AJLS 33rd Annual Meeting

Media Temporalities

November 21–22, 2025, University of Chicago

The 33rd Annual meeting of the Association of Japanese Literary Studies will be convened at the University of Chicago on November 21 and 22, 2025. The theme of this conference is media temporalities in and around Japanese literature, broadly conceived. The host committee at University of Chicago, which comprises Michael Bourdaghs, Tom Lamarre, Hoyt Long, Anthony Stott, and Melissa Van Wyk, have put together the following tentative schedule.

***All panels will be held in Ida Noyes Hall, located at 1212 E 59th St.***

Most panels will be held in either the East Lounge or West Lounge on the second floor of Ida Noyes. The keynote and one additional panel on Saturday will be held in the Cloister Club on the first floor.

Three-presenter panel blocks are scheduled for 80 minutes followed by a 10-minute transition period; four-presenter panel blocks (panels 7 & 8, 12 & 13) are scheduled for 95 minutes followed by a 10-minute transition period.

Friday, November 21

1:00–1:30 PM

Registration | Outside of the Cloister Club

1:30–2:50 PM

Panel 1

East Lounge

Remediations of Premodern Genres and Their Temporalities

                Mariko Naito (Meiji University)

“Horiguchi Sutemi’s Invention of ‘Japanese-ness’: The Influence of Tanka and Folding Screen Painting on Temporality in Horiguchi’s Architecture”

Ashton Lazarus (University of Utah)

“Time, Sound, and Narrative in Tomita Isao’s The Tale of Genji Symphonic Fantasy Picture Scroll”

Hana Lethen (Columbia University)

“Visualizing Ephemerality: Noh from Stage to Picture Scroll”

Moderator: Serena Forest (University of Chicago)

Panel 2

West Lounge

Anachronisms in Crisis: Temporal Residues in Contemporary Japanese Media

Jon L. Pitt (University of California, Irvine)

“‘The Form of it Remained’: Speculative Anachronism in Torishima Dempow’s Sisyphean”

Junnan Chen (NYU Shanghai)

“Disaster Medium: Shiga Lieko’s Post-3.11 Photography and Archiving Practice”

Anthony Stott (UMass Boston)

“Spectral Formations: The Turn-of the-Millennium Critical Magazine and the Question of Anachronism”

Discussant: Patrick Noonan (Northwestern University)

3:00–3:30 PM

Coffee Break | East and West Lounges

3:30–4:50 PM

Panel 3

East Lounge

A Fine Line between Fictionality and Reality: Interpreting History in Tokugawa Literature

            William Hedberg (University of Arizona)

            “Narrating the Ming-Qing Cataclysm in Edo-Period Japan”

                          David Atherton (Harvard University)

“The Temporality of Creative Play: Ancient Japan in the Late Works of Ueda Akinari”

                          Kazuaki Yamamoto (National Institute of Japanese Literature)

                          “The Intersection of Novels and Regulation in Early Meiji Japan”

                          Discussant: Jingyi Li (Occidental College)

Panel 4

West Lounge

Temporalities of the Shōjo in Fiction and Animation

Ai Yamamoto (University of British Columbia)

“The Illusion of Freedom: Patriarchy, Militarism, and Gunkoku Shōjo”

Marina Nascimento (University of Pennsylvania)

“Marriage Refuge: Shared Temporalities of Girlhood in Imperial Japanese Literature”

Yui Yamada (University of Oregon)

“Girls’ Fiction for Inclusive Feminism: Reading Kawakami Mieko’s Wisteria and Three Women (2018) from Shōjo Studies”

Moderator: Ziyi Lin (University of Chicago)

5:00–5:30 PM

Coffee Break | East and West Lounges

5:30–6:50 PM

Panel 5

East Lounge

Documenting Histories of the Past and Present

Mariko Shigeta Schimmel (Grinnell College)

“Meanwhile, In Another Timeline: First Takes on the United Red Army Incident”

Aragorn Quinn (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)

“Situating the Shinsengumi in Space-Time: Shinsengumi keppūroku by Shiba Ryōtarō”

Patrick Chimenti (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)

“The Emperor’s New Clothes: Ethnographic Realism and the Performative Remediation of Literary Histories in Itami Jūzō’s 1970s Television Documentaries”

Moderator: Michael Bourdaghs (University of Chicago)

Panel 6

West Lounge

Embodying Time: Memory, Montage, and Disability Poetics

Amy Wei (Cornell University)

“Thyme, タイム, 時: Reading for Alternative Orthographies of “Time” in Sagawa Chikaʼs Disability Poetics”

Chelsea Morgen Ward (Colgate University)

“Multisensory Montage: Rethinking Silent-Cinema Temporality through Osaki Midori’s Eiga Mansō”

Kendall Heitzman (University of Iowa)

“Yoshimasu Gōzō and the Past in Present Tense”

Moderator: Simon Lenoe (University of Chicago)

7:00–9:00 PM

Reception & Plenary Session 1 | Cloister Club

Keynote and Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture in Japanese Studies

Norma Field (Professor Emerita, University of Chicago)

“Fukushima, Chicago: Opening up the ‘great furoshiki’ of literary studies, mobilizing all our knowledge to address the atomic age”

Saturday, November 22

9:00–9:30 AM

Coffee | East and West Lounges

9:30–11:05 AM

Panel 7

East Lounge

Synchronous Temporalities: Simultaneity, Immediacy, and Space-Time

Abby Ryder-Huth (Pennsylvania State University)

“Binoculars and the Expanded Present of Japanese Modernity”

David Gundry (University of California, Davis)

“Simultaneity and National Consciousness in Ihara Saikaku’s Seken mune san’yō”

Stephen M. Forrest (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)

“Players Progress: Traveling in Sugoroku Time through Premodern Japan”

Antonin Ferré (Princeton University)

“Retrospection and Immediacy: The Problem of Temporal Perspective in Heian-Period Autobiography”

Moderator: Melissa Van Wyk (University of Chicago)

Panel 8

West Lounge

                          Transmedial Temporalities

Andrew Campana, Cornell University

“Restart: Video Game Temporality in Feminist Japanese Poetry of the 1980s and 1990s”

Linda Galvane (University of Kansas)

“Contingent Flows of TOTO Toilet Senryū”

Livia Monnet (University of Montreal)

“A Story Stolen and Lost (in Time):” Temporalities of Animation, Performance, and Consciousness in/through Yuasa Masaaki’s Inu-Oh (2021)”

Shu Sakaguchi (Fukuoka Women’s University)

 “Rewriting Action, Reworlding Narrative: Temporal Disjunction in Post-1980 Japanese Fiction”

Moderator: Thomas Lamarre (University of Chicago)

11:15–11:30 AM

Coffee Break | East and West Lounges

11:30AM–12:50 PM

Panel 9

Cloister Club

Indigenous Futurities with/in Japanese Literary Studies

Daryl Maude (University of Colorado, Boulder)

“Yaponesia’s Discontents: Reading Shimao Miho against Shimao Toshio”

Alex Murphy (University of California, Santa Barbara)

“Records of Remittance: The Restless Afterlives of Nisei-Okinawan Song”

Wendy Wan-ting Wang (Harvard University)

“Beyond ‘Savage Borders:’ Envisioning Indigenous Futurity Through Technology in Colonial Taiwan”

Discussant: Franz Prichard (Florida State University)

Panel 10

East Lounge

Textual Mediations of Film and Performance

Will Gardner (Swarthmore College)

“Researching Scenario Research: The Aesthetics and Politics of Writing Cinema in the Late 1930’s”

Jiayu Gui (University of California, Los Angeles)

“Disguise and Amplify: The Temporality and Intertextuality in Osaki Midori’s Lesedrama “Apple Pie Afternoon”

Masaki Mori (University of Georgia)

“An Interplay between Text and Imaginary Performance in Yukiguni”

Moderator: Hoyt Long (University of Chicago)

Panel 11        

West Lounge

Retrospective Media: Mourning, Memorialization, and Nostalgia

Yingzhi Lu (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

“‘Time is Death’: Dialogic Nostalgia, Death, and Future in Ōe Kenzaburō’s Changeling (2000)”

Fawzi Rami Ghandour (Pennsylvania State University)

“Media as Memory: The Cinematic Rhetoric of Nostalgia in Contemporary Japan”

David Yang (University of California, Los Angeles)

“Natsume Sōseki’s Photographic Afterlives”

Moderator: Doug Slaymaker (University of Kentucky)

1:00–2:00 PM

Lunch | East and West Lounges

2:00–3:35 PM

Panel 12

East Lounge

Temporalities of Reproduction and Gendered Interiority

Anri Yasuda (University of Virginia)

“Countdowns: The Multiple Temporalities of Pregnancy in Tsushima Yūko’s Chōji (1978) and Yagi Emi’s Kūshin techō (2020)”

Adam Decaulp (Pennsylvania State University)

“Disrupting Family Time: Queer Temporality and the End of (Re)production in Modern Japanese Literature”

Jason Beckman (Stanford University)

“Temporalities of Watashi: Digital and Algorithmic Complications of the Contemporary I-Novel”

Noa Ortiz (Pennsylvania State University)

“Voicing Feminine Interiorities: Women Singer-songwriters and Postmodern

Subjectivities in New Music of the 1970s and 80s”

Moderator: Patrick Gwillim-Thomas (University of Chicago)

Panel 13        

West Lounge

The Aesthetics and Politics of Secular and Religious Times

Edwin Michielsen (University of Hong Kong)

“Post-Revolutionary Time and the Temporalities of the Everyday in Shimada Masahiko’s A Divertimento for Gentle Leftists”

Brian Hurley (University of Texas at Austin)

“Conservative Times in the South: Etō Jun and Zora Neale Hurston on the Politics of American Liberalism”

Joshua Rogers (Queens College, CUNY)

“Secularization as Palimpsest: Akutagawa’s Aesthetic Use of Religious Language”

Matthew Chudnow (Central Connecticut State University)

“Folding Time and Sacred Spaces with the Noh Play Kasuga Ryūjin”

Moderator: Eve Zimmerman (Wellesley College)

3:45–4:00 PM

Coffee Break | East and West Lounges

4:00–5:20 PM

Panel 14

East Lounge

The Intersection of Advertising and New Media Conditions in Japan’s 1980s

Ikuho Amano (The University of Nebraska–Lincoln)

“Disrupting the Relevance: Nakajima Ramo’s Tangential Advertising of Kanetetsu Foods Inc.”

Patrick Terry (Portland State University)

“Media-Mix Terebi: Kadokawa Pictures Television Serials and Feature Trailer CMs”

Yoshihiro Yasuhara (Carnegie Mellon University)

“The Temporality of Tanikawa Shuntarō’s Poetry and Its Interplay with the Language of Ad Copy”

Moderator: Hang Wu (University of Chicago)

Panel 15        

West Lounge

                          Repetition and Mobility Beyond the Nation

Margherita Long (University of California, Irvine)

“The Role of the Refrain in Tsushima’s Jakka Dofuni”

Shelby E. Oxenford (University of Texas at Austin)

“Because the Dead Return: Reading Repetition Across Ōe Kenzaburō and Han Kang”

Pedro Bassoe (Purdue University)

“Generations: Immigration and Magical Realism in Nakagami Kenji’s Sennen no yuraku and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Brazil-Maru”

Moderator: Brian Bergstrom

5:30–6:30 PM

Plenary Session 2 | Cloister Club

The Half-Life of Translation:

A Roundtable on Translating Post-Fukushima Literature

Brian Bergstrom

Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

Livia Monnet

Doug Slaymaker

Moderator: Margherita Long

6:30–8:00 PM

Dinner | Cloister Club

This program is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago.

ceas.uchicago.edu