Japanese audio books

Hi,

Does anyone use Japanese audio books for learning - stories, novels, articles, etc.?

I can recommend the books I've got:
1. Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text (by Giles Murray)
2. Read Real Japanese Fiction: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers
3. Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors

The downside is the reading is pretty fast and the texts are rather complex, besides they are very serious classical (#1), often very sad stories.

Here's a collection of downloadable stories - audio and transcripts

List of Free Audiobooks

If you have anything to share, please post here.

Perhaps, I'd like to read/listen to more contemporary and more optimistic stories with lots of dialogues.

Um, I do not know if you don't mind stuff like anime or manga but there is quite a number of vice drama of that line, mostly comedic.

Search this with keyword amazon.
オリジナルドラマCD 佰物語
Very contemporary for sure.
I personally rather liked this, each track is purely composed of dialogues and is at mostly 40 to 60 seconds long and comes with text version, only thing is it is rather inappropriate for lessons and certainly not academic, but despite those things, it probably is rather good material if you only do not mind some dirty jokes etc.

or you could try rakugo, it is a classic comedy and you should find plenty with key words such as: 落語 cd amazon

A ward of warning : rakugo is not that hugely popular and it is not developing much. I am afraid that Very few people find pleasure in listening to rakugo any more: I am personally interested to the typical structure of classic Japanese comedy, so I might listen to it myself but I won't really expect myself to rejoice in it.

As to getting them, well it might not be good to mention this but after all, you have to try a lot of things to find what you would like so...
If it is not illicit (I believe downloading is legal even in Japan yet), you could download them using bit torrent probably. But it is moral to buy one once you find something to you liking.

I suppose there is a library of audio books for blind people too but normally it is unbearably boring to have a book recited because of the reading speed issue, always either too slow or too fast.

If you want something a bit more intellectually stimulating, Online Course material for Japanese University
ocw.u-tokyo.ac.jp/

Thanks, GreenCat. Could you please give a few titles or, at least, a title you personally like fitting "オリジナルドラマCD 佰物語"? So these CD's come with transcripts? It sounds interesting.

Here's another one, not much but the speed is slow. There were a small number of mismatches (text vs audio).

Nippon VoiceBlog

My very first audio CD in Japanese was one from the Weiss Kreuz drama collection. If I remember correctly, before the anime came out, the story is recorded in various CDs called drama collections