
Professor, Department Head, East Asian Studies
Ph.D., Cornell University, 1992
Office: LSB 104
(520) 621-7505
e-mail: jgabriel (at) u.arizona.edu
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