In graduate school I studied the Buddhist traditions of China and Japan, classical Japanese literature, literary criticism of the Edo period, and modern fiction. Research for my doctoral dissertation took me to Osaka University, where I began analyzing Edo-period commentary on The Tale of Genji. I completed my doctorate in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University in 1998. Since then I have taught Japanese language, literature, and film at Amherst College, Columbia University, and Princeton University.
My first book, Appraising Genji: Literary Criticism and Cultural Anxiety in the Age of the Last Samurai, examines the reception of Genji among scholars, poets, translators, and politicians over the course of the last thousand years. I incorporate a broad range of works from various periods and genres—including scholarly commentaries, diaries, critical treatises, newspaper accounts, cinematic adaptations, and modern stage productions—to give readers a sense of how Genji's place in Japanese culture evolved over time.
In writing Appraising Genji I sought to bridge a gap between scholarship on premodern literary criticism and modern theories of fiction in Japan. Continued research and reading have led me to explore intellectual history, nativism and nationalism, theories of the novel, poetic criticism, and the worlds of print culture and commercial publishing in premodern Japan.
More recently, my interest in cultural concepts of time and sustainability has led to a new book project, The Beauty of Limits. This study begins with a puzzle: in 1862, Western scientists recognized Japan's circular agricultural systems as superior to Europe's, yet Europe abandoned these practices while Japan retained them for another century. Why? I argue that Japan maintained a unified worldview integrating material practices, aesthetic philosophy, and indigenous temporality that made constraint itself desirable, creating value commitment beyond mere utility.
The project uses this historical analysis to address contemporary issues and concerns. Dominant approaches to climate change often reproduce the very epistemology that created the problem: concentrated agency, breakthrough fantasies, and the promise of transcending limits. This produces anxiety and passivity. The Beauty of Limits redirects attention toward engagement at available scales, distributed agency, and the less glamorous but more effective daily practices that sustain communities over time. The question is not how do we become Japanese? but what conditions allow limit-wisdom to take root in any cultural context. I explore some of these ideas in a First-Year Seminar (FRS 192) at Princeton.
Teaching, in turn, lets me explore and discuss literature, drama, and film with students in ways that continually inspire and refine my academic work.
