Literary agent Janet Reid talks with editor Keith Kahla on the process of acquiring and publishing Japanese mega-bestseller Higashino Keigo over at her blog, and it’s a fascinating read if you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of how literature in translation is handled by a major publishing house.

Some illuminating highlights:

JR:  How did you find the author Keigo Higashino?

KK: Well, as frequently happens, it was an enterprising agent who found me. In this case, it was Akiko Kurita of the Japan Foreign Rights Centre, who is now retired…

JR:  What drew you to these novels?

KK: Originally, what drew me to take a closer look is just how popular Higashino is in Japan and throughout Asia, how many movies and TV shows are made of his work, how – unlike the vast majority of authors – he’s so popular that he’s known in Japan to general populace in a way that almost no writers other than Stephen King or J. K. Rowling are in the west.

…There’s a universality about them that makes me think that the average American reader can understand and enjoy them, if not in precisely the same way that the original readers in Japanese might have…

JR: How did you find the translator?

KK: A lot of reading. I had a sense of what sort of tone I wanted in the translation, so I went out and bought a lot of current translated works – from literary novels to manga – and picked a few that seemed to suit, have a sense of commercial fiction and story-telling that came through in their translations.

I approached several and from the pool that had the time and the interest, I then picked three (or four? I can’t recall) and contracted them to translate the first chapter of the book.

A group of us – the U.S. agent, my editor in chief, my imprint publisher, a colleague (or two) and I all read, picked our favorite version and for everyone, that was Alex’s translation. And that’s how I tracked down and decided upon Alexander O. Smith….

JR:  Please tell me there are more books in the works! I’m not sure I can stand waiting though.

KK: There are, in fact, two. One is the next (and for the moment, the only other) Detective Galileo novel, A Midsummer’s Equation. The contracts are off being signed in Japan now and I hope to get the translator started later this fall.

The other is Malice – a novel about two children’s book writers, colleagues and rivals, one of which has killed the other. It will be the first book in Higashino’s series featuring Kyochiro Kaga, a Tokyo police detective, to appear in English. The Japanese publisher – a different on than for the Detective Galileo books – is currently reviewing the contracts, so that one is moving ahead as well.

[Thanks to @hatbooks.]