What, really, does a media maker want more than to utter the following four words without irony? ‘We’re huge in Japan.” And so we are, with the release of a Japanese translation of our first book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure.

The book has been translated by Toshiya Echizen, who’s also penning a column in the Japanese weekly, Shukan ST, an English-language publication for people learning English in Japan. Each week, Mr. Echizen will introduce Six-Word Memoirs to readers from the site or our Twitter feed. “The purpose of the column is to explain the possible meaning or meanings of the phrases and to generally instruct our readers how to better understand them,” says Kichiro Tamagawa, Shukan ST division manager. How do you say “Verbal hemophilia. Why can’t I clot?” in Japanese anyway?