Raised in a small fishing village along the coast of Kyushu, Masatsugu Ono, 50, Akutagawa Prize-winning author and French and English to Japanese translator, never dreamed of international success.

“Because I was growing up in the countryside in the late 1970s and early ’80s, it was very difficult to meet foreign nationals, so the English-speaking world was very far away,” he says. “For me, like for many of that time, we knew of English only from the junior high school classroom or NHK radio.” All that changed when Ono started at the University of Tokyo, keen to study comparative literature.

Author and translator Masatsugu Ono
Author and translator Masatsugu Ono