2024-2025 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation Presented to the University of Minnesota Press

The Committee on Japanese Studies at the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago is proud to announce the 2024-2025 William F. Sibley Memorial Subvention Award for Japanese Translation to the University of Minnesota Press for their upcoming book The Luminous Fairies and Mothra, by Tekehiko Fukunaga, Yoshie Hotta, and Shin'ichiro Nakamura, translated by Jeffrey Angles (Professor of Japanese, Western Michigan University).

Mystical and benevolent, the colossal lepidopteran Mothra has been one of the most beloved kaiju since 1961, when The Luminous Fairies and Mothra was originally published in Japanese. Commissioned by Tōhō Studios from three of Japan’s most prominent postwar literary writers (Nakamura, Fukunaga, and Hotta), the novella formed the basis for the now-classic monster film Mothra, with a protagonist second only to Godzilla in number of film appearances by a kaiju. Jeffrey Angles provides a lively translation in English, as well as an extensive afterword about the novella’s cultural context.   This publication is forthcoming in January 2026.  

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 renown 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.