Conference Schedule
Friday, May 12 - Sunday, May 14, 2023
Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh
4200 Fifth Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15260
Friday, May 12, 2023
1:30-2:30 PM
Conference Check-In
Cathedral of Learning Room 324 & 332
2:30-4:15 PM
Opening Remarks
“Performative Artifacts in Postwar to Contemporary Japanese Culture”
Ikuho Amano, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “An Impresario of Japanese Whisky:
Suntory's Advertisements as mise en scène of Modern Consumers”
Yoshihiro Yasuhara, Carnegie Mellon University, “Ōshima Nagisa’s Poetics of
Documentary as a Performative Space for Engagement with Society”
Davinder Bhowmik, University of Washington, “Performance, Parody, Protest:
Murakami Ryû’s 69”
Jiaxin Yan, Pennsylvania State University, “Crossing Oceans, (Re)building Intimacies:
Translations of Littoral Experience in Sakata Kiyoko's 'About Opposite Shores”
5:30 PM
Opening Literary Event
"Pulling the Thorns of Suffering: Reading and Discussion with Itō Hiromi and Jeffrey Angles"
The first novel to appear in English by award-winning author Hiromi Ito explores the absurdities, complexities, and challenges experienced by a woman caring for her two families: her husband and daughters in California and her aging parents in Japan. As the narrator shuttles back and forth between these two starkly different cultures, she creates a powerful and entertaining narrative about what it means to live and die in a globalized society.
Ito has been described as a “shaman of poetry” because of her skill in allowing the voices of others to flow through her. Here she enriches her semi-autobiographical novel by channeling myriad voices drawn from Japanese folklore, poetry, literature, and pop culture. The result is a generic chimera—part poetry, part prose, part epic—a unique, transnational, polyvocal mode of storytelling. One throughline is a series of memories associated with the Buddhist bodhisattva Jizo, who helps to remove the “thorns” of human suffering.
Hiromi Ito came to national attention in Japan in the 1980s for her groundbreaking poetry about pregnancy, childbirth, and female sexuality. After relocating to the U.S. in the 1990s, she began to write about the immigrant experience and biculturalism. In recent years, she has focused on the ways that dying and death shape human experience.
Jeffrey Angles is a writer and professor of Japanese at Western Michigan University. He is the first non-native poet writing in Japanese to win the Yomiuri Prize for Literature, a highly coveted prize for poetry. His translation of the modernist classic The Book of the Dead by Shinobu Orikuchi won both the Miyoshi Award and the Scaglione Prize for translation.
Saturday, May 13, 2023
Cathedral of Learning Room 324 & 332
9:00-10:30 AM
“The Aesthetics of Economic Performance in Postwar and Contemporary
Japan”
Brian Hurley, University of Texas at Austin, “Japanese Capitalism is Beautiful:
Reading Morita Akio's Corporate Memoir 'Made in Japan”
Diane Wei Lewis, Washington University in St. Louis, “Playing House:
New Media and the Neoliberal Family”
Nathan Shockey, Bard College, “The Meaning of Mining: Remaking Coal County
in the Popular Imagination”
Jessamyn Abel, Pennsylvania State University, Discussant
“Adaptation and Variation: Uses of the Past in Modern and Contemporary Genres”
Dunja Jelesijevic, Northern Arizona University, “Creepy Boys and ‘Dead Wet Girls’:
Motifs of Mother/Child Monogurui in J-Horror”
Christopher Smith, University of Florida, “Staging Anime: The Dialogic of
Performance in Kabuki Adaptations of Anime”
Michele de Sá, Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, “A Preliminary
Study on Kabuki and Adaptability”
10:45 AM -12:15 PM
“Performing Across Rupture: Text, Body, and Sound in Contemporary Mediascapes”
Ashton Lazarus, University of Utah, “The Sound of a Nation: History, Listening,
and the Politics of Conservation in 100 Soundscapes of Japan”
Justine Wiesinger, Bates College, “Idol Acts: Abe Shinzō's Bodily Performances from 3.11
to the COVID Olympics”
Shelby Oxenford, University of Texas at Austin, “What They Saw in the Disaster:
Wagō Ryōichi's post-3.11 Twitter Poetry”
Paul Roquet, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Discussant
“Performative Play: Parody and Subjectivity in Japanese Literature and Art”
Sarah Sherweedy, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, “Narration as a Performance:
Between Dazai Osamu’s Multilayered Narrator and Rakugo”
Yingzhi Lu, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, “Performing Aging in Postwar
Japan: Reading Tanizaki Jun’ichirō's Diary of a Mad Old Man (1961) as a Parody of
Kawabata Yasunari’s Cultural-Aesthetic Discontinuity in Sound of the Mountain
(1954)”
12:15-1:30 PM Lunch
1:30-3:00 PM
“Exploring Dialogic Poetics: Intertextuality, Performativity, and Literary Artifacts in Japanese and Beyond”
Mariko Naito, Meiji University, “A Theory of Resistance: An Analysis of the
Concept of Performativity Developed in Minamoto Toshiyori's Poetics on Japanese
Linked-Verse, Renga”
Kai Xie, Kenyon College, “A Site of Social Interaction and Performance: Linked
Verse in Japanese and Literary Sinitic Centered Around the Imperial Court”
Eric Esteban, Yale University, “The Poetry of Kunaikyō: the Intertextual and
Affective Two-Step in Poetess Poetics”
John Bundschuh, Swarthmore College, “The Loss of Narrative Flow: Codification of
Tense in Japanese Translations of Sinitic and Sanskrit Renditions of a Buddhist Story”
“Bodies Unbound: Losing Oneself, Fears of Replacement, and Topologies of Indeterminacy”
Jonathan Abel, Pennsylvania State University, “Singularity and Replacement Theory
in 1950s Japan”
Mariko Schimmel, Grinnell College, “Synchronizing Moments: Rhythms of Labor,
Dance, and Protest in Proletarian and Modernist Literature”
Steve Ridgely, University of Wisconsin at Madison, “Inagaki Taruho and the
Indeterminacy of an Elliptical Universe”
Dan O’Neill, University of California, Berkeley, Discussant
3:15-4:45 PM
“Performing Proletarian Gender: Class Heroines, Socialist Masculinity, and Convert Vamps
in Japanese Proletarian Literature”
Edwin Michielsen, The University of Hong Kong, “From Uneducated Shōjo to Proletarian
Heroine: Gender Trouble and Class Performance in Murayama Tomoyoshi's Play
Shimura Natsue”
Heather Bowen-Struyk, DePaul University, “Performing Socialist Masculinity in
the Underground”
Juhee Lee, Waseda University, “Vamp Acting Wife, Convert Performing Conversion:
The Gendered Representations of 'The Crisis of Representation' in Takami Jun's
Post-Tenkō Works”
“Performing Identity and Language in Japanese Literature and Culture”
Yuki Ishida, Columbia University, “Between Performance and Literary Portrayal:
Stuttering in the late 19th–early 20th centuries Japan”
Nina Farizova, Yale University, “Performing English: On the Reception of The Beatles
Lyrics in Japan”
Mary Gilstad, Yale University, “Literary Artifacts on Screens: Performances of
Cultural Legacy and Literacy”
5:30 PM
Keynote Lecture
"Playing St. Sebastian: A Queer Reading of and Between Literary and Visual Texts from the Modern Period"
Leture by Hideo Tsuboi
Hideto Tsuboi is professor of Japanese literature at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He arrived at his current position after teaching for many years at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto. A prolific researcher, he has published extensively on topics such as the Other in modern Japanese literature, radical feminist poetry, body politics, gender and sexuality, and various routes of migration across the Pan Pacific area. His most recent monograph, Sengo hyōgen: Japanese Literature after 1945 (University of Nagoya Press, 2022), examines the representation of war in poetry, fiction, and criticism from the immediate post war period and through the Cold War, Gulf War, Iraq War, and the March 11 triple disaster.
Other major publications include Koe no shukusai: Nihon kindaishi to sensō [Fest of Voices: Modern Japanese Poetry and War, University of Nagoya Press 1997], Kankaku no kindai: koe, shintai, hyōshō [Modernity of the Sensibilities: Voice, Body, and Representation, University of Nagoya Press, 2006], Sei ga kataru: 20-seiki Nihon bungaku no sei to shintai [Sexuality Speaks: Sex/Gender and Body in the Literature of Twentieth-Century Japan, University of Nagoya Press, 2012], as well as the edited volumes Sengo Nihon bunka saikō [Rethinking Postwar Japanese Culture, Sanninsha, 2019] and Sengo Nihon no kizuato [The Scars of Postwar Japan, Rinsen shoten, 2022].
Sunday, May 14, 2023
Cathedral of Learning Room 324 & 332
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
“Exploring Borders and Boundaries in Japanese Literature and Beyond”
Jiayu Gui, Harvard University, “Crossing the Border: Feminism and Colonialism in
Fiction of Women's Voices”
Nomin-Erdene Enkhbayar, University of Tsukuba, “Reimagining the Space Beyond:
Planet-Hopping, Occupied Japan, and Osamu Tezuka’s Early Works”
Kumiko Saito, Clemson University, “Translating Robots in 1920-30s Japan”
Yu Umehara, University of Tsukuba, “Japanese Performative Schoolgirlhood during
World War II”
12:00 – 1:00 PM
(tentative)
反省会
Roundtable format involving Matthew Fraleigh, Pitt organizers, organizers of AJLS 31