Masatsugu Ono is the author of numerous novels, including Mizu ni umoreru haka (The Water-Covered Grave), which won the Asahi Award for New Writers, and Nigiyakana wan ni seowareta fune (Echo on the Bay), which won the Mishima Prize. A prolific translator from the French-including works by Èdouard Glissant and Marie NDiaye-Ono received the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's highest literary honor, in 2015. He lives in Tokyo.

Angus Turvill was a winner of the grand prize in the Shizuoka International Translation Competition, and he has received John Dryden and Kurodahan translation awards. His translations include Masatsugu Ono's Lion Cross Point, also published by Two Lines Press, Tales from a Mountain Cave, by the great humorist and anti-militarist Hisashi Inoue, and Heaven's Wind, a bilingual collection of stories by some of Japan's finest contemporary women writers.