Teaches courses in modern Japanese literature.

Research interests include the writings of Shimao Toshio, spirituality and Japanese literature, and contemporary fiction. He is the author of Mad Wives and Island Dreams: Shimao Toshio and the Margins of Japanese Literature (1999), Spirit Matters: The Transcendent in Modern Japanese Literature (2006), and is co-editor of the anthology Oe and Beyond: Fiction in Contemporary Japan (1999).

He has also published translations of three novels, one short story collection, and one work of non-fiction by Murakami Haruki, as well as short stories of Murakami’s in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and elsewhere. His translations also include novels by Shimada Masahiko, Kuroi Senji, Yoshimura Akira, and Oe Kenzaburo.

His translation of Kuroi’s novel Life in the Cul-de-sac won the 2001 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the translation of Japanese Literature, and in the same year he won the Sasakawa Prize for his co-translation of Murakami’s Underground. In 2006 he was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for his translation of Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a book which was selected by The New York Times as one of the Ten Best Books of 2005. His most recent publication is a co-translation of Murakami’s short stories entitled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. He is presently researching the work of the novelist Miura Ayako.

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The University of Arizona, Department of East Asian Studies
E-mail: kaniaj@u.arizona.edu