Research interests include the writings of Miura Ayako, Christianity and Japanese literature, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature (1999), Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature (2006), and is co-editor of the anthology Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan (1999).
He has also published translations of seven novels, three short story collections, and four works of non-fiction by Murakami Haruki, as well as numerous short stories of Murakami’s in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and elsewhere. His translations also include novels by Shimada Masahiko, Kuroi Senji, Yoshimura Akira, Oe Kenzaburo, Kirino Natsuo, Yoshida Shuichi, and other writers. His translation of Kuroi’s novel Life in the Cul-de-sac won the 2001 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the translation of Japanese Literature, and in 2006 he was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a book which was selected by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of 2005. Other publications include a co-translation of Murakami Haruki's 1Q84, a travel essay by Murakami for GRANTA, and Murakami’s novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which debuted at No.1 on The New York Times bestseller list. Other recently published translations include: Penance, by Minato Kanae, Murakami Haruki's short story collection Men Without Women (co-transation), Murakami's latest novel, Killing Commendatore (co-translation), the novel The Travelling Cat Chronicles, by Arikawa Hiro, Miyashita Natsu's novel Forest of Wool and Steel, and a translation of the novel Lonely Castle in the Mirror, by Tsujimura Mizuki. In the past two years he has published translations of six of Murakami's short stories---"Wind Cave," "Cream," "With the Beatles," and "Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey" in The New Yorker, "Charlie Parker Plays Bossa Nova" in GRANTA, and "On a Stone Pillow" in Freeman's, as well as Murakami's essay "Abandoning a Cat" (in The New Yorker). Recent publications include: an essay on Miura Ayako's writings, entitled "Miura Ayako and the Human Face of Faith," in the recently published anthology Handbook of Japanese Christian Writers; a translation of Murakami's newest short story collection First Person Singular; Murakami's essay collection Novelist as a Vocation (co-translation); and a translation of the novel Honeybees and Distant Thunder by Onda Riku, which won both the Naoki Prize and the Japan Bookseller's Prize. His most recent publications include translations of the short story "Kaho," which appeared in The New Yorker in July, 2024, and the novel The City and Its Uncertain Walls (November 2024), both by Haruki Murakami. He is presently working on translations of novels by Hika Harada, Natsuo Kirino, and Michiko Aoyama.
Please see the following websites for online interviews with Prof. Gabriel: