Hidaka, Hokkaido – The world of publishing is a fickle place where, without rhyme or reason, even internationally acclaimed authors can have projects surreptitiously scuttled.
In the perennially popular genre of Japanese cookbooks, Nancy Singleton Hachisu is a household name, revered for her farm to farmhouse table cooking. The author of seminal works such as “Japanese Farm Food” (Andrews McMeel, 2012) and “Japan: The Cookbook” (Phaidon Press, 2018), Hachisu had just this happen to her, to then both search for and secure a new home for her passion project.
“The Art and Craft of Japanese Cooking: Artisans, Chefs, Recipes” (Tuttle, 2026) is a revised and expanded version of an earlier book from 2019 — shelved for reasons not clear to even Hachisu herself. Perhaps the new book’s slight digression for Hachisu from her long-established niche of rustic Japanese classics toward refined recipes from renowned chefs made the former publisher hesitant to move forward.
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