Naoko Takahashi (born 1983) is a Japanese translator of English-language fiction. She comes from Hokkaido and graduated in English literature from Waseda University’s School of Letters, Arts and Sciences I. Comparing original texts with translations during university led to an interest in literary translation. She studied at a translation school while working as an English conversation teacher, gained experience in manuscript assessment and draft translation under Toshiki Taguchi, and continued translating while raising her children. She proposed Clare Mackintosh’s I Let You Go to a Japanese publisher; it became her first book-length translation in 2020, published as Sono Te o Hanasu no wa, Watashi. The novel brings a police investigation into a fatal hit-and-run together with a woman’s secluded life by the sea, combining a crime narrative with damaged family relationships and recovery. Her subsequent work included historical fiction. In 2024 she translated Brianna Labuskes’s The Librarian of Burned Books as Homurareta Hon no Moribito, following three women in Berlin, Paris and New York as they resist Nazi book burning and wartime censorship. In an accompanying essay, Takahashi discussed how reading shapes thought and why attacks on books and censorship are dangerous. Her 2026 translation of Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, Yasei no Kuraki Kishibe, depicts a family tending a seed bank on a subantarctic island threatened by rising seas and a woman washed ashore after a storm. Writing about the novel, she examined its sensory descriptions of the natural world and the relationships among characters living with loss.
