Research Highlights

When I was in the sixth grade, my father took me to see the rerelease of a particular foreign film. I would have rather seen some other new movie, but my father insisted on watching this old musical. It was Jerome Robbins’ and Robert Wise’s famous 1961 film West Side Story. This film, which depicts the frustration and tragedy of youth, left a strong impression on me as a child. A modern take on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it tells the story of two rivaling gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, as Tony—a member of the Jets gang—and Maria, the younger sister of the Sharks leader, fall deeply in love. Just as is outlined in the Declaration of Independence, the film places emphasis on the American founding principles of liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness. However, it also depicts how the country deals with issues of race, economic disparity, immigration, and gender discrimination. This was my gateway into wanting to learn more about the USA as a country, so much that I began going to my local library to read all kinds of American literature. As a child, I had enjoyed reading Japanese translations of North American children’s literature and mystery novels like Little Women, Daddy-Long-Legs, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and The Gold-Bug, and it was around this time that I first became aware of the countries and cultures behind them, namely the United States.

I feel like the interests I developed then are the source of inspiration for my research now, which is currently divided into three main areas. The first examines the genealogy of 19th-century female American literature from the perspectives of race, gender, and religion. The topic of my doctoral dissertation was Lydia Maria Child, a 19th-century abolitionist and writer who rejected stringent Calvinism in favor of more tolerance in religion. Child and her contemporary female peers may have had different bearings, but they were all informed by, and all reflected, the zeitgeist of their time. While at first glance many of them may seem to conform to traditional gender models, as we read through and decipher the multiple layers of interpretation within their literary works, we find that the issues they faced then are still present today.

My second research topic moves beyond 19th-century female authors and looks at gender and sexuality across American literature. My undergraduate thesis dealt with 20th-century male novelist Paul Bowles in regard to the representation of homosexuality and femininity in his works, and I have also written about other 20th-century male authors such as William Faulkner and Jim Dodge. I still remember going all the way to Tangier, Morocco, to meet Bowles several years before his death.

The third topic of my research is concerned with the intersection of American literature and Japanese shojo culture. As I mentioned earlier, watching West Side Story made me realize for the first time the good, the bad, and the ugly that existed in the United States. Until then, I had only been aware of the country through its children’s literature, which I feel has had a major impact on the formation of Japanese shojo manga. I am now researching how Japanese shojo culture absorbed that Americanness and internalized it with its representation of young girls by exploring the history behind the adoption of American literature in Japan, the formation of shojo culture after the Meiji period, and the policies of democratization set forth by the United States in postwar Japan.