Janine Beichman is Professor Emerita of Japanese Literature at Daito Bunka University in Tokyo. She has published widely as a biographer of Japanese poets, most notably of Masaoka Shiki and Yosano Akiko. In addition to Ishigaki Rin, she has translated other significant Japanese poets, including Ōoka Makoto, whose selected poems in English, Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets : Selected Poems 1972-1989, appeared from Kurodahan Press in 2018; she also collaborated with Ōoka on wide-ranging anthologies of Japanese poetry in English translation. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and America PEN, and is a winner of the 2019 – 2020 Japan-United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature.

Her books on Masaoka Shiki and Yosano Akiko are: Masaoka Shiki : His Life and Works (Cheng & Tsui, 2002 ); Embracing the Firebird : Yosano Akiko and the Birth of the Female Voice in Modern Japanese Poetry ( University of Hawaii Press, 2002 ).

Her translations include: Harumi (Jakuchō) Setouchi, The End of Summer ( Kodansha International, 1989 ); Makoto Ōoka, A Poet’s Anthology : The Range of Japanese Poetry ( Katydid Books, 1994 ); Makoto Ōoka, Poems for All Seasons : An Anthology of Japanese Poetry from Ancient Times to the Present ( Kodansha International, 2002 ); Abbess Kasanoin Jikun, In Iris Fields : Remembrances and Poetry ( Tankosha, 2009  ; with Ann Cary ); Makoto Ōoka, Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets : Selected Poems 1972-1989 ( Kurodahan Press, 2018 ); Minoru Ozawa, Well-Versed : Exploring Modern Japanese Haiku ( Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2021 ); Koka Fukushima, Koka : A Passion for Ikebana ( Koka Fukushima, 2021 ) – and she has written an American nō play: Drifting Fires: An American Nō ( Shichigatsudō Press, 1986 ).

This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems by Rin Ishigaki