2022-23 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation Presented to Stone Bridge Press and Monkey Imprint

Published on October 16, 2023

The Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago is proud to announce the 2022-2023 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation to Stone Bridge Press and Monkey imprint for their upcoming book Takaoka's Travels by award-winning Japanese author, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928-1987), translated by David Boyd (University of North Carolina at Charlotte).

Takaoka's Travels is a fantasy set in the ninth century. It follows an aging Japanese prince as he travels from Japan to China to Southeast Asia in pursuit of Buddhist truth. As he approaches India, the rules of the physical world are upended. Like Alice in Wonderland, the Prince discovers curiosities and miracles everywhere he goes. Alluringly seductive and mysterious, offering high adventure yet deeply human--this is a novel like no other.  This publication is forthcoming in May 2024.

Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928-1987) was a prolific translator of French literature, known for his translations of the Marquis de Sade and the French surrealists. He published several short story collections, but Takaoka’s Travels was his only novel. Shibusawa is also known for his essays, which deal with topics ranging from dreams to the occult.

David Boyd is Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His translation of Hideo Furukawa’s Slow Boat (Pushkin Press, 2017) won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. He has translated three novellas by Hiroko Oyamada: The Factory (2019), The Hole (2020), and Weasels in the Attic (2022). He won the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the second time for his translation of The Hole. With Sam Bett, he co-translated three novels by Mieko Kawakami: Breasts and Eggs (2020), Heaven (2021), and All the Lovers in the Night (2022).

The William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation is an annual competition coordinated by the Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Sibley was Associate Professor Emeritus in East Asian Languages & Civilizations and a renowned scholar and translator of Japanese literature. He is best known for his work, The Shiga Hero, first published in 1979 by the University of Chicago Press, which introduced Western readers to the fiction of Shiga Naoya, one of Japan’s foremost modern writer. In keeping with Sibley’s lifelong devotion to translation and to the place of literature in the classroom, up to $3,000 is awarded each year as a publishing subvention for translations of Japanese literature into English.