Sophia Magazine vol.7 / SUMMER 2018

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Shion KonoAssociate Professor at the Faculty of Liberal Artsinto Japan’s literary and intellectual currents, and Professor Kono’s course is one example of the many GPGS literature courses which introduce students to subjects that can be pursued in greater depth.Professor Yiu specializes in modern Japanese literature, with some of her recent courses focusing on the writings of iconic author Natsume Sōseki. “Sōseki was ahead of his time, and a lot of the questions he raised about modern society, urbanization, and individualism are still quite relevant,” says Professor Yiu. “Sōseki was writing experimental stories be-fore the term ‘modernism’ was used, and his works provide a map that allows one to explore the origins of Japanese modernism and examine what came out of this experimen-tation.” A prolific translator herself, Professor Yiu edited a collection of modernist fiction in translation titled Three-Di-mensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, which includes her own translations of stories by Sōseki and experimental writers Riichi Yokomitsu and Haruo Satō. Professor Yiu is scheduled to teach a new literature course exploring works such as Shūsaku Endō’s The Sea and Poison and Michiko Ishimure’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, which deal with environmental issues and war responsibility. “Even though these works are based on historical events, the themes these authors explore in their texts, and their poetic insight, help us reflect on contempo-rary issues. I want students to make the works discussed in my courses relevant to their own lives. Literature is not just something delicate or beautiful to look at, but something that informs us about ourselves and our environment.”International collaborative research is a central part of the GPGS. Two books in particular embody the program’s ap-proach to international collaborative literary research. The first, Reading Kokoro: An Anthology of Critical Essays from a Global Perspective1 edited by Professor Yiu, is a series of es-says by Japanese and non-Japanese scholars on Sōseki’s sem-inal work Kokoro. The book is the result of a collaborative research project between scholars of kokubungaku (national literature) and international scholars of comparative litera-ture, and grew out of a symposium held at Sophia’s Open Research Weeks, an annual, fortnight-long event featuring collaborations between departments and faculty. It is one of the few studies in which scholars from different fields cross over to explore how a particular work of Japanese literature speaks to readers around the world. To commemorate the book’s publication, Professor Yiu and Professor Kono held an event at Kinokuniya, a major Japanese bookstore chain, at which they shared the content of this collaborative re-search project with a wider audience. “With these kinds of projects, we hope to draw in a new generation of scholars with new perspectives on how to read Japanese literature,” says Professor Yiu.Left: Sekai kara yomu Soseki Kokoro (co-authored by Angela Yiu) Right: Nihon Bungaku no Honyaku to Ryutsu (co-authored by Shion Kono)A Hub for International CollaborativeLiterary Research1 Sekai kara yomu Sōseki Kokoro (Bensei shuppan, 2016)9Approach