Juliet Winters Carpenter
Juliet Winters Carpenter (born 1948) is an American translator of modern Japanese literature. Born in the American Midwest, she studied Japanese literature at the University of Michigan and the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo. After completing her graduate studies in 1973, she returned to Japan in 1975, where she became involved in translation efforts and teaching.
Carpenter is a devotee of traditional Japanese music and is a licensed instructor of the koto and shamisen. She is professor emeritus at Doshisha Women's College of Liberal Arts in Kyoto and has been involved in the Japanese Literature Publishing Project(JLPP), a government-supported project translating and publishing Japanese books overseas.
Carpenter retired to Whidbey Island in Washington State with her husband Bruce, professor emeritus of Tezukayama University. They have three children: Matthew, Graham, and Mark.
Carpenter's translation of Kōbō Abe's novel Secret Rendezvous ((密会, Mikkai) won the 1980 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. Her translation of Minae Mizumura's novel A True Novel (本格小説, Honkaku Shōsetsu) won that same award for 2014-2015 and earned numerous other awards including the 2014 Lewis Galantière Award of the American Translators Association. Once Upon a Time in Japan, a book of folk tales which she co-translated with Roger Pulvers, received the 2015 Gelett Burgess Children's Book Award for Best Multicultural Book.
Carpenter won the 2021-2022 Lindsey and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize for a lifetime achievement as a translator of modern Japanese literature, with particular reference to her recent translation of Mizumura Minae’s An I-Novel (Columbia University Press, 2021)
An I-Novel, translated by Carpenter, won the 2019-20 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation.
Her translation of The Great Passage by Shion Miura, an audiobook read by Brian Nishii, won the 2017 Golden Earphones Award.
Translations
| Title | Author | Type |
| The Ark Sakura | Abe Kōbō | Novel |
| Beyond the Curve | Abe Kōbō | Short stories |
| Secret Rendezvous | Abe Kōbō | Novel |
| Japanese Women: Short Stories | Yamamoto Shūgorō | |
| The Hunter | Nonami Asa | Novel |
| Uncommon Clay | Sidney B. Cardozo and Masaaki Hirano | Essay |
| Masks | Enchi Fumiko | Novel |
| The Quickening Field | Hachikai Mimi | Poetry |
| Biruma | Hiwa Satoko | Poetry |
| Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa | NogamiTeruyo | Memoir |
| Shadow Family | Miyabe Miyuki | Novel |
| Memories of Wind and Waves: A Self-Portrait of Lakeside Japan | Saga Jun'ichi | Oral history |
| The Last Shogun: The Life of Tokugawa Yoshinobu | Shiba Ryōtarō | Biography |
| You Were Born for a Reason | Takamori Kentetsu, Akehashi Daiji, and Itō Kentarō | Buddhist philosophy |
| Salad Anniversary | Tawara Machi | Tanka |
| After | Wagō Ryōichi | Poetry |
| A Lost Paradise | Watanabe Jun'ichi | Novel |
| The Sail of My Soul | Yamaguchi Seishi | Haiku |
| Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple | Nonomura Kaoru | |
| A Cappella | Koike Mariko | Novel |
| Jasmine | Tsujihara Noboru | Novel |
| Clouds above the Hill | Shiba Ryōtarō | Historical fiction |
| A True Novel | Minae Mizumura | Novel |
| Once Upon a Time in Japan | NHK | Folk tales |
| An I-Novel | Minae Mizumura | Novel |
| The Fall of Language in the Age of English | Minae Mizumura | Essay |
| Inheritance From Mother | Minae Mizumura | Novel |
| The Great Passage | Miura Shion | Audio Book |
| Gems of Japanese Literature | Edited by Juliet Winters Carpenter and Yuko Aotani | Anthology |
| Pax Tokugawana: The Cultural Flowering of Japan, 1603-1853 | Haga Tōru | Cultural History |
| "Kanken,” the Petition of Yamamoto Kakuma: An Annotated Translation | Yamamoto Kakuma | Treatise |
| The Kidai Shōran Scroll: Tokyo Street Life in the Edo Era | Ozawa Hiromu and Kobayashi Tadashi. | Art History |
| Heritage Culture and Business, Kyoto Style: Craftsmanship and the Creative Economy | Murayama Yuzo | Business |
Other works
Carpenter is also the author of the book Seeing Kyoto.
References
- Televised nostalgia in Japan: Those were the days
- A translator's work from Abe to Zen/Professor continues wide-ranging literary pursuits with epic novel by Ryotaro Shiba
- The Asian Bookshelf by Donald Richie: Blood, sweat and tears of Zen
- Strange Moors: 'A True Novel,' by Minae Mizumura