University of California, Los Angeles
10383 Bunche Hall
May 18–19, 2026
“How sad and cruel it is, the way we cling to what lasts like evening dew.” So laments Genji the futility of the human desire for permanence in Royall Tyler’s translation of Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century novel. The image of clinging to the vanishing evokes the paradoxical nature of time itself: ephemeral yet enduring, passing yet persistent, momentary yet monumental. The very survival of a work like The Tale of Genji bears testament to a series of temporal entanglements, occurring each time an iteration of the text—a critical edition, a translation, an adaptation—is produced or encountered. Indeed, the present moment is never a solitary point, but a palimpsestic fold ineluctably entwined with a multiplicity of ever-receding pasts and perpetually deferred futures. This conference offers a chance to explore temporal entanglements as a historical, representational, and conceptual phenomenon in the context of Japan.
Schedule
May 18, 2026 (Monday)
8:30 AM – 9:20 AM Registration and light breakfast
9:20 AM – 9:30 AM Opening remarks
9:30 AM – 10:30 AM Keynote speech
Dr. Atsuko Ueda, Princeton University
10:30 AM – 10:40 AM Break
10:40 AM – 12:00 PM Panel 1: Writing Alternative Temporalities
Discussant: Dr. Seiji Lippit, UCLA
Danlin Zhang, University of Chicago
Generation(s) of Inscription, Generation(s) of Empire—Reading “Anachronism” in Natsume Sōseki’s Sanshirō Through Inscription Technologies
Alice Tseng, Penn State University
(De)mobilizing National Literature: The Alternative Temporality in Kojima Nobuo’s “The American School"
Suong Thai, UCLA
As Time Errs: Refugee Temporality in Japanese-repatriate and Vietnamese-refugee Fiction
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM Lunch Break
1:00 PM – 2:20 PM Panel 2: Reenacting Spaces of Past and Present
Discussant: Dr. Satoko Shimazaki, UCLA
Julia Zhou, Yale University
Beyond Place and Time: “Sinospheric Orientalism” and the West Lake Imagination in Akutagawa, Tanizaki, and the Xihu Jiahua (西湖佳話) Tradition
Ray Matsumoto, UCLA
The Eruption of the Past: Inherited Perpetrator Guilt and the Performance of Atonement in Japanese Independent Theater
Mia Parnall, USC
The Expo Pavilion as Healing Enclosure: Regenerative Technology and Atmospheric Empathy in Naomi Kawase’s Dialogue Theater at Expo 2025 Osaka
2:20 PM – 2:30 PM Break
2:30 PM – 3:50 PM Panel 3: From Materiality to Transtemporality
Discussant: Dr. Michelle Liu Carriger, UCLA
Róisín Lacey-McCormac, University of Michigan
Beyond the Procession: Material Assemblages and the Afterlives of Ritual Time in Medieval Japan
Natalya Rodriguez, UC Santa Barbara
Embracing the Land: Interweaving Legacies of “Resistance by Remaining” in the Miyako Islands, Okinawa, Japan
Eli Troen, University of Kansas
The Japanese “Landscape” from Korea to the Space Age: Temporal Problems in the Interpretation of Tea Bowl Aesthetics
3:50 PM – 4:00 PM Break
4:00 PM – 5:20 PM Panel 4: Corporeal Poetics and Politics
Discussant: Yuki Nagamine, UCLA
Amy Wei, Cornell University
Crip Horizons in Sagawa Chika’s Disability Poetics
Tamane Takehara, UCLA
Disability as Becoming in Shinjuku, Shinjuku Becoming in Disability: Rearticulating Yokota Hiroshi in Postwar Japan’s Shifting Politics of Injury
Tabreya Ryan, Princeton University
We Need No One Else: Liminal Spaces, Corporeal Prisons, and Osmotic Masochism in Hotel Iris
5:20 PM – 5:30 PM Closing Remarks
May 19, 2026 (Tuesday)
9:30 AM – 11:30 AM Workshop (for invited participants only)
Dr. Atsuko Ueda, Princeton University