Christmas gift guides, New Year’s resolutions ... the time for making a list and checking it twice is upon us. As we head deeper into the holiday season, The Japan Times asked translators of Japanese literature for their biggest book wish: Which Japanese work or author do you most want to see translated into English? Read on for our holiday wish list for book lovers.

Polly Barton: One of the first Japanese books I really fell in love with is Nao-Cola Yamazaki's debut novella, “Hito no Sekkusu o Warau Na” (which translates to “Don't laugh at other people's sex lives”). It tells the story of a relationship between a young student and his art teacher twice his age, portraying all its clumsiness, humanity and wild, unpredictable loveliness. For me, it's that rare thing: a love story, relatively simple in its formulation, that manages to feel both startlingly new and achingly true and personal.

Sam Bett: My pick is Atsushi Sato's “Arechi no Kazoku” (“Family of the wasteland”). Set 10 years after the 2011 tsunami, this Akutagawa Prize-winning novel is a reckoning with disaster: what it takes away, what it leaves behind and how we struggle to make sense of it. Yuji Sakai, a single father in his 40s, funnels his pain into pruning trees in his hometown north of Fukushima, where a new seawall serves as a "monument to horror." The descriptions of tree care have an ASMR quality, but the only thing Yuji can stop from changing is himself. It’s a view of Japan the world needs to see.

David Boyd: I’d like to see Kuniko Mukoda get the attention she deserves. Two volumes of her work have already appeared in English: “The Name of the Flower” (translated by Tomone Matsumoto in 1994) and “The Woman Next Door” (translated by A. Reid Monroe-Sheridan in 2021). It would be great if somebody would translate “A, Un” into English as well. Mukoda first wrote this story about a Showa Era (1926-89) love triangle as a TV drama (it was aired by Japanese public broadcaster NHK in 1980) and then rewrote it as a novel shortly thereafter. This is the only full-length novel that Mukoda completed before her untimely death in 1981.

Andrew Fitzsimons: I would like to see more works of the persecuted poets of the New Rising Haiku movement from the 1930s and ’40s available in English, in particular the tragic Seiho Shimada, whose work had a major influence on Tota Kaneko. In the meantime, to keep us going, we have Masaya Saito’s terrific English translations of one of the survivors of that terrible time, Sanki Saito, in the recently published “Selected Haiku 1933-1962: Sanki Saito.”

Lucy North: Over the summer I read four novels by Junko Takase (who won the Akutagawa Prize for “Oishii Gohan ga Taberaremasu Yoni” [“May you always eat delicious food”] in 2022), and I have to say that I’m hooked. Takase eschews the hyper-reality and horror seen in many recently translated works of Japanese literature, relying instead on realism to examine consciousness, embodiment and self-determination.

My favorite so far is “Ii Ko no Akubi” (“Good girl yawning”), first published in the literary journal Subaru in May 2020. Many readers see it as her best work to date. Naoko has played the good girl all her life, acting polite, cooperative and sweet. But inside, she is sick of being nice, and she has some searingly nasty thoughts about the people around her: her male bosses, her friends, her teacher boyfriend and even people she barely knows. Lately, she has felt an irrepressible irritation at people, invariably men, who rush along absorbed in their smartphones, assuming that others, invariably women, will get out of their way. The story begins as Naoko purposely bumps into an oblivious teenager who has his face buried in his phone while riding his bike. A car almost runs him over, and the “story” takes off on social media. It’s a densely written novel about a nasty young woman for whom we never quite lose sympathy, with numerous flashes of comedy and truly compelling explorations of profound issues.

Allison Markin Powell: I’ve had the privilege of working with Kanako Nishi over the past several years, and I’m delighted that HarperVia will be publishing her first novel, “Sakura,” in 2025. Nishi has an incredible bibliography, and I hope to be able to translate many more of her books, especially her memoir that came out in Japan in April. “Kumo o Sagasu” (“Looking for spiders [and clouds]”) just won the Japan Booksellers’ Award and has sold almost 300,000 copies. I think there is room for much more nonfiction in translation, and, to that end, I also hope to find a publisher for Yoko Uema's essay collection “Umi o Ageru” (“I give you the sea”), which Nishi recommended to me. It won the Booksellers’ Award in 2021.

Ginny Tapley Takemori: One author I really want to translate more of is Kyoko Nakajima. I have already translated two of her works, but there are numerous other works by her that I would love to translate. One in particular is her recent novel “Yasashii Neko” (“The kind-hearted cat”), which was recently serialized by (Japanese public broadcaster) NHK, and later also in English on NHK World. It is about a young Sri Lankan man who falls in love with a Japanese single mother but then falls foul of immigration and ends up in the notorious Ushiku immigration detention center (which happens to be not far from where I live in Ibaraki Prefecture).

What makes the novel especially compelling is that it is narrated by the daughter, who was still in elementary school at the start of the story, and we see all the developments through her eyes alongside her own struggles growing up into her teenage years. The novel is meticulously researched and humanizes an issue that has taken on increasing importance not only in Japan but all over the Western world.

Asa Yoneda: As a child of the Showa Era, I have a deep fondness for the historical detective novels of Shotaro Ikenami. Born 100 years ago (shortly before the Great Kanto Earthquake), he is a beloved novelist and essayist whose work has been repeatedly adapted into manga, stage plays, TV dramas and movies. Of his three major series, “Kenkaku Shobai” (“Swordsman business”) best showcases his humanistic view of justice and the human condition, but many of his works offer comfort reading to those interested in encountering Edo (present-day Tokyo) through a 20th-century imagination.