It may be only mildly surprising that Japanese translations of the first four "Harry Potter" titles have racked up 16.5 million sales to date. It is, though, quite astonishing that the publisher is not an industry giant, but a small Tokyo firm with no previous best seller to its name.
This is all due to the zeal and ability of Yuko Matsuoka, the president of Say-zan-sha Publications Ltd. After falling in love with the first of J.K. Rowling's books while she was in England in 1998, she not only succeeded in acquiring the Japanese translation rights for the whole series, but then set about translating "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" herself.
"It was like magic," Matsuoka says in the postscript of that book, which was her first-ever translation of a literary work. "It was like falling under a spell," she says, recalling how she read the book from cover to cover one night, then picked up the phone the next morning and called the author's agent to inquire about translation rights.