Wayne P. Lammers grew up in Japan as the child of missionaries, and is now an independent commercial and literary translator working out of Portland, Oregon. His published translations include Evening Clouds (2000) and the award-winning Still Life and Other stories (1992) by Junzo Shono (one of Kojima's contemporaries); Taken Captive: A Japanese POW's Story (1996) by Ooka Shohei; and The Tale of Matsura: Fujiwara Teika's Experiment in Fiction (1992), a courtly tale from the 12th-century.