Book Talk Event: Yu Miri at Princeton University [October 5, 2023]

About
Yu Miri, a writer known for Tokyo Ueno Station and a winner of National Book Award for Translated Literature, came to Princeton University on October 5, 2023, to talk about her newly translated book The End of August, as well as her earlier works with Princeton University’s scholars Atsuko Ueda and Ryo Morimoto.
Speakers
Yu Miri is a writer of plays, prose fiction, and essays, with over twenty books to her name. She received Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, she began to visit the affected area, hosting a radio show to listen to survivors’ stories. She relocated to Fukushima in 2015 and has opened a bookstore and theater space to continue her cultural work in collaboration with those affected by the disaster. Her novel Tokyo Ueno Station won the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature.
Atsuko Ueda, Professor of East Asian Studies, specializes in modern Japanese literature and culture. Her research interests include literary historiography of modern Japan; linguistic reforms of Meiji Japan and the production of a “national” language; postwar literary criticism and its relationship to war responsibility. Most recently, she published a book entitled Language, Nation, Race: Linguistic Reform in Meiji Japan 1868-1912 (UC press, 2021), which explores the many proposals for linguistic reforms prevalent in the Meiji period. In this book, she examines the first two decades of the Meiji period with specific focus on the issue of race, contending that no analysis of imperialism or nationalism is possible without it.
She has recently co-edited The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism, 1945-52 (New Studies in Modern Japan) and Literature among the Ruins, 1945-1955: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism (New Studies in Modern Japan). She is also the co-editor of Natsume Sōseki, Theory of Literature and Other Critical Writings of Natsume Sōseki (Columbia University Press, 2009). Her first book, Concealment of Politics, Politics of Concealment, was published by Stanford University Press in 2007.
Ryo Morimoto is a first-generation student and scholar from Japan. His scholarly work addresses the planetary impacts of our past and present engagements with nuclear things. Regionally centered on Japan, Morimoto’s research creates spaces, languages, and archives through which to think about nuclear things, along with other not immediately sensible contaminants, as part of what it means to live in the late industrial and postfallout era. He grounds his work in a range of theoretical frameworks-including semiotic anthropology, anthropology of disaster, environmental anthropology, anthropology and the recent history of Japan, anthropology of science and technology, and digital humanities. Morimoto mobilizes them to explore the uses and applications of technologies in social processes whereby certain sensory-cognitive experiences are (im)materialized and to grapple with the techno-sensory politics that emerge in discourses concerning invisible things. His scholarship addresses the experiences of lay public to read situated perspectives against the archive of what has been rendered perceptible.
Morimoto completed his first book project, titled Nuclear Ghost: Atomic Livelihoods in Fukushima’s Gray Zone (forthcoming in June 2023 from University of California Press). This book integrates environmental anthropology, recent Japanese history, and science and technology studies to understand the uses and applications of technologies in social processes whereby certain sensory-cognitive experiences are (im)materialized. Morimoto uses the local term “nuclear ghost” to analyze the struggles of representing and experiencing low-dose radiation exposure in coastal Fukushima, where individual, social, political, and scientific determinations of the threshold of exposure are often inconsistent. Against the state’s reliance on technoscientific measurements to regiment what it means to be exposed, his ethnography explores local experiences of radiation exposure, as well as situated ways of knowing and living with nuclear things in people’s shifting relationships with contaminated others such as wildlife, lands, and ancestors.