IASIL Japan Newsletter2017 No. 2
The Japan Branch of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures
September 2017

1. IASIL Japan Conference 2016, Kindai University
IASIL Japan Conference 2017 will meet on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 October at Kindai University
with the theme of ‘Encounters’. The programme, the book of abstracts, the campus map, and theposter of the conference are downloadable at the IASIL Japan website <http://iasil.jp/conference.html>.
Students and guests are welcome to attend. We hope to meet you all there.
This year, we introduce online registration system. Please go to our Conference website<http://iasil.jp/conference.html> and register by 22 September 2017.
About the Guest Speakers
Margaret Kelleher is Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University CollegeDublin. She was the Chair of IASIL for seven years until 2016. Her books include The Feminization ofFamine (published by Duke UP and Cork UP, 1997) and the landmark publication The Cambridge Historyof Irish Literature (2006), co-edited with Philip Ó Leary. She was the editor (with Michael Kenneally) ofIreland and Quebec: Interdisciplinary Essays on History, Culture and Society (2016). She has recently
completed a monograph entitled Language Crossings: Myles Joyce, James Joyce and the Maamtrasna
Murders and a special issue of the journal Éire-Ireland on the topic of Ireland and theContemporary (Summer 2017). Her primary research interests include nineteenth-century literature, famine
literature, women’s writings, contemporary writing, and the historical relationship between literature in
English and Irish. She is UCD academic lead on the Ulysses Centre @ Newman House project, a literary
exhibition space (focusing on 20th and 21st century Irish writing) that is being developed by UCD and theNational Library of Ireland and which will open to the public in early 2019.

Lia Mills writes novels, short fiction, memoir and literary non-fiction. Her first novel, Another Alice(1996), was nominated for the Irish Times Irish Fiction Prize. Nothing Simple (2005) was shortlisted for
Irish Novel of the Year at the inaugural Irish Book Awards. Her memoir of an experience of oral cancer, InYour Face, was named as a favourite book of 2007 by several commentators. Her most recent novel, Fallen,
was the Dublin/Belfast Two Cities One Book festival selection for 2016. In the same year she waswriter-in-residence at Farmleigh House and Arts Council Fellow at University College Dublin and wasawarded an Honorary Doctorate in Laws from the University of Dublin, Trinity College.

12. Payment of annual membership fees
If you have not already paid your membership fees for 2017, please do so by the end of September, as
the journals will be distributed to paid-up members at the conference. This of course applies tonon-paid fees for past years as well.
Membership with JIS
Membership with JIS & IUR¥7,000¥10,000

Couple membership with JIS
Couple membership with JIS & IUR

三菱東京 UFJ 銀行（銀行番号：0005）
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普通 0648854 IASIL JAPAN 会計 桃尾美佳

¥10,000¥13,000

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If you live abroad, please transfer your membership fee to the following account:
Bank Name Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, LTD.
SWIFT CODE: BOTKJPJT
Branch Name: Kyodo Branch (Branch No. 091)
Branch Address: 3-1-42 Miyasaka, Setagaya-ku, Tokyo 156-0051, Japan
Tel: +81 (0)3-5477-5751
Account Name: IASIL Japan Treasurer Mika Momoo
Account No: 0648854

Please add the overseas postal charge to mail you the copies of Journal of Irish Studies and Irish
University Review for which you have paid, according to the table below.
International postalrates for JIS & IUR
JISJIS & IURAsia¥ 750¥ 1,500

Oceania, North America, Central
America, Europe, Middle East
¥ 1,000¥ 2,000

South America, Africa¥ 1,300¥ 2,600

3. Report of IASIL 2017, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
On July 24-28, 2017, the annual conference of the IASIL was hosted by Nanyang TechnologicalUniversity, Singapore. The conference was held on the theme of ‘Ireland’s Writers in the 21st Century’.
The first Keynote Address by Professor Margaret Kelleher introduced us to ongoing projects that makehistorical and literary resources accessible as digital texts or database, including ‘Inspiring Ireland’ of
the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI). Both the two other keynote speakers talked about
contemporary Irish novelists: Professor Derek Attridge explored the work of three novelists who have
won the Goldsmiths Prize, Kevin Barry, Mike McCormack, and Eimear McBride, revealing for us
their innovative forms and literary techniques; Professor Gerry Smyth read Anne Enright’s The
Gathering, centring on the theme of ‘betrayal’, a theme of historical as well as literary relevance toIrish culture.
The topics of the individual papers were not confined to contemporary literary works; they ranged
from the revaluation of canonical figures such as Joyce and Yeats to the cross-cultural or cross-genre
development of Irish literary works. Members of IASIL Japan who read papers were Hawk Chang,
Andrew Fitzsimons, Eishiro Ito, Wei H. Kao, Youngmin Kim, Haruko Takakuwa, Fuyuji Tanigawa,Chinatsu Toma, Naoko Toraiwa, Kumiko Yamada, Shotaro Yamauchi, and myself. As far as I
witnessed and experienced myself, the speakers gained useful feedback from audience and their papers
often generated active discussions.
2The conference was also enriched by fascinating literary events; on the 24th and 27th, poets from
Ireland and Singapore collaborated in reading their own works. ‘Writers Roundtable’ was a rareopportunity for literary scholars to hear from writers themselves about their attitudes towards reviews
and criticism of their own work, and about the process of creation. The friendly atmospherethroughout the conference was especially encouraging for postgraduates; this atmosphere will surelypervade future conferences, since it was agreed that the IASIL would continue to welcome theattendance of postgraduate students, encouraging them with workshops and scholarship, as it
successfully did this year.
Nao Igarashi (PhD Student, Durham University)

4. IASIL Annual Conference, 23-27 July 2018
The IASIL conference will be hosted by Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands next yearwith the theme of ‘Reimagining Traditions’. The conference website is already up and running:
http://www.ru.nl/iasil2018/

5. Obituary: Professor Shigeo Shimizu (1943-2017)
The sad news about Professor Shigeo Shimizu’s death following a courageous battle with pancreaticcancer has come as a shock to us all. The late Professor Shimizu was a former member of IASIL Japan,
one of the founder members of the James Joyce Society of Japan and served as its president from 2002
to 2013.
Shigeo Shimizu certainly will be remembered as an excellent Joycean. He devoted his entire
academic career to the study of James Joyce and explored the oeuvre of this gigantic novelist in
English language literature of the 20th century. He was also a great scholar of the Irish language. Beinga competent speaker and reader of the modern Irish language, he showed great affection for the oldIrish language tradition, especially Brian Merriman’s Midnight Court.
We have to remember him as an eager and enthusiastic, sometimes relentless, teacher. He
organized many reading circles and encouraged younger generations of Joyceans who participated inthem. They were taught how to read Joycean texts and his work as a whole. At Waseda, Shimizu,
along with the late Seamus McElwaine, also organized extracurricular courses of Irish language,
which were open to anyone who wished to learn the language.
He had another aspect as a translator of Irish literature. The Irish writers he introduced to Japan
include such poet as Mícheál Ó Siadhail (a personal friend of Shimizu’s) and contemporary
playwrights such as Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, Thomas Kilroy, and Frank McGuinness.
After his retirement from university teaching, he told his family and close friends that he wasready to launch yet another project, to write a book on James Joyce. We now know that sadly the bookwill never be accomplished.
I wish to express my heartfelt condolences to his wife and children, and his family.
Hiroko Mikami (Waseda University)3

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