August 5, 2026

EVENT REPORT: Book Editing and the Tuttle Style of Publishing

On June 17, 2026, Tuttle Publishing editor Cathy Layne joined a group of fifteen SWET members and others gathered at the Book House Café in Jinbochō to share her story of the last thirty years. Layne first came to Japan in 1996 as a teacher on an exchange from London, where she was a high school teacher. She continued to teach for several years while studying for her MA in Japanese Studies and gradually moved on to freelance translation and editing. She became an editor at Kodansha International in 2004. After KI closed down in 2011, she returned to teaching for a few years and eventually took up a position as editor for Tuttle at its Singapore office. Since 2025, she has been based at Tuttle’s Tokyo office.

What led to your connection with Japan and your entrance into the book editing profession?
I came to Japan, like many people, as a teacher. I was teaching at a high school in central London, working for Westminster council—the equivalent of Tokyo’s Chiyoda-ku. Westminster and Chiyoda-ku had an exchange program, with students going back and forth every year, and in 1996 they extended the program to ask a Westminster teacher to work in Chiyoda-ku for one year, and it was me. I liked it. Indeed, I liked Japan so much that I stayed on in Tokyo after the program ended. I taught for a few years, while studying Japanese first at local classes and finally by distance learning with Sheffield University for a Masters in Advanced Japanese Studies. I loved learning Japanese. 

In the mid-1990s, English-language publishing in Japan, via books, newspapers, journals, and magazines, not to mention all sorts of advertising, promotional, and commercial media, was going strong. SWET’s community, founded in 1980, was vigorous, with nearly 500 members until the Kobe Earthquake and the sarin gas subway-poisoning incident shook up the country in 1995. There was high demand for editors, writers, and translators, and the “wordsmith grapevine,” via numerous in-person events and gatherings in those pre-Internet days, was instrumental in helping such people find opportunities.
One day a friend called my attention to an ad in the Japan Times: “Kodansha International is looking for an editor.” My immediate reaction was, “I don't want to work for a Japanese company. I’ll have to work till midnight every night and have no holidays!” So I didn’t apply. That was in the January of 2004. But by August that year, they found me. They hadn't been able to find anyone for the job, and the late Tokyo-based literary agent William Miller—whom I had been in touch with to discuss literary translation—had recommended me to his friend Stephen Shaw, who was editor-in-chief at KI at the time. They called me in and . . . I got the job. So that’s how I started in editing; in other words, I didn’t deliberately aim to get the job at KI; it just kind of happened. I think it's because I was following my interests. 

While I was teaching, I was studying Japanese. I was doing a bit of freelance translating and stuff. I was kind of doing the things that I liked.

Occupational serendipity like that happened a lot to wordsmiths who turned up in Japan in those days. When you let people know what you could do and what you were interested in, somehow you would find yourself in the job that matched your interests. 

Who did you work with at Kodansha International? 
I started at the same time as Greg Starr, who was the new editor-in-chief, replacing Stephen Shaw. We were the newbies. And then Barry Lancet, Suzuki Shigeyoshi, Michael Staley, and Ginny Tapley—they were the main editors there at the time. 

On my first day at KI, someone plonked a manuscript down on the desk in front of me and asked me to edit it. Although I’d never edited a book before, I quickly realized that this was something I felt comfortable doing. I knew how to do it.

Fixing the text of a book to make it readable was one thing—but learning how to do acquisitions was a little trickier. Once a week, editors had to present potential acquisitions to the sales team—often to be shot down in flames! In the early days I didn’t have anyone sending me submissions, and I didn’t really know how to look for Japanese titles that could be translated into English. I decided I would make my own dream book—an anthology of short literary stories by Japanese female authors that would give an insight into the lives of Japanese women today. The sales team went for it. And a combination of inexperience and idealism meant that rather than getting a literary freelancer to put the book together for me, I ended up reading hundreds of stories, contacting all the authors and translators myself, and even translating a couple of the stories. I was very proud of the finished product. It is titled Inside: Japanese Women by Japanese Women—it’s out of print now, but you can still find the odd copy floating around.

Other notable books I worked on at KI include Yakuza Moon, the autobiography of a young woman who grew up the daughter of a yakuza, translated from the Japanese edition. The sales team didn’t want to do it because Japan’s yakuza culture was not something they really wanted to advertise to foreigners. But the English edition of the book became a bestseller for the company. Another bestseller was (and still is) The Just Bento Cookbook, by Maki Itoh, originally a bento blogger who I happened to see an article about and approached to write a book. It is still selling really well, twenty years later. I also had the chance to work with some luminaries in the field of books on Japan, including the late Donald Richie on a revised version of A Hundred Years of Japanese Film. He took me out for lunch one day at the old FCCJ, which felt very glamorous. I also did the first of several books with the late Juliet Winters Carpenter —the English translation of the story of a Japanese salaryman who became a monk for a year, Eat, Sleep, Pray. 

And then on February 28, 2011, we heard that KI was to be closed down. It came as a great shock, and everybody was to be let go. That was enough of a shock. And then two weeks later was the big 3/11 Tohoku Earthquake. So those two things happened together. The earthquake really shook me up, and there I was, jobless. I thought: it’s a sign, and decided I had to leave. I left Japan then after fifteen years. 

I got a job with the British Council in Borneo, which is where I first met Richard Medhurst. 

Richard Medhurst, currently a translator and editor working for the news site Nippon.com, has since settled in Japan. In 2011, he was living in Toyama prefecture and later joined SWET. He has been a regular contributor to SWET activities, including his column “Word Wise,” and translates literature as his personal pursuit. 

That sounds like another fine serendipity.
Weirdly enough, yes. Yes, Richard and I had a mutual friend and we happened to meet in Borneo when he was on a visit there. It’s a very small world, isn’t it? 

And while I was in Borneo, I thought, “I really miss making books.” So I wrote to Eric Oey, who is the head of Tuttle, and said, “Can I have a job?” And because I’d worked at Kodansha International, he said, “Yes, of course you can.” I was delighted.

All the other Tuttle native English editors are American, and they are based in the U.S. office in Vermont, so the plan was to send me there. But at the time, it was very hard for a British person to get a visa to the United States. I ended up going to the Singapore office, because it was easy to get a visa there, and I worked there for about for nine years. In 2025, when the Singapore government wouldn’t renew my visa anymore, I negotiated with Tuttle and they agreed to have me work in their Tokyo office, which at the time was only handling sales—there wasn’t an editorial staff here. But that's how I came back to Japan. 

Even when I was in the Singapore office, my work was heavily focused on Japan. Most of the people I was dealing with every day, like Richard Medhurst, for example, are here in Japan, so it makes sense to be in Japan. Singapore is our production center and we have a very big office there with designers, production staff, and so forth. And we print all the books in Southeast Asia, China, some in Singapore, but in that area. Our CEO, Eric Oey, lives in Singapore, and he's half Indonesian, so that’s his part of the world, really. 

Tuttle publishes books in a wide range of genres, not only relating to Japan. Layne shared copies of the latest catalogue, which can be perused online. We asked Layne whether she is able to work on books of her own personal interest.
There are five foreign language editors at the company. We do tend to specialize, and they try and give us the things that we’re good at and that we like. For example, I don’t usually do craft books, and they’re not my favorite. I’ve got a woodworking book coming up, which is going to be a challenge for me. We sometimes end up having to do books that we don’t love. But there is scope to do the books that you really enjoy. And the great thing at the moment is that Japanese literature—which I do love!—is really popular, the classic literature, the modern literature. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Richard on his fantastic Akutagawa translations.

Tuttle published Richard Medhurst’s anthology of stories by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, The Essential Akutagawa, in 2025, with a second volume A Fool's Words scheduled for 2027. Japanese literature is big these days, and Tuttle already has many literature titles in its list, I believe?
Yes, there is a lot, including classic literature, which is what Tuttle first made its name for. Back when the company first started in Japan in the early post-World War II period, it was translating the classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors for the first time for a worldwide English audience. Today, contemporary literature is also very popular. You’ve heard about “cozy fiction”—anything with a cat in a bookshop on the cover will just sell like hotcakes, like Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (Harper Perennial, 2023). Tuttle’s first foray into that genre is Postcards from Japan by Francesc Miralles, published in April 2026.

What is the Tuttle view about poetry, translating Japanese poetry? 
We have quite a few poetry books, a surprising number, in fact, and they do quite well. I think it’s because it’s kind of niche. We recently did Sōseki Natsume's Collected Haiku (2025).  I just worked on a new version of the Hyakunin isshu, in a translation by Michael Freiling, One Hundred Poems from Old Japan (2025). It’s quite popular, and has really nice woodblock print illustrations. We’ve got a wide variety of poetry books, including Japanese Haiku for Cat Lovers (2026), Japanese Death Poems (2018), The Poetry of Chūya Nakahara (2026), and The Poetry of Chiyo-ni (2025).

Paul Rossiter mentioned Santōka earlier, and we have the The Life and Zen Haiku Poetry of Santoka Taneda (2021). How many people have heard of Santōka ? I hadn't heard of him before I edited the book, but his life is fascinating and it’s a wonderful translation by William Scott Wilson. 

While you were in Singapore, was it mainly also literature that you were editing? What were some of the books you worked on there?
I’m doing exactly the same job in Tokyo as I did in Singapore. I do all kinds of books. I do quite a lot of cookbooks, which I really enjoy because they're very systematic. I’ve also become the wellness expert, books like “The Zen Guide to . . .,” you know, and books on topics like wabi-sabi, and other Japanese keywords. They’re very popular as well. I seem to have become the person who specializes in wellness, which is just an accident really. I also have to do language books, which I'm not really that keen on, even though I have the knowledge. When I was at KI, Michael Staley did all the language books and he worked with Janet Ashby on her Read Real Japanese anthologies of short stories and essays.

And how does it look for people to support your work in the company? Do you also look for freelancers to help with your work? 
Yes. Especially when you happen to be working on a book which is quite specialized or not in an area that you know anything about. I imagine I'll have to hire someone to edit the architectural joinery book that I’m about to acquire as I don't know anything about that. If we're very busy, we do have freelance copy editors and proofreaders we employ. We are always looking for translators. I think one of the issues that we find, especially when we’re looking for literary translators, is that Tuttle is a relatively small company compared to the big companies that dominate the publishing world. We don’t offer huge advances, and that’s sometimes a difficult issue. The advantage of working for Tuttle is that we do, compared to other publishers, keep books in print for a very long time—like fifteen, twenty years, which is unheard of, I think, for most publishers. So, if you do become a Tuttle translator and you’re on a royalty, then, you know, you will get income, hopefully, for quite a long period of time. The other thing about Tuttle is that we do have excellent worldwide distribution—not just to English-speaking countries but to any country with an English-language market. You’ll find Tuttle books in any sort of English language section of a bookstore in whatever country you’re in. If you're a translator, you would get worldwide exposure as well. So that’s another plus of working with Tuttle. 

One big plus is that Tuttle accepts submissions directly from authors. You don’t have to go through an agent. If you have this passion that you want to translate something, and you submit it and it’s accepted, then you can have an editor, and you can get it published. Another important thing is that you can work with an editor who knows something about Japan and Japanese. I think that if you go to a big publishing house, you may get a big advance, but you probably would not be working with a Japan specialist. So that’s the other advantage, I think. For a translator to have an editor who will understand why you’ve obsessed over certain parts of your translation and not just cut it out, is very important, right? 

Do you use any other kinds of wordsmiths? You do all the proofreading and…
We sometimes do use freelance editors, copy editors, or proofreaders, depending on the particular job at hand. 

And now that you are here in Japan, has the nature of your work changed any or is it pretty much the same thing? 
It is pretty much the same. Though now, I get to actually meet people—authors and collaborators—face to face. 

On a technical level, you print in Singapore, you say. But you don’t use print on demand, you use regular kind of printing, don’t you? And you must have a warehouse somewhere?No, we don’t do print on demand—only for publicity and the like. We print physical books, and nearly every book that we do has an e-book version as well. We have them printed by printing companies. Tuttle has a warehouse attached to the Singapore office on an industrial estate.

We've always been doing e-books since I’ve been at Tuttle. Everything has an e-book version. In Japan, our main market is bookshops, and Amazon. 

Why do you think that Tuttle is keeping books in print a comparatively long time compared to other publishers? How do you explain that? 
Perhaps because we specialize in Japanese culture with relatively few competitors . . . and because the books are good ones, and people keep buying them. I don't really know about the business side of things, but I do know that you find Tuttle books everywhere, and not just the new ones; you can get old titles too. Tuttle keeps books in print for a very long time, maybe fifteen, twenty years. And most publishers don’t do that.  

Such books—perhaps they are what they call “sleepers”—stay on the shelves, and they don’t sell a million, but they keep selling little by little, over time. Tuttle seems to have a lot of those. I don’t know much about the business model, but obviously keeping the books in print works for the company. But I’m not sure why it doesn't work for other companies. We keep selling books if they are needed. Many of our books on Japan are not going to be found at any other publisher. As long as we choose the right ones to publish at the beginning, the books can just stay in print for a long time. That may be one of the advantages of specialization.

Do you have enough experienced translators or editors to help you in your work? 
I’m always looking for literary translators, especially now that Japanese literature is so popular. We're redoing all the nineteenth and twentieth century classic works. I’m looking for someone to do a new translation of The Makioka Sisters, which is five hundred pages! The thing is, there are many great translations of these classic works, but they're very old now. I worked with Juliet Winters Carpenter on the new No Longer Human. The Donald Keene version, of course, is a classic, but it is so old. It’s still sold hundreds of thousands of copies but the language is so antiquated, you know? And Juliet did this wonderful, clear, sparse, beautiful, easy-to-read translation, and it is selling really well. And Richard’s doing the same thing with Akutagawa. So, just making things more accessible for a new generation of younger readers. 

We do many other categories apart from literature, such as crafts, gardening, history . . . Some of these are original books, others are English translations of books by foreign publishers. Not just Japanese publishers, but a Spanish publisher might do a book about Japan, or a French publisher, and we acquire the English-language rights to those as well and translate them. So, translating non-literary books that have already been published in Japanese is quite a big sector. In total, we put out quite a few titles per year, about 100. 

Was there a difference between working at KI and working at Tuttle?
Yes. Kodansha International was like a philanthropic thing, you know. It was set up in the 1960s to introduce Japanese culture to the English-speaking world. The goal was not to make money, as they had the mother company behind them. Mrs. Sawako Noma at the time was a force behind KI, and she was all for it. The editors didn’t have any pressure to scout for money-making titles. At Tuttle, each editor will do six or seven books a season. That’s like twelve or fourteen books a year. At Kodansha International, we did maybe two books a season. And it was very sort of laid back.

And then, of course, as soon as Mrs. Noma died, the very next day, they closed the company down. Her son, who inherited the presidency of the company, was not interested at all in keeping it going.

What was it that led Charles Tuttle into publishing about Japan in the first place?
I know that the company’s roots go back to a family business based in Rutland, Vermont. Charles E. Tuttle was a bookseller in Vermont for the family company, who joined the US military during the war and was sent to Japan after World War II with the Occupation forces. He was in Japan for many years and decided while he was here that he would set up a branch of the family business in Tokyo and introduce Japanese literature to the rest of the world. He ended up staying here all his life until he died in 1993. The Charles E. Tuttle Company founded in 1948 initially had the military market in Japan to build on, and at the time Japan itself was putting resources into making itself known. Probably there was funding and there were various other ways of getting support for the books that Tuttle was putting out, so the timing would have been good to establish a publishing business in Tokyo.

You say that Tuttle’s main market is the United States. I don’t know how big the market for English books in Japan is, but Tuttle has a presence in Japan, right? 
Yes. The US is the main market. When we’re deciding which books to publish, we’re thinking of trends and the US market, what they want to read. That comes first. Japan has always been a steady market but relatively small, because it’s tourists coming to Japan or English speakers in Japan who would maybe buy the books. The last year or so, with all the tourism, the Japan office itself is having a record-breaking time, just selling so many books at the moment. Also, the Kinokuniya chain is in nearly every country. If you go to any Kinokuniya, you’ll find Tuttle books in Southeast Asia or Australia or wherever they have stores. Any sort of overseas bookshop that has an English language section and a travel section and a Japan section, you’ll find Tuttle books there.

Did your training as an editor begin at Kodansha International? 
I didn’t have any formal training in editing. You just had to use all your own inherent talents. I told you that my friend, six months before I got the job, told me “You should do that job.” So she obviously knew that I had something. I didn’t really think about it. And I remember my first day at Kodansha International, and they sat me down at a desk, and they put this big manuscript down in front of me, and said “Can you edit this, please?” And I remember sitting there thinking, “Oh my God. . . . What if I can’t do it?” But as soon as I started—and I was 41 years old at that time, I thought, “Oh, I know how to do this!” And the book—by the way—was a revised edition of Diane Durston’s Old Kyoto. Do you remember that beautiful book? Do you remember the photographs in it? Oh, such a gorgeous book. So, that was a nice easy start. You asked me to talk about training and stuff that I’ve done, but I haven’t done any. I just like reading and writing. Editing is just something that I was able to do, I think. 

You must have been an avid reader or interested in good writing, certain writers, and they occupied your brain. Then you got into the right profession. 
I think so. I got there in the end. 

Many of us in SWET have had the benefit of working with senior editors who were very skilled and experienced—Becky Davis, Susie Schmidt, Suzanne Trumbull, Nina Raj, and Patricia Murray. But professional training is available, for example, through Editors Canada, and other professional organizations. EC has webinars, and they have a wonderful Professional Editorial Standards document that has everything written down that you’re supposed to do as an editor. We encourage people who are getting into the field to use those tools. Especially in the case of work relating to Japan, of course, the best thing is to work for someone who's been doing it, so whoever is joining you there at Tuttle is lucky. Positions where one can work under a senior editor are very few now. It is very important that we train younger editors.  
I find it quite interesting doing a book on a subject area I might not know anything about because it makes you into a very objective editor. You have to be able to understand what’s written there. You’re not bringing your own knowledge to bear because you don’t have any. One of the keys to being a good editor is objectivity. Looking at something with that distance, when you're working in an area that you know nothing about. I can't cook, but perhaps that's why I love editing cookbooks. I may be a good cookbook editor because if I don't understand something, it’s obvious and I work to clarify it.

Does Tuttle have a “house style” that guides your editing for each book?
No. I do refer to the Chicago Manual of Style generally, but my main goal is to just strive for objectivity, readability. Is this understandable? That's the bottom line, really. Our market is popular rather than academic, so we don’t have specialized style sheets for particular genres. The writing just has to be clear and readable. 

With Tuttle focusing mostly on Japan and let’s say Asia, is that because of demand? Would Tuttle also consider, for example, expanding, I don't know, to Africa maybe or Latin America? Or is it deliberate to focus on this part of the world? 
I think it’s deliberate to focus on Asia. Our CEO started in Indonesia with a chain of bookstores called Periplus. Then he started a small Periplus publishing imprint. And then in the 1990s, when Charles Tuttle died, Oey bought Tuttle. So, we have this huge Japanese catalog, and if you think in terms of Asian countries, Japan is the one that most international readers want to know about. Japan is the most important country on the Tuttle list. But we also do some Indonesian books because of that heritage. We’re doing a lot of Korean books at the moment—language books, K-pop or K-drama themed books—because Korea is having a moment. And we do some books related to other Asian countries, such as China, the Philippines and Vietnam. So, it’s Asia, really. That’s what we’re known for. 

© SWET 2026. Compiled and edited by Julie Kuma and Lynne E. Riggs 
for the SWET website