Source — Aozorasearch full-text check for 木漏れ日 (komorebi)

• Title: Aozorasearch 青空文庫全文検索 (unofficial full-text search engine for the Aozora Bunko digital library)
• Author/maintainer: Kouhei Sutou (myokoym), per the tool's own GitHub project
• Publication: myokoym.net (tool), querying the Aozora Bunko corpus
• Date: n/a (a search tool, not an authored text)
• URL: https://myokoym.net/aozorasearch/search?word=木漏れ日 (search query for 木漏れ日; tool root: https://myokoym.net/aozorasearch/)
• Type: primary (a direct, reproducible full-text search result over primary-source texts) — this project ran the query itself and read the underlying files, not a report about the search
• Accessed: 2026-08-30

Extract

• Aozora Bunko is the standard digitized archive of Japanese-language public-domain (and some author-permitted) texts — on the order of 17,000+ works, skewing toward authors who died before Japan's copyright term expired for them (mostly Meiji–early-Shōwa-era writers), plus contributed material (including amateur translations of foreign public-domain works) added on an ongoing basis. Aozorasearch (built on the Groonga full-text search engine) indexes the whole corpus for exact-phrase search.
• A search for 木漏れ日 across the entire corpus returned exactly 3 hits, confirmed at https://myokoym.net/aozorasearch/search?word=木漏れ日 (2026-08-30). All three are Japanese translations by the same translator, 奥増夫 (Oku Masuo), of pre-1940 English-language pulp fiction — not original Japanese-authored prose:
  1. "怒髪" (a translation of Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1939 novella The Black Flame; Aozora card https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/002265/card62687.html): "白銀の水が木漏れ日にきらきら光り、ゆるゆる流れ、眠気を誘う。" ("The silver water sparkled in the komorebi, flowing slowly, inducing drowsiness" — this project's own rough rendering). Aozora lists this translation's own publication/last-update dates as 2024-11-27 / 2026-01-02.
  2. "道化玉座" (a translation of Fred M. White's 1911 story A Mummer's Throne; card https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/002043/card60066.html): "ニタのほほが交互に赤くなったり青くなったりする様は朝風に揺れる夏の木漏れ日のよう。" Aozora dates: 2019-10-06 / 2020-12-18.
  3. "ギルレイ" (a translation of Fred M. White's 1911 story The Man Called Gilray; card https://www.aozora.gr.jp/cards/002043/card60167.html): "他人から少し離れて座り、素晴らしい景色や木漏れ日を見ていた。" Aozora dates: 2019-10-20 / 2021-04-21.
• All three Aozora-listed dates (2019–2024) are this contemporary translator's own publication dates for these translations, not the original (1911/1939) English works' dates — checked directly against each work's card page. This corpus check therefore does not date the word 木漏れ日 itself: it shows only that a 2019–2024 amateur translator chose this present-day-ordinary Japanese word when rendering English descriptions of dappled/filtering light in old pulp fiction.
• Taken as a check on the word's presence in the classic (older, mostly pre-WWII-authored) Japanese literary corpus specifically: 木漏れ日 does not turn up in any original Japanese-authored prose in Aozora Bunko's full-text-searchable holdings — only in this one contemporary translator's word choice. Given Aozora's coverage skews toward authors who died decades ago, this is consistent with (but does not prove) the word being of more recent common literary currency than, e.g., the Meiji/Taishō-era authors most represented in the corpus; it is also consistent with the word simply being rare in the genres (adventure, ghost stories, etc.) that dominate Aozora's translated/foreign-derived holdings. Under-claim: this is an absence-from-one-corpus finding, not a dating of the word.

Gaps

• Does not resolve when 木漏れ日 first appears in Japanese-language literary prose generally — only that it is absent from Aozora Bunko's searchable holdings outside these three 2019–2024 translations.
• Whether 奥増夫's own translation career/reading habits explain the specific word choice (idiolect vs. broader contemporary usage) is unknown and unresearched.
• This tool (myokoym.net/aozorasearch, query via ?word=<term> GET parameter) is a genuinely useful, previously undocumented resource for this project for any future full-text check against the classic/public-domain Japanese corpus — noting it here for reuse.

Used in

• Komorebi