International Poe Bibliography in Japan No. 4 (April 2018-March 2021)
Fujimura, Nozomi. “The Female Body, Male Subjectivity, and Narratives of Affect: Reexamining
the Gothic and Comic Tales of Hawthorne and Poe.” Journal of the Society for General
Academic and Cultural Research (Asia University), no. 37, 2020, pp. 21-38.
This article examines representations of the female body and its connection to male subjectivity
in the Gothic and comic tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. By considering
Hawthorne’s “The Birth-mark” and “Mrs. Bullfrog” along with Poe’s “Berenice” and “TheSpectacles,” this article demonstrates that both Hawthorne and Poe explored the potential of thefemale body to undermine and destabilize male domination over women, and critiqued thegender politics of antebellum America.
Fukushima, Shoichiro. “Viewing Death: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’and the Deception of Viewing” (Japanese). Asphodel, vol. 65, 2021, pp. 40-57.
This paper examines the relationship between “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and Poe’s
criticism of myopia in his tales, and shows that “Valdemar,” which is often viewed as a hoax,
not only critically delineates fears regarding the rapid growth of science and technology, butalso criticizes the deceptive nature of sentimentalism and the American sublime in Poe’s era.
Ikesue, Yoko. Selected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Asahi Press, 2019.
This book is edited and annotated as a textbook for college education, which includes “TheBlack Cat,” “The Shadow –A Parable,” “The Mask of the Death,” “The Devil in the Belfry,” “ATale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Raven,” and “Instinct vs Reason – A black Cat.”
Itoh, Shoko. ‟A Survey on the Ecocritical Studies of Herman Melville: From Cetology to Material
Ecocriticism.” Sky-Hawk (Melville Society of Japan), vol. 7, 2019. pp. 107-117.
This historical survey examines the ecocritical studies of Melville among other American
Renaissance writers, focusing in particular on his environmental and material vision.
_____. “Milton, Coleridge, and Thoreau: From Lethean Stream to the Beach of Wreck” (Japanese).
Transatlantic Ecology: New Romantic Dialogue, edited by Saeko Yoshikawa and Masae
Kawatsu, Sairyusha, 2019, pp. 103-132.

This article discusses how Milton and Coleridge had strong influences on the writers of theAmerican Renaissance in their efforts to contribute to national American literature, especiallyin Thoreau’s representation of the transformation of the bird.
_____. Learn A to Z with Zombies (Translation), Paul Lewis and Ken Lamug. A is for Asteroid, Z isfor Zombies: A Bedtime Book about the Coming Apocalypse. (Translation) Takanashi, 2019. 42pages.
This book aims to teach children how to survive in a fearsome world of zombies. It includes a“Preface” by Paul Lewis and a postscript by the translator, Shoko Itoh. The original comic bookwas written as black humor amid an era of global threats. The author, Paul Lewis, is thechairman of the Boston Poe Statue Project near Boston Common and one of the most celebratedleaders in the study of the poet and Poe’s footprints in Boston. He is the former President of thePoe Studies Association and Professor of Boston College. This book was gifted to Shoko Itohwhen she was awarded the honor of Honorable Membership of PSA at the Kyoto PoeHawthorne Conference in 2018.
_____. “Edgar Allan Poe in Sakutaro Hagiwara: Searching for the Enigma of Ula Poems in theAuthentic Edition of The Blue Cat” (Japanese). Journal of the Poe Society of Japan (Poe Societyof Japan), vol. 12, March, 2020. 61-79.
This comparative study of Sakutaro Hagiwara and Edgar Allan Poe focuses on theirrepresentations of “The Blue Cat” and “The Black Cat.” It examines Sakutaro’s transformationof Poe’s “Ulalume: A Ballad” into his Ula Poems, a kind of dialogue between a dead cat, thepoet, and his ghostly lover, Ula.
_____. A Collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s Critical Works: “Doings of Gotham” and Others, with theessays “Reading Poe as a New York Author in the Age of the Pandemic” (Translation).
Takanashi, 2020.
This volume includes Poe’s critical works, significant and yet never translated into Japanese:“Doings of Gotham-- Letters 1 to VII” with the “Introduction” by T. O.Mabbott; “Some Secretsof the Magazine Prison-House”; “The Daguerreotype”; “An Introduction to The Conchologist
First Book ”; and rare in Japanese, “Instinct VS Reason,” and “The Sphinx.”

_____. “‘The Masque of the Red Death’ as World Literature: Poe and Kurosawa” (Japanese). Journalof the Poe Society of Japan (Poe Society of Japan), vol. 13, March 2022, pp. 1-3.
This short essay surveys the activity of the Poe Society of Japan over the past year by thePresident of the Society. More specifically, it focuses on the study of Poe and the Pandemic,
especially on the masterpiece, “The Masque of the Red Death” as World Literature, referring toAkira Kurosawa’s manuscript of the film titled “The Masque of the Red Death” publishedposthumously by Iwanami Publisher in 2002.
Morimoto, Hikari. “Lying with the Dead: Reflections on Poe’s ‘the Raven’” (Japanese). Pleasure ofText Reading: Critical Essays on American Literature, edited by Yasushi Takano and Tomoko
Takei, Syôrai-sha, 2021, pp. 63-88.
This paper focuses on the ambiguity of the meaning of the word “lie” in the final sentence ofPoe’s “The Raven.” “Lying” is a motif in Poe’s short stories and poems. The paper examines its
significance and applies it to the interpretation of “The Raven” to clarify the implication of thelast sentence.
Nishiyama, Keiko. “Dreaming of a Fall in the Age of Flight: Poe’s ‘The Unparalleled Adventure ofOne Hans Pfaall’” (Japanese). American Literature and the Sky, edited by Tsuyoshi Ishihara,Sairyusha, 2019. pp. 27-47.
In “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” we can observe not only the imaginative
character of flight in the era but also Poe’s unique imagination in which flight, which should bean upward motion, is inverted into a falling motion. While investigating Poe’s idiosyncratic
images of flying through the cosmic world, the author suggests that Poe’s poetic vision of theEarth anticipated the existential images of the space age.
_____. Edgar Allan Poe: Experience of the Limits, Encounter with the Real (Japanese). Shin-yo-sha,
2020. 328 pages.
This book takes a multifaceted approach to Poe as a writer of “boundaries,” “limits,” and“thresholds,” whose intense narratives transcend the boundaries of experience: life and death,self and other, consciousness and unconsciousness, existence and nothingness, the organic andinorganic, reason and madness, language and silence. “The Real” in the book’s subtitle refers
to Lacan’s concept of le réel, which is helpful for understanding in Poe’s works the uncannyemergence of usually hidden dimensions of the world.
_____. “‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and the World Turned Inside Out” (Japanese). Journal ofthe Poe Society of Japan (Poe Society of Japan), vol. 13, 2021, pp. 32-42.
Epidemic narratives often focus on “how to defend the perimeter,” from which two broad types
of epidemic narratives can be derived: One is the story of “containment” to prevent the spreadof the plague, and the other is the story of “seclusion” to protect oneself from the plague. Poe’s“The Masque of the Red Death” is indeed a typical story of the latter, a story of seclusion.
However, in the work’s final scene, the seclusion space is suddenly reversed into a space ofcontainment. This reversal of inside and outside is the most striking point in the story.
Nishiyama, Tomonori. “Fear from the South: Poe, Haiti, and Zombies” (Japanese). Journal of thePoe Society of Japan (Poe Society of Japan), vol. 12, 2020, pp. 45-60.
This paper examines zombies in American culture and the terror of slave revolts in Edgar Allan
Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, and Lafcadio Hearn’s works, focusing on The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym of Nantucket, At the Mountains of Madness, and Two Years in the French West Indies.
Tatsumi, Takayuki. Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe,Hawthorne and Melville. Sairyusha, 2018. 179 pages.
This book attempts to reread the American Renaissance from the viewpoint ofTransgenerational, Transdisciplinary and Transnational American Studies. The first threechapters deal with Edgar Allan Poe’s transatlantic and transpacific possibilities, with special
emphasis on “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”(1841), his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
Twice-Told Tales and its impacts upon a Japanese poet Yone Noguchi, and his influence upon
the Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo’s detective fiction. The next three chapters reinterpret thetranscultural interactions between Hawthorne’s masterpiece The Scarlet Letter (1850) andHerman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), decode the seeds of our contemporary celebrity culture
in Pierre, and attest to Melville’s literary echo in Abraham Lincoln’s political speech act. The
seventh chapter transgresses the generic boundary between Henry David Thoreau’s Nature
Writing, Paul Thomas Anderson’s avant-pop cinema and Haruki Murakami’s postmodern novel.
The concluding chapter on Emily Dickinson aims to trace the trajectory of her poetic bullet not
only in the box art of major modernist Joseph Cornell but also in the book art of postmodernists
William Gibson and Denis Ashbaugh.
_____. “In Pym’s Footsteps: Poe, Ooka, and Ballard.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 20, no. 1,

2019, pp. 110-25.
The original manuscript of this article was first delivered as a plenary speech at the International
Poe and Hawthorne Conference held at Kyoto Garden Palace on June 22 nd, 2018. Noting thatscholars of comparative literature have rarely paid attention to Poe’s influence on Shohei Ooka,
whose Fires on the Plain might be understood as a tribute to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
Pym of Nantucket (1838), the author also explores the impacts of Ooka’s Fires on the Plain(1952) on distinguished British speculative fictionist J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962)and other stories.
_____. “In Pym’s Footsteps: Poe, Ooka, and Ballard.” Journal of the Poe Society of Japan (The Pos
Society of Japan), vol. 11, 2019, pp. 3-22.
The Japanese version of the plenary speech of the International Poe and Hawthorne Conference
mentioned above.
_____. “Editing and Anthologizing Poe in Japan.” Anthologizing Poe: Editions, Translations, and(Trans)national Canons, Edited by Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato, Lehigh UP, 2020,
pp. 351-67.
Recollecting the experience of reading Takehiko Takeda’s retellings of Poe’s stories as anelementary school boy, the author starts the essay by pondering the significance of the literaryinterpreter, who, at the risk of disfiguring the original text, introduced young readers to thepleasure of literature. Thus, the author traces the history of Poe anthology from the Meiji era(1868-1912) through the Heisei era (1989-2019), ending up with his own three-volume pocket
anthology of Poe (featuring literary subgenres such as Gothic Romance, Detective Fiction andScience Fiction) published from Shinchosha between 2009 and 2015.

The Poe Society of Japan
Compiled by Yoko IKESUE, Atsushi GOTO, Greg BEVAN, and Shoko ITOH