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March 27, 2026
[MJHA] New Books on Japan: "The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga"
From: Dahlberg-Sears, Robert <dahlberg-sears.1@buckeyemail.osu.edu>
Date: 2026/02/24
Dear Colleagues,
Please join the MJHA (www.mjha.org) for the next in our New Books on Japan series with Lynne K. Miyake (Pomona College) as she discusses her recent book, "The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga" (Bloomsbury, 2024). Please see the details below. As always, registration is requested via zoom link, and we ask for your assistance in sharing widely to any interested parties.
(Americas ET) Monday, March 2, 2026 | 7:00-8:30 PM
(Japan/S. Korea) Tuesday, March 3, 2026 | 9:00-10:30 AM
(CET) Tuesday, March 3, 2026 | 1:00-2:30 AM
The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga (Bloomsbury, 2024)
Discussant: Jan Bardsley, Professor Emerita of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Modern Japan History Association invites the wider community to a conversation with Lynne K. Miyake (Pomona), who will be speaking about her new book The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga (Bloomsbury, 2024). This groundbreaking study examines the unlikely merger of two Japanese cultural phenomena, an 11th-century aristocratic text and contemporary manga comics. It explores the ways in which the manga versions of The Tale of Genji use gender, sexuality, and desire to challenge perceptions of reading and readership, morality and ethics, and what is translatable from one culture to another. Lynne K. Miyake shows that, through their girls, ladies, boy love, boys, and young men, and informational comics remediations of the tale, the manga Genjis visually, narratively, and affectively rework male and female gazes; Miyake reveals how they gently inject humor, eroticize, gender flip, queer, and simultaneously re-inscribe and challenge heteronormative gender norms. The first full-length study of Genji manga, this book analyses these adaptations within manga studies and the historical and cultural moments that fashioned and sustained them. It also interrogates the circumscribed, in-group aristocratic society and the consumer and production practices of Heian society that come full circle in the manga versions. The Tale of Genji through Contemporary Manga utilizes western queer, feminist, sexuality and gender theory and Japanese cultural practices to illuminate the ways in which the Genji tale redeploys itself. Yet it also provides much needed context and explanation regarding the charges of appropriation of prepubescent (fe)male and gay bodies and the utilization of (sexual) violence mounted against Genji manga - and manga and anime in general - once they went global. Jan Bardsley (UNC) will serve as interlocutor.
Robert M. Dahlberg-Sears
Part-time Lecturer
Faculty of Liberal Arts, Sophia University | 上智大学
7-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554
Approved by ssjmod at 12:19 PM