@amherst.eduResearch
My research interests encompass the middle of the eighteenth century through the 1930s. This is a period of immense upheaval in Japan, one that witnesses the rise of a commercial economy, the encounter with the West, the audacious program of modernization implemented in the wake of the Meiji Restoration of 1868, and the transformation of the country by the forces of industrialization and urbanization. My research in this period follows three broad lines of inquiry: the memory of the past in a new age; the ways in which literature reflects and responds to forces changing society; developing theoretical approaches that remove literature from isolation and puts it in contact with other arts and with the larger social world more generally. My early research centered on understanding the neoclassical style utilized by the pioneering woman writer Higuchi Ichiyo, which resulted in the monograph The Uses of Memory: The Critique of Modernity in the Fiction of Higuchi Ichiyo (Harvard Universtiy Asia Center, 2006). My second book, Struggling Upward: Worldly Success and the Japanese Novel (Harvard University Asia Center, 2016), took up the role played by new discourses on social mobility in the formation of the spatial imagination of the modern novel. My current book project, tentatively titled Celluloid Metaphors: Japanese Literature in the Age of Cinema, will seek to uncover the connections between literature and new technological cultural forms, especially the cinema, during the 1920s and 30s. I have also written on the artist Kobayashi Kiyochika and the writer Tamura Toshiko, among others.