May 7, 2026

The “Chances” That Start It All

In February 2019, a few months before Juliet Winters Carpenter was to leave Japan after a long teaching and translating career beginning in 1969, she agreed to an interview with SWET members Emily Balistrieri, Lynne Riggs, and Lisa Wilcut during a visit to Tokyo. The following is part of that more than two-hour conversation, as we enjoyed a multi-course nouveau washoku meal and Juliet generously shared from her decades of memories and experiences. Regrettably, the partially edited transcript lay incomplete for a long time, but as we grieve her loss in May 2026, we have now prepared it for publication. 

Juliet was active in SWET events in the Kansai area from early in its history, and numerous articles based on her workshops, lectures, and other contributions can be found in the SWET Newsletter archive, as listed in our “Tribute” to Juliet on the SWET website. 

Your first published translation was Secret Rendevous (Mikkai) by Abe Kobo, right? Could you say your career starts there?
Yes, it came at a really good time and purely by chance. It was a challenge. Abe’s writing contained passages about nuclear holocausts and environmental degradation. He was prophetic, writing back then about the deluge of information in our manic world. Some aspects of the translation were nearly impossible to bring off, however, such as his transition in the writing from the third person, in the form of notebooks, to the first person. You just can’t change perspective that easily in English.”* 

The same kind of thing happened with the Buddhism translations, which also came to me by chance. Somebody asked me at my farewell lecture at Doshisha Women’s College why I had done all these books on Buddhism. Was it because I had become a Buddhist? Not really. I wouldn’t have taken them on, but the initiator of the translation had gone to Edward Seidensticker first and asked if he would do it. He said no but recommended me to them. With his background from translating the Genji and all, he knew about Amida Buddhism, and he said: “This is a solemn and profound book.” I thought, “Solemn and profound”—that sounds okay.” I could do solemn and profound. He assured me, this is straightforward Buddhism, nothing strange here. Well, the work in question might be considered controversial, and the people who were publishing the book are controversial, but he accepted them, and accepted the book. I thought, well, if Seidensticker says its worthwhile . . . . And that carried a lot of weight with me. That’s how I would make a decision like that, but without that background, I probably wouldn’t have agreed to do it. 

You are well known for juggling several projects at once. When you are working on three, four, maybe five books at a time, how do you manage that? What is your work method? 
Well, you know how it is that when you have something you really have to do and you know the deadline is approaching, then somehow you tend to do something else? I usually figure that the job that absolutely has to get done will get finished. But this other job, if you put it off, it may not get done at all. So you can rationalize that the latter job has priority. It’s kind of reverse psychology.

So instead of Twittering, I should procrastinate by translating!
I know I’m going to get job A done, but it’s a tough one, so I go work on job B instead.

If you’re working on one thing, and you get stuck . . .
Then you can flee into the other. It’s wonderful to have something to flee into; to deal with that feeling “I can’t look at this again right now.” 

I have various tricks to get myself going. One of them is very simple. If the chapter has twenty-five pages, I write out each page number in a notebook, and when I’ve done that page, I cross it off. I can see how many I have left. It’s really satisfying to cross off things. Then I can do ten pages a day sometimes. And it helps to be able to see your progress like that.

Do you work on paper, or do you work on a computer?
On a computer. But then I print it out, go over it on paper, and then revise the file—I go through a lot of different stages. I can’t ever work just completely on the computer.

Here’s a similar question, but on the non-technical side, an emotional, psychological type of question. What is the experience of translating like for you? What realm does it take you to?
It’s completely pleasurable, because you immerse yourself. You lose yourself in that world. In actual life, if things aren’t going the way you wish they were—and you know, life’s complicated—you set all that aside, and translate. So now I’m this person, and I’m doing these things.

I like works that allow me a little bit of freedom to play with the writing, too, so there’s that enjoyment. I did Heritage Culture and Business, Japanese Style, by Murayama Yuzo [Japan Library] about old Kyoto businesses (shinise), which came out in March [2019]. It was more just sort of straightforward translating, but it was still fun, because I could jazz it up a little bit. The author really liked it when I jazzed it up. 

It sounds like you feel a sense of the adventure when you come across something that is obviously difficult, and could be done in various ways. By now, you probably feel you could tackle anything.
Yes, absolutely! Then you think, okay, now I’ve got something I can sink my teeth into. . . . I was always attracted to Japanese because it was different. Everything was so different. 

I just remembered: I had a Japanese boyfriend when I was in high school, and we would talk sort of in Japanese, because it was fun. He was twenty, and I was sixteen. But I remember I would always make him laugh because I would say something, and then I would forget to say ne? or yo, right away, and there would always be a pause of thirty seconds or so, and then I’d go “ne?” In English, we don’t express emotion by putting something at the end of a sentence. So that was really hard for me to get used to in speaking. It’s interesting that it was so different from the way you would talk in English. That intrigued me.

The story that I always tell, that I’m sure you’ve heard many times, is about the time my boyfriend said “Kaeru?” I thought he said “Frog?” And I was just so mystified by that. And thinking back, I don’t know why I even knew the word for “frog.” I didn’t know that much Japanese. I’d only been studying for a year. I knew that kaeru meant frog. I did not know that it meant “Let’s go home.”

I was editing the translation of a manga once, and there was a little boy, crying, saying “Kaeru, kaeru.” And the translator had put “froggie.” It’s the same misunderstanding! I’d love to have that on a T-shirt, a little crying boy saying, “froggie.” 
I’m not alone! Finally my boyfriend rephrased what he wanted to say, and I could see he really didn’t want to—he kept saying kaeru? and when I didn’t get it, thinking—“Do I look like a frog?”—finally he said, looking like I’m shikata ga nai, he says, “Kaerimasu ka?” And then I understood, and I said, “Oh, sure,“Ok!” I hadn’t made the connection. And it was clear, I realized, that he didn’t want to have to use that formal speech. That taught me right there, something about Japanese: that I was not the kind of person that he wanted to say the formal-sounding “-masu” to. I realized how one’s relationship with someone is defined by the expressions they use, and I was somebody to whom he didn’t want to say kaerimasu ka?

Why do you translate so much? You must be paid well for your translations, but with a good professorial job, it can’t be just the money. What are your other motivations for translating so many books? 
I don’t translate for money, that’s very clear. I just translate because—maybe it’s a sort of fear or compulsion? Because if I stop, they’re going to say she’s not translating anymore, and they’ll give all the interesting books to somebody else.

Well, I have a feeling, Juliet, that a lot of us could not translate the way you translate. You have a particular style and feel for translation that is very appealing. Isn’t that why you’re being asked to do all those books?
Well, maybe not the Buddhist books; others could do those. I’m not sure that I am the only person who could do the books I translate.  The people who’ve come to me, about the translation of Ryoma! for example, are desperate readers, saying “somebody” has to translate this. “Somebody” has to do it. Nobody will do it. Will you do it? And I think, “Gee whiz, yeah, ok, I’ll do it!” Somebody ought to do it. 

You do have a solid track record of knowing how to translate Shiba Ryōtarō, going back to The Last Shogun.
Yeah, but they went to other people first, and those people said no. Then they came to me, and I said yes. And once I had said yes to the first Shiba book, again, somebody came to me and said, you know, I want to get this translated. Will you do it? No guarantee of publishing. But it just seemed like a no brainer. It seems like, sure. It will work out.

You have a particular way of translating . . .
What is my way of translating? 

It is simultaneously faithful to the original and has a good storytelling style. I know that people are looking for your style, which we the readers recognize and enjoy.
You do one thing, and you just do the best job you can do on it, and you just assume that it will lead to something else. Or you do something that nobody else has done. And you think, well, somebody has got to do it, why not me? So, those are some of the motivations. I just think that books ought to be translated. And life is short, and why watch another TV show? I could spend the rest of my life watching TV, but that doesn’t sound very attractive to me. Or I could take up gate ball. That doesn’t sound very interesting. What could be more fun than translating?

The trouble is I get used to translating in a certain way on one book—like a novel by Mizumura Minae—and I have a certain way of proceeding. Then I look at Hirano Keiichiro’s novel and go, my gosh, his sentences are all different! And I can’t consult with him frequently way I do with Minae. We have to be able to get into different strides. You have to match your stride to the author, and it’s hard—I’m working at a different pace on the Hirano book.

Also, do you find it hard to read Japanese without constantly thinking: how would I translate this? I get distracted while I’m reading, thinking, oh, this would probably come out like such-and-such . . .
I’ve learned that I can read Japanese really quickly, especially if I just want to read a book and see if I want to translate it or not. I’ve trained myself to just go through to get the gist of the story. If I were actually reading, not just to get through it, but to really understand, it would take me a lot longer. And then, you read it the slowest of all when you’re actually translating. You go back and forth, and you say, I want to remember this sentence! You think you’ll come back and deal with a knotty part later. Then, when the time comes, you really have to deal with it. But when you’re just perusing the text, you don’t stop and think—because you can’t—you just think, yep, that’s going to be tough, okay . . . now, move along . . .

I start to feel nervous if I have not translated something for a while even if I am taking a break. I feel should be working. Do you feel that way about translating?
I don’t think I’m much fun to be married to. But one of the rules that I have is, when my husband is up, I don’t work. He goes to bed at 9:00, and that’s been very helpful. So, I start working at 9:00.

So you work late at night?
If I worked in the daytime, I just wouldn’t have a marriage. Because he goes to bed so early, I feel like, when he’s there, I should be there. We have to talk to each other! You have to invest in the marriage. That’s important.

So it’s really helped that he goes to bed so early. That’s just what he chooses to do. Having an early dinner is totally normal in our family. We eat at 5:00 or 5:30.

Wait, so you just said that you’re not much fun to be married to, but yet you do your work after he goes to sleep.
Yeah, well, I’m still not very much fun. I’m still always running around, and here I am [in Tokyo], and he’s not here. And when I have to work in the day, I do. But I try to keep evening hours for my marriage.

So what time do you go to bed?
It depends. Last night, I went to bed right away after I came back. I was exhausted and went to bed at 9:00 and slept till seven in the morning. So when I get a chance, I’ll sleep, but for years, I worked from 9:00 to 3:00. If I can go to bed at 3:00, and I can get five hours of sleep, I’m okay. And I’ll take a nap sometime during the day. That’s six hours, that’s all right. And then you catch up when you need to.

You sound like Martha Stewart. She’s famous for sleeping for four hours a day.
Four hours is a bit rough. Five would be good.

When you start working at 9:00 or whenever, are you able to concentrate?
It takes me a little while to get into it, but then once I’m into it, then yeah, I concentrate. I forget to go to the bathroom and things. Really, you shouldn’t do that. Sometimes I do stay up until 4:00, but that’s just because I just got so into it that I didn’t notice what time it was.

I wish I could do that. I’m more like, translate the sentence. Okay, translate the next sentence.
Well, I do that too. That’s why you make your list of page numbers, and you cross them out. And so I have a list of this book’s page numbers here, and this other book’s page numbers here also. You put a little date next to the page numbers, so you can see how many you did each day.

When you’re doing your first pass of translating, normally how close do you get it? Do you leave it rough and come back? And, how far away do you go before you come and look at it again?
I’m constantly going back to it. Constantly. So first you get it into English. This is definitely not Japanese, it at least looks like English. And then you go back, and you think, would I really say this? Would he really say that to her? And questions like that. Well, what would he say? Would he use this word? Maybe not.

Speaking of what they would say, how do you get into the different characters’ voices?
You just do your best. To me, that’s what’s really fun about translating, is you have to become that person, and you have to think, what is this person’s educational background and all those things, and that comes into their word choices. 

My husband is very good as my first reader. He doesn’t do it so much now, but he once read everything I ever did. I owe him a lot. He saved me from a lot of unfortunate things. I have a tendency to be too horsey—to be too raw, you might say. And he’s just, “Tone it down, tone it down. You don’t want to do that. Keep it dignified.” And he’s usually right. You have to be really careful about those kinds of things.

I wanted to ask about how teaching and translation intersected for you. Because you’re teaching translation, too, right? Your translations must have informed your teaching, or vice versa. What are your thoughts on that?
I had to teach my students about translation from English into Japanese, and I wasn’t really qualified to do that. I realized I could become qualified by doing it. I could do it as well as anybody. Teaching translation is hard, no matter who it is and which way you are translating, but I figured I could do it by working with movies that had Japanese subtitles. And I would always teach Casablanca. We start in the spring semester with Casablanca for E-to-J, and in the fall semester with Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story) for J-to-E. And we look at the subtitles and consider why are they are the way they are. And then we branch out from that.  The students went into projects of their own after that. I have them study subtitles because translating subtitles is the same thing as what a translator has to do.

In movies especially, if a line isn’t important for the movie, they cut it. What remains is only something that either is there because it reveals character or because it is essential to the plot, or this is the theme of the movie, so it’s there for a real reason. And you have to think, why is this line here, which of those tasks is it performing, and how can my subtitle function that same way? The students grapple with the written word, but it’s also the world of movies. It’s easy for students to get into. I like movies; who doesn’t like movies?! 

But it’s really helpful because movies are dialogue, and I always think dialogue is hard, so it’s helpful to look at movies because you realize all the different ways that we say things in English. And ooh, that’s a good way to say that, you know, whereas the Japanese is just dōmo or something. Movie dialogue is real—well, it’s not real real, but it’s pretty close to how people talk.

One more question: What contributed to your success? What put you on the road to where you are now? What advice would you give to novice translators?
Absolute luck. Absolutely the best luck in the world.

What I said in my final lecture at Doshisha was: your chance will come, but when it comes, you’ve got to be ready for it. I had a great chance. If I hadn’t quite been ready, it would have been too bad. I would’ve been left thinking “Gee, if I had only been ready . . .” But it came, and I could do it, and I took it, and I did it. 

I used to do all kinds of things. And I studied other people’s translations. There was Mishima Yukio’s Sun and Steel, translated by John Nathan, and I would just look at it sentence by sentence and compare it with the original and think, “How did he get that?” Having no idea of what goes into a translation, I was thinking he just read that Japanese and immediately wrote that English. It was very educational. And I so admired Edward Seidensticker, and I would try to imitate things that he did. I noticed that in his translations, he often used the expression “it was less . . . than it was . . .” And I used that pattern. I would find patterns . . . And it’s not stealing, it’s just echoing, sort of, because I admired him so much. So I would find words or expressions that I thought would carry over in translation. When someone starts to get drunk, they say sake ga mawaru, but how do you say that in English? I learned from Seidensticker that “it starts to take effect.” Right, I’ve got it! And then you can just use that, because that comes up again and again. So I would try to pick up on things like that. 

There are so many ways to learn besides just groping around in the dark. I see lots of younger people plunging into translation without the least preparation, just deciding, “Oh, I like this, so I’m just going to translate it.” And often they have no real ability; they just swipe the work of others. There are ways to train yourself besides stealing other people’s work and posting it on the Internet. 
I always knew I wanted to be a translator, and I knew that I was no good. I think that’s important to know. I knew that I could be better, and I was very willing to accept any advice or any correction that people would give. You know, some people get upset, and they say, “Oh, what do you mean it’s no good?” But I know when it’s no good. So I ask someone to help me out. 

But you learn from just little things, like from the editor of the first book I did with Enchi Fumiko. There’s a phrase that comes up over and over, and she says it maybe five times, and the editor said, “Well, we don’t have to have all of these.” At first I wondered, “You can do that, take stuff out?”And then I realized, okay, let’s do that! Just learning what’s possible and what isn’t takes a while. Each time you learn something, then you remember that, and then you use it the next time. Okay, we don’t have to say she said it five times, we can tone it down to three or even two; it doesn’t matter. The point is she said it.

* See Jane Singer, “The Bright Career of a Literary ‘Shadow Hero,” The Japan Times, May 22, 2010). Her translation won the 1980 Japan–United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

(© 2026. Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators. Edited by Phyllis Birnbaum and Lynne E. Riggs)