Red Circle Authors, a unique endeavor in the publishing world, aims to connect East and West through literature. As founders and directors Koji Chikatani and Richard Nathan explained in a recent interview with The Japan Times, Red Circle Authors is not strictly a publishing firm, nor is it an agency. Rather, they see it as a "home" for a group of established Japanese and Japan-based writers, helping to promote their work overseas while heightening overall awareness of the great depth and breadth of Japanese literature in the process.
"We think of ourselves as curators for the museum of contemporary Japanese literature," explains Nathan. "We've gathered a select group of Japan-based authors, looking at a mixture of age, genre and gender. We built an English profile for each author, adding announcements and facts about each author to make them more accessible to Western readers and publishers."
To house all the information, Chikatani and Nathan built an extensive website in English featuring an online magazine, The Circle, which offers news and views on Japan, articles on a wide range of Japanese literature, and a searchable "factbook," an encyclopedic wellspring of knowledge on literary Japan. The website also showcases Red Circle's debut six authors: Kazufumi Shiraishi, Randy Taguchi, Fuminori Nakamura, Mitsuyo Kakuta, Kanji Hanawa and Roger Pulvers.