar, the page’s meaning as a historical source changes depending on whether it is “what was there at the time” or “something saved, reposted, or altered later.”
Japanese Internet Underground Literature: List of Works and Sites
In the “Confirmable period” column below, the types of evidence differ: Wayback snapshot years, dates displayed on the pages themselves, later recollections by the authors, and so on. Not all of them can therefore be read as years of first publication.
| Work / site | Author / operator | Confirmable period | Main form of publication / distribution | Position in this article |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sesshō-mori | Qbic | 1999 snapshot | Personal site | Author site for Qbic’s works |
| The Endless Summer Vacation | Qbic | 1999 snapshot | Personal site | Later reclassified as a “word you must not search” |
| Underground Writingarts Federation | Zappie Asano and others | 2001 snapshot / page date 1999 | Web literary community | A cultural sphere with submissions, criticism, literary prizes, and links |
| Silk Embrace | Qbic | Confirmed on the 1st prize page | Online literary prize entry | Example of Qbic’s connection to the community |
| Ball-Crushing Beautiful Boy Hell | Qbic | 2nd prize deadline shown as 2000 / results snapshot 2001 | Online literary prize | Grand prize winner; later a search-taboo word |
| The World of Despair | Miyatani | Author site confirmed by 2003 | Author’s personal site | Branches into author site, mirrors, and remakes |
| Kyōki Tarō | Kyōki Tarō | Started in 1998 according to the author’s later record | Author’s personal site | Long-running personal-site author |
| The Tragedy of Akane | Camu | Page date 2000 / 2005 snapshot | Guest work | Later a search-taboo word |
| Kinō no Shikai | Kinō | Around 1998 according to the author’s recollection | Personal site → community repost | Example of re-preservation of a vanished site |
| Kiroku: document X | Asumi Shii | 2014 Kindle product | E-book | Weird-text-like electronic literature received as mockumentary |
| The Hikikomori Notes | MMM_Memento Mori Machina | 2020–2021 | Kindle series | Example of e-publishing a massive individual work |
The items listed here do not constitute a “Top 11 Japanese underground literature” ranking. They are works and sites whose online publication routes and reception history we were able to trace to some extent in this research, and which are meaningful for explaining the subject of this article.
Conclusion: The Underground Did Not Vanish—Its Places Multiplied
Tracing Japanese internet underground literature back from “words you must not search” reveals the landscape that preceded it. The Endless Summer Vacation had an author named Qbic and a homepage called “Sesshō-mori.” Ball-Crushing Beautiful Boy Hell was the grand prize winner of an online literary prize before it appeared on lists of dangerous words. The Underground Writingarts Federation had not only works but authors, readers, critics, submissions, literary prizes, relay novels, and link pages.
On personal homepages, authors wrote their texts and, at the same time, built the places where those texts would be placed. Later, huge posting and writing platforms such as Shōsetsuka ni Narō, AlphaPolis, pixiv, Kakuyomu, and note were added, and e-bookstores such as Kindle expanded the routes for distributing writing as products.
So there is no need to think that Japanese internet underground literature has “disappeared.” Nor, however, did the culture of the 1990s migrate intact to the present. Multiple publication routes—personal sites, posting platforms, and e-bookstores—have come to overlap, and the very places where one can put words that are hard to display openly, strange words, and overly long words have increased.
The underground was once found deep inside small homepages someone had built. Now it also exists inside giant platforms. Rather than the underground having disappeared, it is the boundary between above ground and underground that has become far harder to discern than before.
About the Research for This Article
This article was prepared by cross-checking existing official sites, pages saved on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, later materials by operators and authors, public documents, official guidelines of each platform, bibliographic information, and so on. Because with old web literature the actual date of first publication and “the oldest snapshot confirmable at present” may not coincide, we have prioritized what the sources allow us to say, using expressions such as “confirmable in 1999” or “its existence can be confirmed by 2003.”
We have also not treated author sites, third-party mirrors, official revivals, community reposts, and remakes as the same thing. Regarding “words you must not search,” the listing dates we were able to confirm do not indicate the date of first registration within that culture; we have treated them as the lower bound of re-reception that can be confirmed at present.
For the 2010s onward, we have not found quantitative or genealogical evidence that “the old personal-site culture moved intact to posting platforms.” For that reason, rather than asserting that posting sites and e-publishing are “direct successors of the old culture,” this article describes them as new routes that have been added for individuals to publish their works.
Notes
Most sources below are in Japanese. Original titles are given with English translations in brackets.
- ニフティ「沿革」 [Nifty, “Corporate History”]. Gives the launch of NIFTY-Serve as April 15, 1987, and the launch of its internet connection service as January 1996.
- 「殺生森」Qビックのホームページ [“Sesshō-mori”: Qbic’s Homepage]. Wayback Machine, saved February 9, 1999.
- Qビック「鬼畜・小説集」 [Qbic, “Brutal Fiction Collection”]. Confirms 『終わらない夏休み 作：Qビック』 [The Endless Summer Vacation, by Qbic]. Wayback Machine, saved May 8, 1999.
- 幻想異端文学大賞 [Grand Prize for Fantasy and Heresy Literature]. 1st prize results, 2nd prize call for entries, 2nd prize results. The 2nd prize call for entries shows a deadline of February 14, 2000. The confirmed snapshot of the results page is from November 23, 2001.
- Old description page of the 幻想異端文学連盟 [Underground Writingarts Federation]. Saved November 23, 2001. Confirms the page date of February 10, 1999, Zappie Asano’s signature, and the original spelling “UNDERGROUND WRITINGARTS FEDERATION.”
- Old top page of the 幻想異端文学連盟 [Underground Writingarts Federation]. The 2001 version confirms the Grand Prize for Fantasy and Heresy Literature, relay novels, etc. The 2008 version confirms the plan to become a magazine and the progress of the 10th Grand Prize for Fantasy and Heresy Literature.
- Author site of 『絶望の世界』 [The World of Despair] under the name 宮谷 [Miyatani]. Wayback Machine, saved December 19, 2003.
- Later preservation lineages of 『絶望の世界』 [The World of Despair]: mirror on
ojiji.net, third-party remake saved in 2008, current page. - Official site of 狂気太郎 [Kyōki Tarō]. The 1998 start and similar details are treated as the author’s own later record. 「建設の歴史」 [History of Construction] / list of works / official top page.
- カミュ『茜の悲劇』 [Camu, The Tragedy of Akane]. The old site’s list of works by author, 「作者名-か行-」 [Authors: Ka-row], shows 『茜の悲劇』 and “2000/06/28” under the entry for 「カミュ様」 [Camu-sama]. The confirmed snapshot of the list page is from October 30, 2005. The text page was saved on April 9, 2005.
- 鬼脳「鬼脳の視界」 [Kinō, “Kinō no Shikai” (Kinō’s Field of Vision)]. The old site around 1998 and related details are based on the author’s later recollection. Profile / CREATION.
- Personal blog post of July 28, 2009. Introduces 『終わらない夏休み』 [The Endless Summer Vacation] as 「絶対に検索してはいけない単語」 [a word you must absolutely never search].
- 「絶対に検索してはいけない言葉 wiki」 [Words You Must Absolutely Not Search wiki], Web Gyotaku (megalodon.jp) capture of March 15, 2010. Confirms 『茜の悲劇』 [The Tragedy of Akane], 『終わらない夏休み』 [The Endless Summer Vacation], and 『玉潰し美少年地獄』 [Ball-Crushing Beautiful Boy Hell].
- Internet Archive Help Center, “Using the Wayback Machine”. On cases where pages are not saved by the Wayback Machine and on the limits of capture.
- 小説家になろう [Shōsetsuka ni Narō]. The 2004 start is based on Hina Project’s corporate history; posting possibilities, hosting policy, and R18 categories are based on 「作者の方へ」 [For Authors] and 「年齢制限について」 [About Age Restrictions]. Current pages checked in September 2026.
- アルファポリス [AlphaPolis]. The corporate history derived from securities reports gives founding in August 2000, the publication application system in January 2008, the Web Content Grand Prize in February 2008, and the start of posting incentives in January 2015. The 2014 start of on-site posting is attributed to an interview with a staff member by 公募ガイド [Kōbo Guide]. Checked in September 2026.
- カクヨム [Kakuyomu]. Began accepting works on December 28, 2015; officially opened on February 29, 2016. Official 4th-anniversary retrospective / 小説投稿ガイドライン [Novel Posting Guidelines]. Current rules checked in September 2026.
- note. Announcement of the official launch on April 7, 2014, and official help on the magazine feature (「マガジンとは」 [What Is a Magazine?]). Current help checked in September 2026.
- ピクシブ株式会社「pixiv小説がサービス開始から15周年！」 [pixiv Inc., “pixiv Novel Marks 15 Years Since Launch!”], July 29, 2025. States the launch on July 29, 2010, more than 1.07 million cumulative posters, and 25.26 million cumulative posted works.
- pixiv’s age-restriction categories. 「年齢制限作品（R-18・R-18G）を見たい」 [I Want to View Age-Restricted Works (R-18/R-18G)] / 「年齢制限とはなんですか？」 [What Are Age Restrictions?]. Current help checked in September 2026.
- 国立国会図書館カレントアウェアネス「Amazon.co.jpが日本向けKindleストアを10月25日にオープン」 [National Diet Library, Current Awareness Portal, “Amazon.co.jp to Open Kindle Store for Japan on October 25”].
- Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. KDP official site / publishing steps / Content Guidelines. Current pages checked in September 2026.
- 阿澄思惟『忌録: document X』 [Asumi Shii, Kiroku: document X], Amazon Kindle product page, ASIN B00K4UWJ14. The listing shows May 4, 2014 and “A.SMITHEE” in the publisher field. The product description lists the four pieces included. The use of KDP and the legal entity behind A.SMITHEE are unconfirmed.
- Third-party reception of 『忌録』 [Kiroku]. マシーナリーとも子「エラいもんを読んでしまった〜〜〜！！！ ホラー小説『忌録』がめちゃくちゃすごいから読んでくれ」 [Machinery Tomoko, “I’ve Read Something Incredible!!! The Horror Novel Kiroku Is Insanely Good, So Please Read It”], ねとらぼ [Netorabo], August 9, 2019. BRUTUS No. 991, 「怖いもの見たさ。」 [Morbid Curiosity], released August 16, 2023. The issue’s 「ホラーガイド444」 [Horror Guide 444] introduces Kiroku as a mockumentary, with a comment by 朝宮運河 [Asamiya Unga]. The web version was published on December 5, 2024.
- KADOKAWA, product description of 『カイダンドローム』 [Kaidandrome]. The publisher’s description positioning 『忌録』 [Kiroku] and 『禁祀』 [Kinshi] as precursors that influenced contemporary mockumentary horror.
- MMM_Memento Mori Machina『ひきこもりの手記』 [The Hikikomori Notes]. Official works page / Amazon Kindle series / print edition. Amazon confirms a four-volume Kindle series from 2020–2021 and a 602-page print edition published in 2022. The print edition’s listing reads “Independently published.”
- Amazon KDP official help on ISBNs and imprints. Confirms that “Independently published” (個人出版) is assigned when a free ISBN is used. This does not directly prove the use of KDP for all four e-book volumes. Current page checked in September 2026.
Translated from the Japanese original, “日本のインターネット・アングラ文学｜『絶望の世界』『終わらない夏休み』からpixiv・Kindleまで”. Quotations from Japanese sources are our own translations.