Japanese Literature in English - Book Readings

Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated fiction by almost two dozen modern and contemporary Japanese authors. Her translation of Sayaka Murata’s bestselling Convenience Store Woman was awarded the 2020-21 Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Prize, and her translation of Mayumi Inaba’s Mornings With My Cat Mii was awarded the 2025 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize. Her most recent translations include Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World, Akiyuki Nosaka’s The Grave of the Fireflies, and Asako Otani’s Hollow Inside. She lives in Tsukuba with her husband and more cats than she bargained for.

Janine Beichman, another Tsukuba local, studied Japanese poetry at Columbia University, where she received her doctorate. Her published translations include works by Japan's greatest poets from the 8th century down to the present day, including Kakinomoto Hitomaro, Masaoka Shiki, Yosano Akiko,Ooka Makoto, and Ishigaki Rin. She is also the author of the original Noh play, Drifting Fires, which has been performed in the United States and Japan. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Pen America, and she is on the judging committee for the Japan International Translation Competition.

Louise Heal Kawai has been a Japanese-English literary translator since 2006. Her translations include a variety of mystery and literary fiction, notably best sellers The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo and The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa, which was also named Honor Book in the 2023 Global Literature in Libraries YA Translated Book Prize. Other authors she has translated include Mieko Kawakami, Seicho Matsumoto and Rio Shimamoto. In 2025, she was awarded the Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture for her translation of The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama. Louise is also a keen actor and her involvement in theatre has led to translation of play scripts for The New National Theatre, Tokyo. Louise comes from Manchester in the UK and currently resides in Yokohama.

Kalau Almony is a Japanese-English literary translator based in Kawasaki, Japan. His translations include the work of Fuminori Nakamura, Tahi Saihate, Shinya Tanaka, and Jose Ando. Born and raised in Kailua, Hawaiʻi, he completed his BA in Comparative Literature at Brown University and MA in East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is a 2025 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow.

http://kalaualmony.com/

Eli K.P. William has spent his entire adult life in Japan making a career out of story and language. The only member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan who writes novels in English, he is the author of The Jubilee Cycle trilogy, set in a dystopian future Tokyo. He translates Japanese literature, including the Yomiuri Prize winning novel A Man by Keiichiro Hirano and the bestselling essay collection The Traveling Tree by Michio Hoshino. In recent years, he also writes professionally in Japanese, serving as a bilingual story consultant for a major Tokyo-based video game development studio and contributing short stories to such publications as SF Prologue Wave and the 2025 Hayakawa anthology Fear and SF (kyōfu to SF). His translations, essays, and short stories have appeared in Aeon, Granta, The Southern Review, Monkey, The Malahat Review, The Japan Times, Reactor, Kyoto Journal, Writer’s Digest, Nippon.com, Subaru, and more.

To learn more, visit https://elikpwilliam.com or join his newsletter Almost Real at elikpwilliam.substack.com.

Sylvia Gallagher, Originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, now lives in Fukushima where she works as a freelance translator. Her translations include a short story by Hiroko Oyamada and The Nine Lives of a Bookshop Cat by Kentaro Utsugi.

Adam Sutherland grew up in Windsor, England, and has been based in Tokyo since 2009. As of 2013 he has worked as a freelance translator specialising in film subtitles, video games, and catalogues and essays for universities and art galleries. He is drawn to works that deal creatively with nostalgia, the weird/eerie, and the effect of time and place on the psyche. His first literary translation, a collection of three short stories by Tomoko Yoshida (1934–), is scheduled for publication this spring.

Lisa Wilcut is a Yokohama-based writer and translator originally from the United States. She holds an MA in Japanese literature and culture from Stanford University and has been recognized by Japan’s Agency of Cultural Affairs for her literary translation. Her literary awards and publications include translations of works by Kaori Fujino, Yoshitake Shinsuke, Kayako Nishimaki, Ryoji Arai, Shingo Nagasaki, Shiho Kikuchi, and Ritsuko Naito. Her creative fiction has appeared in Tokyo Weekender and the anthology Structures of Kyoto.

https://www.lisawilcut.com/