Nonfiction
Essays, Literary Journalism, Narrative Nonfiction, True Tales
The Dialectics of March 11: A Decade After the Japan Tsunami
"The dialectic of a disaster involves loss, death, and coming apart, but also its negation: flourishing, healthy, productive communities." Japan’s remote northeast struggles recover a decade after the tsunami hit.
The Hills Above, the Sea Below
This nonfiction narrative follows coffee shop own Jun Akazaki as he and his mother try to get to safety in the minutes and hours after the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami. As they watch the waves batter Otsuchi, their hometown, they begin to realize how thoroughly their lives have changed. This essay appeared in the Fall 2017 issues of The Iowa Review
"The Rancher Who Refused to Leave: A Fukushima Story"
This essay about Masami Yoshizawa, a cattle rancher whose land is located near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power in Namie Town, first appeared on Catapult in June 2017.
"The Sad March of the Japanese Left"
This piece of reportage centers around an anti-nuclear protest in Ishinomaki City in Miyagi Prefecture, which took place in the summer of 2015. The piece first appeared on the Los Angeles Review of Books' website in May 2017.
"A Colossal Swell"
This essay focuses on Keitaro Matsumoto, a hair stylist in Kamaishi City, who was stranded on the room of his building when a 9.0 magnitude earthquake struck Northeast Japan on March 11, 2011. It appeared in the Fall 2014-15 issue of Ninth Letter.
Fiction
Short Stories, Flash Fiction, Outright Lies
"Hay In Summer"
This short story concerns three cousins' trip to eastern Washington State, where they go looking to buy hay only to find something much darker. It first appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Witness.
"Harvest"
This short story, about the domestic power struggles within a family of garlic farmers in Aomori, Japan, first appeared in the Fall/Winter 2014 issue of Colorado Review and is available through Project Muse.
"A Foreign Language"
This piece of flash fiction centers on a boy whose terminally ill father has an unexpected visitor at the hospital one evening. It first appeared on the online literary site Switchback in April 2012.
Reviews and Scholarly Articles
Other People's Children
My review of Kawakami Hiromi's Record of a Night Too Brief, also includes my thoughts on the use of folklore in contemporary Japanese literature and a few notes on the current state of fiction in Japan. This review appeared online at the Los Angeles Review of Books on July 19, 2017.
My review of Kawakami Hiromi's The Nakano Thrift Shop, which also discuses the phenomenon of hikikomori and the enclaves of bubble-era retail shops that remain scattered throughout the country. This review appeared online at the Los Angeles Review of Books on November 27, 2017
My review article on Fredric Jameson's The Ancient and the Postmoderns appeared in the December 2017 issue of Poetics Today.
Pearl S. Buck, Pavilion of Women, and Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Feminism
This article looks at the competing conceptions of gender in Pearl S. Buck’s Pavilion of Women. Using the work of prominent gender scholars as a lens to examine the text, I argue that the novel is a rich portrait of female subjectivity in early twentieth-century China, which should be given more attention. The article appeared in the March 2019 volume of the Journal of the Jissen English Department.
Accumulating and Realizing the Radical Potential of Catastrophe in Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
This article looks at how Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest anticipates what John Bellamy Foster calls the accumulation of catastrophe in the current stage of capitalism. The narrative demonstrates the inherent contradictions of global neoliberal capitalism and speculates about what will happen when these tendencies overwhelm all technocratic countermeasures. In my reading, the novel also demonstrates how imagining the collapse of the current system allows us to glimpse its exterior. After the text’s dystopian elements have reached their peak, the novel concludes with a multi-pronged ending that suggests several possibilities for the imaginary reconstitution of society or utopia. Crucially, all of these hopeful futures emerge from what I call the radical potential of catastrophe. It is my contention that Yamashita’s novel demonstrates how humanity’s despair is also likely to contain our best hope of reconfiguring society, our personal relations, and our orientation to the natural world.