About

Tomi Suzuki is a Professor of Japanese Literature and the Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University. She joined the department in 1996 and has an extensive academic background, including a BA and MA from the University of Tokyo and a PhD from Yale University. Her research interests encompass Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism in a Comparative Context, Literary and Cultural Theory, Narrative, Genre, and Gender Theory, Modernism and Modernity, the Intellectual History of Modern Japan, and the History of Reading. Professor Suzuki is engaged in completing a book titled Gender, Literary Culture, and Nation in Japan: 1880s-1950s, which investigates the formation of the literary field from the late nineteenth century to the postwar period, focusing on gender construction, language reform, and education. Her work explores the modernist construction and questioning of Japanese linguistic and cultural traditions within a transnational context. She has also contributed to the field as a co-editor of The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature and has published extensively in both English and Japanese. Her scholarly contributions include analyses of modern Japanese literature, censorship, media, and literary culture, as well as explorations of national identity and modernity in Japan.

Research topics

• History
• Literature
• Art
• Sociology
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Kawabata's views of language and the postwar construction of a literary genealogy

  Japan Forum · 2018-01-02

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  This paper shows the ways in which, in the immediate post-war period (1945–1951), Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) reflected on his earlier, pre-war literary career and re-envisioned his postwar literary trajectory by constructing a new genealogy of the modern novel in Japan, in relationship to the intricate issues of the literary styles of the modern novel, ‘national language’ (kokugo), and the literary tradition. By examining his Shin bunshō tokuhon (New Guide to Literary Language, 1950), which presents Kawabata's past and present views of literary language, I will argue that Kawabata's changing views of language and literary style must be understood in the context of contemporary debates over national language policy and language reform movements. I will show the manner by which Kawabata formulated his views of language in dialogue with his two rival writers: Yokomitsu Riichi (1898–1947) in the prewar period and Tanizaki Junichirō (1886–1965) in the postwar period. As we shall see, the death of his close literary colleague Yokomitsu in 1947 and Tanizaki's unflagging literary exploration during and following the war prompted Kawabata to position himself in a genealogy of modern Japanese literary writers as well as in relationship to the linguistic and literary tradition of Japan.

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• <i>“Splendid Japanese Women Artists of the Edo Period”. Special Exhibition on the 120^th Anniversary of Jissen Women’s Educational Institute, at the Kōsetsu Memorial Museum, Tokyo, April 18–June 21, 2015</i>.

  Early Modern Women An Interdisciplinary Journal · 2016-03-01

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• Bibliography of English secondary sources and translations

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-12-17

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• Introduction: nation building, literary culture, and language

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2015-07-31 · 1 citations

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  Ihara Saikaku and Ejima Kiseki were active on the literary scene during the decades-long first flowering of urban townsman culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shoguns. Saikaku gradually cultivated a growing group of fellow poets and disciples who joined him in haikai composition. He edited five volumes of verses for publication, but his own verses appeared sporadically in the haikai collections of other Danrin poets. A posthumous publication in the category of books on love was titled Saikaku okimiyage, and represented the last collection of stories on what might be termed Saikaku's favorite and defining subject, sexual love. Kiseki's first foray into the genre of ukiyo-zoshi was a five-volume Hachimonjiya publication titled Keisei iro samisen. Kiseki's skillful use of sentimentality in his writings appealed to a broad readership in his day, and this quality allowed his works to exert on ongoing influence on Edo period letters.

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• Gender and formation of the modern literary field in Japan: Women and the position of the novel, 1880s-1930s

  2008-01-01

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• Gender and Formation of the Modern Literary Field in Japan: Women and the Position of the Novel, 1880s-1930s

  2008-01-01 · 1 citations

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• 3. Gender and Genre: Modern Literary Histories and Women's Diary Literature

  Stanford University Press eBooks · 2002-01-01 · 6 citations

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• Fictions of Desire: Narrative Form in the Novels of Nagai Kafū. By Stephen Snyder. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000. viii, 195 pp. $42.00 (cloth); $17.95 (paper).

  The Journal of Asian Studies · 2001-11-01

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  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

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• Gender and cultural topography: the figure of woman in Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's reflections on Japanese language

  Proceedings of the Association for Japanese Literary Studies · 2001-11-14

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  In the mid-1920s, when the modem standardized genbun itchi tai written style ( i § )(-3&1*) had permeated Japanese writing through standardized education and mass journalism, a number of Japanese literary writers started to question and problematize the genbun itchi written language, largely under the impact of European literary modernism and in the context of rapidly expanding mass industrial society.Tanizaki Jun'ichiro (~~lf'~-NB, participated in this problematization of the modern genbun itchi written language when he left his native city of Tokyo and moved to Kansai in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923.It was also the time when a widescale retrospection and reevaluation of the modernization process took place, including the reevaluation of the genbun itchi national language.1 In this paper, I would like to discuss Tanizaki's reflections in the late 1920s to the 1930s on the Japanese language both through his critical writings and narrative fiction.I will pay particular attention to the figure of the Osaka woman whose "exotic" speech provided the Tokyo-born Tanizaki with a new site of linguistic and cultural exoticism and induced him to talk about what he imagined as the unique possibilities of Japanese language and cultural tradition.I will consider the significance of gender and the cultural topographies as interrelated organizing metaphors in Tanizaki's modernist discussion of language and cultural tradition.

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• Narrating the Self: Fictions of Japanese Modernity

  Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies · 2000-12-01

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Frequent coauthors

• David B. Lurie

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2 shared

• Haruo Shirane

  2 shared

• Katsumi Tsukamoto

  The University of Tokyo

  1 shared

• Samuel Hideo Yamashita

  1 shared

• Tomoharu Hayashi

  Nitto (United States)

  1 shared

• Richard Torrance

  1 shared

• Yoichi Nagashima

  1 shared

• Lawrence E. Marceau

  1 shared