Viglielmo's primary career focus was on modern Japanese literature, and he produced many studies of principal authors and their works, as well as translations. In 1971 Viglielmo translated the Sōseki novel "Meian" ("Light and Darkness", 1916), which received high praise from Western literary critics such as Fredric Jameson and Susan Sontag. Two years earlier, in 1969, he translated a brace of essays, "The Existence and Discovery of Beauty", which the first Japanese Nobel Prize recipient Kawabata Yasunari gave in the form of public lectures as a visiting professor at the University of Hawai‘i in May 1969.