Beckett & Japan: A Virtual Seminar Series
Saturday 13th May & Saturday 3rd June
Please join us for the fourth and fifth sessions in this seminar series examining aspects of the reception ofSamuel Beckett’s work in Japan. This series is presented by the Samuel Beckett Working Group at IFTR andthe School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen’s University Belfast.
Booking: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/samuel-beckett-japan-seminar-series-tickets-624296015187

Seminar 4
Saturday 13th May 2023, 10.00-11.30am (Dublin/London time) / 6.00-7.30pm (Tokyo time)(via MS Teams)

Euske Oiwa,‘Facing the Time: Beckett’s Theatricality and Installation Art’
This presentation explores the structures of Beckett's work through my own artistic practice. As anartist and researcher, I have focused on and analysed the interplay between the specific designof installation artworks and the audience's theatrical experience. Art theorist Michael Fried
developed the critical concept of ‘theatricality’ influenced by Stanley Cavell's essay on Endgame, which
delves into the experience of existence in a theater. Some of my works evoke the respective themes
through various theatrical media: subjectivity in the pandemic lockdown with a comedy (Vacances,2020), the eerie temporality of vaccination with a science-fiction-style dialogue (Chill, 2021), ourparanoiac interest in the external world with a play (P in case, 2022), and the convergence of possibility
and fate with a game (Card Game, 2022). Fried characterizes the theatrical object as ‘disquieting,’ likea silent, masked human, but in our current situation, individuals are left to make the decision to wear aliteral ‘mask’. Beckett's abstractness provides valuable insights into our experience of ‘otherness,’which includes others, distant futures, ghosts, language, and the world. Therefore, the subject of myartistic research is what sort of sensibility is essential to installation art as a form that emerged in the1960s and continues into the present.

Kumiko Kiuchi (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan),‘Thirty Years: Reception of Samuel Beckett’s prose work in Japan from the 1990s’This paper is part of the publication project of the Samuel Beckett Research Circle of Japan tocommemorate its thirtieth anniversary this year. The purpose is to illustrate the Japanese reception ofBeckett’s prose in the Japanese literary world during the past thirty years from the 1990s onwards.
Within this timeframe, the paper begins by focusing on the body of writing by the Japanesenovelist Kazushi Hosaka (1956-). He has been one of the few contemporary novelists who openly andrepeatedly declares Beckett’s influence on his work, reflecting in depth on the concept of the novel inthe loop of Beckett, Kafka, and the Japanese novelist Nobuo Kojima (1915-2006). Kojima, known for
his essayistic writing style that blurs the boundary between reality and fiction in a subtle yetmesmerizing manner, also acknowledges Beckett’s influence in his prose writing and interviews.
This presentation first studies how Hosaka discusses Beckett along with Kojima, and viceversa. Despite differences in methods and styles, Hosaka praises both Beckett and Kojima for offering

the reader an affective experience. The idea of ‘affective reading’ is posed as a challenge against theanalytical method of reading that urges the reader to treat a literary text mainly as a body of data thatcan be divided into units of meaning for a plausible interpretation. Instead, he underlines the fact thatreading a novel is first and foremost an experience of the indivisibility, between content and form,
image, sound, and movement/rhythm. However, any critical writing is analytical in nature. Then, howdoes Hosaka write about Beckett, Kojima or others while maintaining the “integrity” of their work? By
analysing Hosaka’s writing on Beckett’s Molloy, this paper analyzes how Hosaka inserts the reader’sphysicality as an index of the present in his analytical writing.
This presentation also seeks to contextualise Hosaka’s writing strategy as a response to thedominant discourse in the Japanese academia and literary world when he began his career as a writer inthe early 1990s. The presentation also hopes to introduce some young contemporary writers in whose
writing Hosaka acknowledges ‘Beckett’, not the ‘Beckettian’.

Seminar 5
Saturday 3rd June, 2023
10.00-11.30am (Dublin/London time) / 6.00-7.30pm (Tokyo time)(via MS Teams)

Sennojo Shigeyama‘Revitalizing Beckett in the New Era of Japan’,In conversation with Yoshiko Takebe
In this talk, Sennojo Shigeyama will discuss his experience of acting Vladimir in Waiting for Godotat Kanagawa Arts Theatre (Yokohama city) in 2019. The strategy of featuring a young yet traditional
Kyogen actor in a contemporary setting raised the question of what it means to ‘wait’ for the audiences,
who were in fact experiencing the transition period from the former Heisei to the new Reiwa era backin 2019. Just as Beckett was writing and directing bilingually, this talk also focuses on the effect of
being a bilingual performer and director through the innovative lens of Sennojo Shigeyama.

Speaker Biographies
Kiuchi, Kumiko is Associate Professor at the Institute for Liberal Arts, Tokyo Institute ofTechnology. She was a member of the rita (altruism) project of the Future Humanity Research Centre(2021-2023), writing a number of essays on the topic. She has published articles and book chapters on
Samuel Beckett and the representation of urban space both in English and Japanese. Her recent
publications include ‘Reading Prometheus’s fire after P in case’ (in Euske Oiwa, P in case, Towada
Art Center, 2023), ‘Why is “Listener” Named “Souvenant”’ (in Beckett’s Voices/Voicing Beckett, Brill,2021), ‘Tweaking Misogyny or Misogyny Twisted’ (in Beckett and Politics, Palgrave, 2020), ‘Tokyo
Ecology’ (in Botanical City, Jovis, 2020). She is one of the translators of the new Japanese translationof Beckett’s complete dramatic works and publishes her creative writing and photographs in theliterary journal SNOW. She is currently the chairperson of the Samuel Beckett Research Circle inJapan (2023-2025) and is a leading editor of Beckett’s Words/Paroles de Beckett (Beckett no kotoba),
the volume to be published in autumn/winter 2023 to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the Circle.
Oiwa, Euske was born in 1993 in Saitama Prefecture and is artist who reinterprets installation art byconsidering the various phases of space beyond its physical shape. He sees space as an interweaving ofmultiple aspects: game-like possibilities, interpersonal intimacy, our collective movement through time,
the relationship between engagements and desires, the efficacy of language and words, and thejuxtaposition of history with fiction. Through his writings and creative practice, he explores the ideathat we don’t have to be ‘contemporary’ with other people and objects and that this may at times extend
to the artist and the audience. He finds this motif reflected, for instance, in the way different spaces
have transformed in recent years due to the pandemic.
Oiwa is currently enrolled in the doctoral program at the Graduate School of Film and New
Media at the Tokyo University of the Arts and is a lecturer in the Art and Design Course in theDepartment of Information Design at Tama Art University. His recent installation works include a card
game entitled Executioners Accompanists (2022), and margin reception (2021), which featured anorange-flavored drink whose juice content ratio was that of the artist-gallery profit margin, andVacances (2020), where manzai stand-up comedians are tormented by noise.

Shigeyama, Sennojo (Doji Shigeyama) (born: 1983) is recognized today as one of the new emerging
talents in the world of Okura School Kyogen. Influenced by his pioneering grandfather Sennojo (died:2010), who broke the taboo of the world of Noh-Kyogen by engaging in a rich variety of activities
outside his Kyogen profession, and by his father Akira, who followed that vision by attempting toachieve fusions of traditional Japanese performance arts and Western contemporary theater with hisNOHO Gekidan theater company and other international activities such as directing opera and staging
Kyogen performances in English, Doji Shigeyama is opening up new horizons as a performer. His
activities as an artist have ranged from writing and directing stand-up comedy for his
Hyakumanben performances, writing a new Kyogen work for his Marikouji performances with the aimof creating new classics that will still be performed a hundred years from now, directing opera andbilingual Kyogen.
Takebe, Yoshiko is Professor in the Translation and Interpreting Course at the Department ofPractical English, Shujitsu University in Japan. Her research focuses on the correlation between
nonverbal and verbal forms of expressions with respect to drama and theatre. She studied Drama andTheatre in Research at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has worked as a Japanese-English
interpreter and translator in Tokyo. Her recent articles on Beckett are ‘Translating Beckett’s Voices inDifferent Cultures’ in Beckett’s Voices / Voicing Beckett (Eds. Laurens De Vos, Mariko Hori Tanaka,and Nicholas E. Johnson. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2021) and ‘Translating Silence: Correlations between
Beckett, Chekhov, and Hirata’ in Influencing Beckett / Beckett Influencing (Eds. Anita Rakoczy,
Mariko Hori Tanaka, Nicholas E. Johnson. Budapest/Paris: L’Harmattan Publishing, 2020).

Series Organisers
Mariko Hori Tanaka (Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo), Michiko Tsushima (University of Tsukuba),
Kumiko Kiuchi (Tokyo Institute of Technology), Yoshiko Takebe (Shujitsu University), and Trish McTighe(Queen’s University Belfast). For queries relating to the event and booking please contact
t.mctighe@qub.ac.uk.