Kyoto Lectures

Kyoto still preserves its ancient cultural tradition as one of Japan's major academic centers and a meeting place for scholars from around the world. Organized in collaboration with the École Française d’Extrême-Orient and the Institute for Research in Humanities at Kyoto University, the Kyoto Lectures offer specialists in East Asian cultures and societies the opportunity to present their ongoing research results in Kyoto.
Izumi Kyōka’s Animistic Prose

Kyoto Lectures

Izumi Kyōka’s Animistic Prose

When the Semantic Becomes Mantic

Cody Poulton

February 21st, 2024 18:00

This lecture will be held on site and via Zoom

Praised by younger writers like Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Kawabata Yasunari, and Mishima Yukio, Izumi Kyōka (1873-1939) is today one of the most challenging of modern Japanese novelists to read, much less trans-late into a foreign language. His prose style is one of enchantment: as Nakajima Atsushi put it, it has the effect of a narcotic like heroin, taking the reader into an altered state of consciousness. Using examples from his own translation of the story, in this lecture the speaker will focus on Sanjaku-kaku (“Three Feet Square,” 1898) and its sequel Kodama (“Echo”) to ex-plore how, through language, Kyōka makes the lost world of late-nineteenth century Fukagawa come alive.

Cody Poulton is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada, and currently serves as Director of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. A specialist in Japanese performance, he is author of Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyōka (2001) and A Beggar’s Art: Scripting Modernity in Japan, 1900-1930 (2010). He is also chief editor and translator of Citizens of Tokyo: Six Plays by Oriza Hirata (2018), co-editor of The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Drama (2014) and Okada Toshiki and Japanese Theatre (2021), and contributing editor to The Cambridge History of Japanese Theatre (2016).

 

This hybrid lecture will be held on site (email required in advance) and via Zoom (meeting ID: 840 2211 1804).

The meeting link will remain posted on the ISEAS website top page from February 19.