This study examines how Japanese literature was made readable and circulable in Maoist China through paratextual framing. Drawing on publication notes, prefaces, translators’ afterwords, editors’ notes, critical commentaries, circulation labels, and materials from the translated literature journal Zhaiyi, it argues that paratexts were not peripheral additions to translated works, but a central mechanism through which foreign literature was interpreted and managed. The analysis shows that these paratexts worked through repeatable routines of classification, warning, circulation control, and attribution. They classified authors and works before reading, warned against politically inappropriate interpretations, limited readership through internal circulation, and weakened individual translator identity through collective, pen-name, or absent attribution. In the case of Japanese literature, paratexts also produced a manageable image of Japan by narrating Japanese society as a site of capitalist crisis, framing literary value through a worker-peasant-soldier subject position, and arranging cultural knowledge through lists and columns. The article shows that translation during the Cultural Revolution was a language-ideological and cultural-political practice, through which foreign texts were turned into controlled objects of knowledge within a supervised system of publication and reading.