The Japan Society

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ARCHIVED ONLINE LECTURE - Touching the Unreachable: Writing and Skinship in Modern Japanese Literature

Monday 20 June 2022 / 6:45pm
ONLINE LECTURE - Touching the Unreachable: Writing and Skinship in Modern Japanese Literature

Date
Monday 20 June 2022
Time
6.45pm (BST)
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Booking Details
Online Lecture
Free – Donations Welcome
Booking essential

Please note this lecture has changed to an online event so we will send the zoom links and details to attend closer to the date.

Book online here

The activities of the Japan Society are made possible thanks to the support of its members. This event is free of charge and open to all. We realise that this is a difficult time for many people. However, if you are planning to attend and do not have a membership subscription as an individual or through your employer, please consider making a donation. You can find details of membership and how to join the Japan Society community here.


What is the role of touching in modern Japanese literature? How have Japanese writers expressed the act of touching mediated through skin, objects, and memories?

In this talk, Fusako Innami will explore the work of Japanese writers—such as Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, Junnosuke Yoshiyuki and Rieko Matsuura—to analyse the desire for touch in modern Japanese fiction. Combined with feelings of concern, fear and yearning, touch emerges in these writers as a particular obsession with objects and with the possibility of connecting with the Other. At the same time, through the language they choose, they acknowledge distance in touch and the difficulty in building relationships with others.

Fusako Innami is Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University. Her research interests include life writing, performance, phenomenology and psychoanalysis, the body and the senses, operatic orientalism and translation. Her first monograph, Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan, appeared in September 2021 (University of Michigan Press), and she is currently working on her second project on phenomenal bodies in postwar Japan.

If you have any questions, please call the Japan Society office on 020 3075 1996 or email events@japansociety.org.uk.

* Images: Complicité co-production with Setagaya Public Theatre and barbicanbite09 Shun-kin, directed by Simon McBurney, inspired by A Portrait of Shunkin and In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki (First premiered in 2008 at Setagaya Public Theatre). Left © Sarah Ainslie; Right © Robbie Jack.

Booking Info

  • Please note this lecture has changed to an online event so we will send the zoom links and details to attend closer to the date.

  • You should receive an automated email from the Japan Society to let you know that your booking request has been registered. Please note that your booking is pending while we check your details and you will receive a further email once your booking is confirmed.

  • If you don't receive any confirmation emails, please check your spam folder or email events@japansociety.org.uk.