Saeko Usukawa's long hours bent over draft manuscripts and her quietly persuasive work with authors helped guide hundreds of books onto bookstore shelves.
As an editor for more than four decades, she was a behind-the-scenes leader in the Canadian publishing world. She edited books by award-winning authors including Wayson Choy, Douglas Coupland, Sky Lee, Bill Richardson and many others, covering genres as diverse as literary fiction, first nation studies, visual art, and cookery.
Ms. Usukawa was born in the Lemon Creek internment camp in the Slocan Valley, B.C. She shares that sad bit of history with author and environmentalist David Suzuki, and with author Joy Kogawa.
Her father, Akinori Usukawa, had left Japan and moved to B.C. at 18 and soon after that met Saeko's Canadian-born mother, Tomoe Miura. Mr. Usukawa worked in a lumber mill on Vancouver Island and published haiku poetry.
In 1949, after leaving the internment camp, the family moved to Toronto and Saeko began elementary school in the city's west end. When she was eight, her mother died of cancer. Saeko and her sister Donna moved with their father into the home of extended family.
Early on, her love for books was clear. By the time she completed high school at Parkdale Collegiate she had skipped two grades and was primed to begin studying at the University of Toronto. But she quickly grew bored with academic life and instead spent time working on costume design at Hart House, a popular campus theatre.
After dropping out of university, she took a job as a secretary at the MacMillan Publishing Co. Soon after, she was promoted to editor.
In the 1970s she packed up her books and her editing skills and moved to Vancouver. She became politically active and protested against apartheid and the Vietnam War. She also became involved in the women's movement. She joined the Pacific Women's Graphic Arts Co-operative, a publishing and design collective, where she worked on the feminist arts journal Makara.
Ms. Usukawa worked for Open Learning Institute for a few years as a course editor on distance education. She also edited a Grade 6 textbook on Japan and spent time there in order to become more familiar with the culture.
Ms. Usukawa met Peggy Thompson at a Vancouver Rock Against Radiation concert in 1978 and the women began a 30-year relationship. Early on, they were frequently seen at the Smilin' Buddah Cabaret on East Hastings Street, fans of the emerging punk music scene. The women were part of a vibrant art scene and their career paths took them, in varying degrees, toward books, film, music, and theatre. Years later, they collaborated on two books of movie trivia published by Arsenal Pulp Press: Hardboiled: Great Lines from Classic Noir Films and Tall in the Saddle: Great Lines from Classic Westerns. As well, Ms. Usukawa edited another Arsenal Pulp title, The Little Lavender Book of the Love that Once Dared Not Speak Its Name.
In 1979, she began working as an editor in the Vancouver office of Douglas & McIntyre, where she helped birth hundreds of titles.
"She was a master at doing difficult things and having authors love her gentle ways, but she wasn't gentle when it came to the prose," Scott McIntyre said. Wayson Choy's first novel, The Jade Peony, partly owes its success to the careful attention paid by Ms. Usukawa. The book was conceived as a series of linked short stories, but she quickly spotted a novel in it.
"It was like a magic carpet, and she was with me on that first ride," Mr. Choy said. "My impression was that she knew my intentions very clearly and guided me in a gentle way, always reminding me that the decision would be mine."
The novel tells the story of a Chinese immigrant family living in Vancouver before and during the Second World War. After six months on The Globe and Mail bestseller list, The Jade Peony won the 1996 City of Vancouver Book Award. Mr. Choy shared the Trillium Book award with Margaret Atwood in 1996.
One of Ms. Usukawa's greatest skills was in turning scholarly art books, with a significant visual component and often filled with art jargon, into popular and accessible products. An example was Abstract Painting in Canada, written by historian, critic and curator Roald Nasgaard. According to the publisher, the manuscript was a mess when it arrived on her desk. The text was long, the ideas shapeless, and the topic far too complicated for a lay audience.
"[She set about] weeding out repetitive arguments, purging the abstrusely academic, removing excessive details, diversions or self-indulgences, and generally streamlining the text down to some 160,000 words of readable text," Dr. Nasgaard said.
Ms. Usukawa won the Tom Fairley award for editorial excellence for her work on this 342-page book.
This award is presented annually by the Editors' Association of Canada to recognize the editor's often invisible contribution to written communication.
She edited several other art books for Ian Thom, curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and had partnerships with various other galleries.
In 2001, she briefly left editing to teach a fiction writing course in the University of British Columbia's department of creative writing.
She took an early retirement from Douglas & McIntyre in 2006 and worked as a freelance editor until the end of her life.
Saeko Usukawa
Saeko Usukawa was born May 13, 1946, in Slocan, B.C. She died July 5, 2009, in Vancouver of cancer. She was 63. She leaves partner Peggy Thompson, sister Donna Crawford, cousin Bill Hamade, and nieces Wendi and Dawn.
