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