Edward Lipsett, an American immigrant to Japan and a professional translator, founded Kurodahan Press with two colleagues in Japan in 2002. Between then and 2025, Kurodahan Press published a wealth of Japanese texts in various genres (including speculative fiction) in English translation. Here, I ask him about sf, publishing, and translation.
Rachel at SFT (SFT): What inspired you to start Kurodahan Press in 2002?
Edward Lipsett (EL): I’d been translating professionally, mostly technical documents, for decades by then, and simultaneously reading lots of SF&F books (in Japanese and in English) and meeting regularly with the Japanese SF translation world via the Honyaku Benkyōkai run by Takumi Shibano. SF&F translators got together every couple months at some onsen in the extended Tokyo region and spent an overnight talk-and-drink session and invited me along to answer questions about incomprehensible English they couldn’t parse.
I continued to expand my collection of old and small-press SF&F books throughout this time, including favorites like Gnome and Arkham, as well as younger presses like Tartarus and Donald Grant.
I was not terribly happy with the commercial translation work I was doing. I was very good at it, and there was plenty of money in it, but you can only describe something as an epoch-making product that will revolutionize the world so many times. With the exception of technical articles describing some invention or discovery that was actually new and exciting, the work was a succession of boring content on high-pressure deadlines.
Since the company already knew how to handle writing, translation, editing, design, layout, and even printing, and I loved small-press books, it was not a far leap to wanting to publish Japanese literature in translation.
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SFT: In the 23 years that Kurodahan Press brought Japanese SFT to the Anglophone world, what did you learn about the niche market that is sf in translation?
EL: That it rarely makes much difference how good the story is, TBH. One widely-read review in the right place can kill the best title, or crown the worst. Sure, distribution is necessary so people who want the book can actually find it, but Amazon has taken the lion’s share of the English-language market and handles that very well. Getting your title noticed is the most important element.
It is interesting that European and Japanese authors understand that translators have to be paid, and sending mss to an American publisher requires money for translation, while American authors blithely assume that they can fling English mss into the void and everyone will be able to read them easily and for free. (I dealt with a lot of books being translated into Japanese, or from Southern European languages into English, through the Trident House and Cadmus Press imprints.)
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SFT: Kurodahan published many books and stories inspired by the Cthulhu mythos–why do you think this universe is so important to Japanese authors and how much more is out there just waiting to be translated?
EL: I’m not sure why it remains so popular, but having a very large setting to play around in without fear of copyright infringement is very attractive. I’ve done it myself. People like Aramata and Asamatsu, among others, brought the original Mythos canon to Japan in a big way, although of course it had been here one way or another pretty much since Weird Tales published it in the first place. There is so much literature to choose from almost every publisher here has published something in the field, and continues to. The Japanese have no problem with drawing elements from the Mythos for use in other types of fiction, or other mediums (anime and manga, for example) so you end up with purple-eyed, sword-slinging teenage girls named Nyarlathotep.
There are infinite amounts of both mainstream Mythos fiction and the purple-eyed-girl-with-a-sword peripheral stuff, in Japanese that have not been translated, and much of it deserves to be.
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SFT: Can you talk a bit (or a lot!) about the technical side of translating from Japanese into English? What are some of the difficulties and how do translators navigate them in order to bring Japanese literature to Anglophone audiences?
EL: There are whole books about this, and it demands a more thoughtful response.
The biggest problem, when translating J2E and between any two languages, is simply that readers of the translation lack the everyday knowledge common to the author and readers of the original. If an American author drops a reference to Lassie or Captain Crunch it means something to most of their readers, but unless the reader of the translation knows what they are (probably OK for the former, highly unlikely for the latter) the words are just noise and the author’s intent is lost.
The translator, then, has a choice of (1) excising the offending words which is a terrible option, (2) leaving them in with no explanation, only fractionally less terrible, (3) replacing them with local equivalents that convey the same message to a Japanese reader as the original conveys to an American reader or (4) leave the original words but add minimally intrusive explanations to convey the intended meaning. Depending on this’n’that, I would consider 3 or 4 as plausible choices. There is no “best” solution.
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SFT: What were some future projects that you were interested in pursuing with Kurodahan?
EL: Tens of thousands of books to choose from, but top projects on my “hot list” were:
Umehara Katsufumi: Soriton no akuma (Soliton devils)
Awa Naoko: A collection of her children’s stories
Kajio Shinji: A collection (or three) of his best short fiction
Yamada Futarō: Almost any of his ninja novels (~ninpōchō)
Ryū Mitsuse: A collection of his Golden Age of Space SF stories
Thank you to Edward Lipsett for this interview!
