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, Christianity 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 two works 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 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 publications include a co- translation of Murakami’s short stories entitled Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, and translations of a book of essays by Murakami and the novel Real World by Kirino Natsuo. He is presently translating a novel by Yoshida Shuichi and researching the work of the novelist Miura Ayako.
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