Hello. I’m honored to be one of the members of Writers in Kyoto. I’m Yuki Yamauchi, a translator of English and Irish literature and part-time event writer for The Japan Times. I have written about events in Kyoto, such as annual performances of Kyoto’s five kagai (geisha districts), Kyoto Experiment and Nuit Blanche Kyoto.

I was born in 1991 in the city of Osaka. In 2013, I graduated from Kansai University in the Department of English Linguistics and Literature with a thesis on The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) by Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany.

My serious interest in Kyoto was aroused twice. About a month before graduation, I came across a stunning passage in Lord Dunsany’s semi-autobiographical novel The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933) — “I have seen in Japanese temples the carvings of little gods with drums and harps and flutes, running and flitting through clouds.” Somehow I could speculate that the writer might have been describing the statues of bodhisattvas inside Hoo-do (Phoenix Hall) of Byodo-in temple in Uji, Kyoto Prefecture. The discovery gave me the first boost in my interest in Kyoto and its Buddhist temples.

The second opportunity came to me in 2016, when I was preparing to translate The Darling of the Gods, a Japan-themed American melodrama in 1902 that Lord Dunsany saw the following year in London. The play, giving prominence to bogus geiko and maiko, piqued my curiosity in the traditional entertainers. For some reason, the interest reached a peak that autumn, which coincided with the 59th edition of Gion Odori. Since then, I have never spent an autumn without seeing the annual event (excluding this year).

In 2018 I self-published a small booklet titled Irish literature in Pre-WWII Kyoto and this year completed a chronology of film and stage director Akira Nobuchi, who had much to do with the inaugural performance of Gion Odori in 1952. I am also the Japanese translator of a booklet by Eric Johnston about the history of media images of Japan, which will be published in 2021.