Gabriele d’Annunzio’s works had a wide circulation in Japan. In his first novel, Il Piacere, Japanese readers discovered an ugly compatriot named Sakumi. The character shocked Japanese readers and showed up in Japanese writing: for example, a novel by ITO Sei portrays an intellectual who often reflects on the D’Annunzio’s character with disgust. Sakumi was depicted worse in the Japanese version of Il Piacere than in the original novel. In fact, most of the translations of this work distorted the original portrait of Sakumi. The Japanese version was a re-translation of the English version. The distortions of Sakumi cannot be traced simply to mistranslations. This paper analyzes the process of modifying literary texts and examines the influence of cultural images in translating.