He then was employed as Acquisitions Editor, identifying English nonfiction books fusing science and the humanities for publication in Japanese,[7] translation checker and foreign secretary for the Tokyo publishing firm Kōsakusha.
Characteristically, he provides the original Japanese text, with romanized transliteration, a word-for-word literal gloss, and then multiple versions (what he calls by his portmanteau neologism, paraverse, though the method was used by Hiroaki Sato.
[11] Kern's view is, that despite several idiosyncrasies of personal style and formatting that render his approach trying to readers, Gill's works may ... be preferable, even with all their quirks, to the preponderance of academic translations of Edo-period comic poetry.
[13] Gill's competence in this arcane area was called on, and acknowledged, by the University of Guam's Alexander Kerr, a marine biologist, working on a philology of the Holothurians from antiquity to Linnaeus.
Gill is one of the two people, the other is the ex-academic John Solt, who have challenged the negative, dismissive view associated with the passing references to the genre in the works of Reginald Horace Blyth, Donald Keene, Makoto Ueda and Faubion Bowers.
Kern, after cautiously noting that Gill's presentations of his material might give casual editors the impression that the author is parodying the Nabokovian Charles Kimbote or even William Chester Minor, acclaims this and a sister book on the topic as "a significant contribution to Edo studies", "[b]ombilating with verve", and "stand[ing] out from the huggermugger of scholarly discourse on similar topics, which more often than not disappoints as eminent but dull",[18] and sums up his achievement in breaking the bowdlerized approach to the subject by concluding that: it is in breaking the wrongheaded if entrenched pattern of dismissive lip service to randy verse—that is, of barely acknowledging bareku in order to try to repress it—that gill's Octopussy is to be singled out for especial praise.