Japan's Literary Boom!
Tuesday, December 3 | 6PM EST
Wednesday, December 4| 8AM JST
Hosted online via Zoom
(Zoom link will be in your confirmation email)
About the Event:
Join JSB to celebrate the launch of Volume 5 of MONKEY: New Writing from Japan, the only annual English-language anthology of Japanese contemporary literature.
Our program will be moderated by Roland Kelts, the Tokyo-based Japanese American author, editor, lecturer, and scholar who wrote our "Letters from Tokyo" series. As the contributing editor of MONKEY, Kelts will lead a conversation with Motoyuki Shibata, co-founder and editor of MONKEY, Tomoka Shibasaki, Akutagawa Prize–winning author of the forthcoming "A Hundred Years and a Day: 34 Stories," and poet/translator Leo Elizabeth Takada, whose work appears in MONKEY 5, and who translated the screenplay for the award-winning film Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders. Join us to discuss the current global boom in Japanese literature and the critical bridge-building mission of the MONKEY team.
This is a free hour-long presentation hosted on Zoom.
About The Speakers:
Photo: Amblin Entertainment
Roland Kelts is a Tokyo-based Japanese-American writer, editor, lecturer, and scholar. He is the author of Japanamerica: How Japanese Pop Culture has Invaded the US, considered the ultimate guide to Japanese pop culture, and has taught literature, writing, and media studies at the University of Tokyo, Waseda University, and New York University. He has won various awards and fellowships, incuding a 2017 Nieman Fellowship in Journalism from Harvard University.
He has written for many distinguished publications including The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Time, The Japan Times, Nikkei Asia, and Guernica Magazine, among others. He is also a primary source on Japanese culture for CNN, the BBC, the CBC and NHK. His latest book is The Art of Blade Runner: Black Lotus, published by Penguin Random House and Titan Books.
Illustration: Satomi Shimabukuro
Motoyuki Shibata translates American literature and runs the Japanese literary journal MONKEY. He has translated Paul Auster, Rebecca Brown, Stuart Dybek, Brian Evenson, Laird Hunt, Kelly Link, and Steven Millhauser, among others. Recent translations include Eric McCormack’s Cloud and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. He is professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo.
Photo: Takeshi Funayoshi
Tomoka Shibasaki is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Her
books include Awake or Asleep, Viridian, and In the City Where I Wasn’t. She won the Akutagawa Prize in 2014 with Spring Garden, which has been translated by Polly Barton (Pushkin Press). She has appeared regularly in Monkey Business and Monkey, and Barton’s translation of One Hundred Years and a Day, her 2020 collection of stories, is scheduled to be published by Stone Bridge Press in February 2025.
Photo: Mayumi Shimoyama
Leo Elizabeth Takada is a translator and self-translating poet born in Japan, raised in Scotland, and currently living in Tokyo. Takada is the English translator of the screenplay and subtitles for the award-winning feature film Perfect Days, and the Japanese translator of the interview series with the film’s director, Wim Wenders. Takada’s bilingual poetry collections include Sapere Romantika and Anamnesiac.
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