A working life between languages
An American born in Los Angeles, Shaw built his career around Japan. A 1933 Hokuseido catalogue places him first at Yamaguchi Commercial College and later at the Osaka School of Foreign Languages. His books included translations of Kurata Hyakuzō, Kikuchi Kan and Futabatei Shimei, alongside his own Osaka Sketches and Japanese Scrap-Book.
His work extended beyond literary publishing. After the war he served at the American embassy in Japan, where colleagues remembered his fluent Japanese and enthusiasm for introducing the country’s arts to visitors. Colorado College, which lists him among its 1910 alumni, awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1944. His teaching, city sketches and translations offered different ways of moving between the two languages and their audiences.
Giving Akutagawa an English voice
The introduction to Tales Grotesque and Curious is signed in Osaka on 10 June 1930. Shaw says he aimed to translate the stories as closely as possible and explains their settings, sources and connections to Akutagawa’s career. He also acknowledges Japanese colleagues whose help he sought when dictionaries and his own judgment were insufficient. The book therefore records collaboration as well as an individual translator’s choices.
Its stories include The Nose, Rashomon, The Spider’s Thread and Tobacco and the Devil. Shaw had already published his translations of Rashomon and Lice in an English-study magazine before collecting them here. His introduction gives English readers a route into historical settings, satire and grotesque humour, while its judgments also reveal a translator’s particular reading of Akutagawa. The stories are Akutagawa’s; Shaw supplies their English form and the critical introduction.
