Brian is a lecturer and translator currently based in Montréal after living in Chicago, Kyoto, and Yokohama. After graduate school at University of Chicago and Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, he has worked over ten years in the East Asian Studies Department at McGill University and has published academically in the peer-reviewed journals Mechademia, positions: asia critique, and Japan Forum on Japanese literature and contemporary society.

As a translator, Brian has worked in a variety of fields for over 20 years. He specializes in literary translation, many times working closely with living authors. His published translations include the collection We, the Children of Cats by Tomoyuki Hoshino (PM Press), which was longlisted for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award, the short story “See” by Erika Kobayashi, which was the first runner-up in Asymptote’s Close Approximations Translated Fiction Contest in 2017, and The Shining Sea by Koji Suzuki, bestselling author of the Ring novels.

His translation of Erika Kobayashi's novel Trinity, Trinity, Trinity was published by Astra House in 2022 and won the 2022-2023 Japan-US Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature, and his translation of Kobayashi's collection Sunrise: Radiant Stories came out in 2023, also from Astra House.

His latest book-length translations include the non-fiction work Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kōhei Saitō (Astra House, 2024), which was shortlisted for the 2024 Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation Translation Prize, and the novel Hotel Lucky Seven by Kōtarō Isaka (Overlook, 2024), part of the Assassins Series and a direct sequel to Bullet Train.

Other translations of his have appeared in venues including Granta, Aperture, LitHub, Rikka Zine, CrimeReads, The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories (Penguin Classics, 2020), Queer: LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday (Head of Zeus, 2021), and The Art and Craft of Asian Stories (Bloomsbury, 2021).