Giorgio Amitrano, 55, the new director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo, is an eminent Italian scholar of Japanese literature who has translated a number of popular Japanese works, including Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen."

" 'Kitchen' became a best-selling book in Italy, selling around 300,000 copies," said Amitrano, who inspired a boom in Yoshimoto's works in his country with his translation in the early 1990s.

His other translations include Haruki Murakami's best-sellers "Norwegian Wood" and "1Q84," as well as Kenji Miyazawa's "Night of the Milky Way Railway," which won Japan's Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 2001.