About Book Nerd Tokyo
Hi, thank you for finding the Book Nerd Tokyo newsletter. My name is Yuki Tejima, and I’m a translator and writer currently living in Tokyo, though when people ask which city I consider to be home, I still say Los Angeles.
Born in Tokyo, I moved to LA with my family when I was four, and it was in my mid-thirties that I began to live in Tokyo again. Before Tokyo, I moved around a bit, studying and working in Kyoto, Okinawa, and New York City in my 20s and 30s, but LA was where I was formed, where my book-reading began.
It was here in Tokyo, however, that my interest in Japanese literature ballooned into something beyond what I could have imagined - literary translation. The city is rich in literary history, locales, people, and events, and when I first moved here about ten years ago, I ventured out to a different neighborhood almost every weekend to visit a bookstore, followed by dark, bold coffee in a delicate porcelain cup at a classic kissaten. Coming from a land where value depends on its ability to supersize, Japan has taught me about finding joy in the details, the history, the whispers heard from the walls of these bookstores and cafes.
Listening to these whispers for years, I finally took the leap in 2020 into literary translation by entering the JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) International Translation Competition, an annual contest run by the Japanese government, and winning a prize that helped to open doors. Since the contest, I’ve had the privilege of being mentored by Juliet Winters Carpenter for the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorship in 2022, as well as by David Boyd for the ALTA Emerging Translator Mentorship in 2023.
In 2025, I look forward to sharing the translations of novels by authors I respect and admire immensely, including Mizuki Tsujimura’s Lost Souls Meet Under a Full Moon (Doubleday, 2025) and How to Hold Someone in your Heart (Doubleday, 2025), Someone to Watch Over You (Pushkin Press, 2025) by Kumi Kimura, When the Museum is Closed by Emi Yagi (Harvill Secker, 2025) and the sequel to Tetsuko Kuroyanagi’s best-selling memoir Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window 2 (Kodansha, 2025).
My hope for this newsletter is to share some of what I see, hear and learn in the book world and beyond. This journey began with a small Instagram account that I call @booknerdtokyo , which I will always be grateful for, for it is the people I’ve met there who have helped me recognize and ignite my inner book nerd.
Thank you for being here.
