Am 19. Juni 2024 findet von 16:00 Uhr bis 18:00 Uhr der Vortrag von Professer Matias Chiappe Ippolito vom Centro de Estudios de Asia y África (CEAA), El Colegio de México mit dem Titel "Murakami Ryū’s alternative dystopian Japan during the 1990s" statt.

Title of presentation

Murakami Ryū’s alternative dystopian Japan during the 1990s

Abstract
Best known for his debut novel Kagirinaku tōmei ni chikai burū (1976, Almost Transparent Blue), Murakami Ryū is a multifaceted writer whose work is not fully known in English translation yet. The present class will address two of his novels from the 1990s: Gofungo no sekai (1994, The World Five Minutes After Now) and Hūga uirusu gofungo no sekai tū (1996, The World Five Minutes After Now II: The Hūga Virus), which are exemplary of a dystopian science fiction style that the author used during those years. The first novel presents an underground Japan inhabited by guerrillas who have not surrendered to the Allied Forces at the end of World War II; the second, set in the same universe, presents us an American journalist in the midst of a worldwide virus outbreak. Through a textual and contextual analysis of the novels, during the class we will show how Murakami used the image of an alternative dystopian Japan to disclose unresolved conflicts within Japanese society that lingered since the disintegration of the Empire of Japan in 1945. We will also make reference to other novels by the author from the same decade, such as Piasshingu (1994, Piercing), Ōdishon (1997, Audition), In za misosūpu (1997, Miso Soup), and Kyōseichū (2000, Parasites), to his film Topāzu (1991) and his documentary Ushinawareta jūnen (2000, The Lost Decade), in order to highlight how Murakami’s ideas of the alternative dystopian Japan are present in other works by him.

Bio

Matias Chiappe Ippolito (b.1984) is Full-Time Professor of Japanese literature at the Center for Asian and African Studies (CEAA) at El Colegio de México. He was also a researcher at the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences at Waseda University in Tokyo, where he completed his Ph.D. with a dissertation on the relationship between Japanese and Latin American literatures. He has taught literary translation and Japanese literature in translation at Waseda University and other universities in Japan. He holds a Master's degree in Japanese Studies from El Colegio de México and did his undergraduate studies at the University of Buenos Aires, where he holds a Bachelor's degree and is a professor of Letters. He has translated Ango Sakaguchi(Ango Sakaguchi, farsas y ensayos, Editorial Evaristo, 2023), Osamu Dazai (Flores de la bufonería, Editorial También el Caracol, 2023) and Hagiwara Sakutarō (Gato azul, Editorial Noctámbula, 2021), among others. He is also editor of the bilingual English-Japanese Tokyo Poetry Journal, published in Japan.