New Books in East Asian Studies Hiromi Ito, "The Thorn Puller" (Stone Bridge Press, 2022)
Mar 20, 2026
Jeffrey Angles, translator and professor of Japanese known for award-winning translations, discusses Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller. He traces how the translation came to be and Ito’s blend of prose and poetry. They explore her provocative themes of motherhood and sexuality, her play with quotations and hybrid storytelling, and the book’s ties to Sugamo rituals, aging, and place.
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Use Magazine Excerpts To Launch Full Translations
- To publish translated literature, use periodicals to serialize excerpts and leverage partnerships with niche presses to incubate full books.
- Angles placed chapters in Monkey issues, which led editors to champion full-book publication under Stonebridge's Monkey imprint.
Monkey Imprint Turned Magazine Excerpts Into A Book
- Monkey began as Monkey Business to introduce Japanese literature to American readers and relaunched as an annual anthology called Monkey in 2020.
- Stonebridge Press created a Monkey imprint to publish anthology-incubated works, and The Thorn Puller became the imprint's first book after chapters appeared in Monkey issues.
How A Conference Panel Sparked A Long Translation Project
- Jeffrey Angles met Hiromi Ito after organizing a conference panel in San Diego and they talked for hours at her home.
- That meeting led him to publish Killing Konoko in 2009 and begin a long translator-author relationship that produced multiple books in English.
