On the current ‘Boom’ of Contemporary Japanese Women's Writing in English Translations: Reading Care and Labour in Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void (2022)

Speaker: Dr Nozomi Uematsu (University of Sheffield)

Abstract

The translation of contemporary Japanese women’s writing has received significant recognition through numerous awards and nominations of international literary prizes in recent years: Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (translated 2018), Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary (translated 2018), Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (translated 2019), Miri Yu’s Tokyo Ueno Station (translated 2019), Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Things as An Easy Job (translated 2020), Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are (translated 2020), Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs (translated 2020), and her Heaven (translated 2021).

This talk aims to provide a critical framework to situate this literary recognition of contemporary Japanese women’s writing, seeing how English translations of this body of work plays a role in the context of World Literature. While these translations are diversifying the field of literary works through contemporary Japanese women’s writing, it is imperative to consider the possibilities and the challenges that this trend poses to accessibility.

In this context, I will explore the recent translation of Emi Yagi’s The Diary of a Void (2022), which exemplifies the international interest in recent Japanese literature in the global market, as well as representing the care and gendered labour in neoliberal and globalised societies.

About the speaker

Dr Nozomi Uematsu is a Lecturer in Japanese and Comparative Literature at the University of Sheffield in the School of East Asian Studies. Her research interests include contemporary women’s writing in English and Japanese; the rhetoric around women’s happiness and labour since the 1980s, and postfeminism.

Her co-authored article on female masochism comparing Kono Taeko and Angela Carter has recently been published in Contemporary Women's Writing (Oxford University Press: 2023) titled “Dis-Oriented Desires and Angela Carter’s Intersectionality: Nationalism, Masochism, and the Search for “the Other’s Otherness””. Her book chapter ‘Writing Women’s Happiness in the 1980s: Labor and Care in Kometani Foumiko, Hayashi Mariko and Yoshimoto Banana’, is in the Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Japanese Women Writers, ed. by Rebecca Copeland (Amsterdam University Press: 2023; Japan Documents 2022).

Registration

This event free, open to the public, and held both in person and online. If you would like to attend, please register using one of the links above.

• Organiser: SOAS Japan Research Centre
• Contact email: centres@soas.ac.uk