PROFILE

Yuko Matsumoto is a Japanese author, translator, and researcher of the Anne of Green Gables series written by Canadian author, L.M. Montgomery. She majored in international politics at the University of Tsukuba. She has been a director of PEN Japan, a Japanese branch of PEN International since 1999. Her novel For an Over-Eating Girl, The Dawn Never Comes won the Subaru Literary Award in 1987, and her critical biographical novel Fireflies in Love, or Tomie Yamazaki and Osamu Dazai won the Nitta Jiro Literary Award in 2010. She has published approximately sixty books in Japan, and some of them have been translated and published in Italy, South Korea, and China.
Since 1991, she has translated and studied the Anne books, identifying many of the books’ allusions and quotations in the Anne books through research at Harvard University Library and the British Library. She has traveled to Canada thirty-two times to follow in Montgomery’s footsteps, to the US seven times and to the UK nine times to research English and American literature quoted in the Anne Books.
Anne of Green Gables, translated by Yuko Matsumoto, is the first complete Japanese translation without abbreviation and alteration and the world's first translation with annotations on literature, the bible the Arthurian legend, the Holy Grail, and Canada in the 19th century.
She has attended the L. M. Montgomery Conference in Canada since 2022, and her paper written for the Conference will be published in Canada in 2025.