Satoko Shimazaki
Satoko Shimazaki’s areas of research include early modern Japanese theater and popular literature; the modern history of kabuki; gender representation on the kabuki stage; sound and visual media; and the interaction of performance, print, and text. Her first book, Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost (Columbia University Press, 2016), which was awarded the John Whitney Hall Book Prize and honorable mention for the Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theater History, explored kabuki as a key player in the formation of an urban identity in early modern Japan, along with the modern textualization of the art as it was pressed into service as a guarantor of national identity. She is currently working on two book projects: Kabuki Actors, Print Technology, and the Theatrical Origins of Modern Media, which explores the continuities and ruptures that link early modern books and prints as conduits of bodily knowledge, voices, and sounds to the age of mechanical recording and moveable type; and Kabuki in Print: Sukeroku in Theatrical Ephemera, a pedagogical guide to the rich world of kabuki theater ephemera, including playbills, actor critiques, illustrated digests. She will be on research leave during 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 with the support of the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment of the Humanities.
Before moving to UCLA in 2019, Satoko Shimazaki was associate professor at the University of Southern California. She has also taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and currently has a joint appointment as associate professor at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Education
Columbia University Ph.D., Japanese Theater and Literature (2009)
Tokyo University Foreign Research Scholar (2005-2007)
Waseda University, Theater Museum, COE Special Research Student (2005-2006)
Columbia University M.A. Japanese Theater and Literature (2002)
Keio University, B.A. Law/ Political Science (1999)
Publications
books
Edo Kabuki in Transition: From the Worlds of the Samurai to the Vengeful Female Ghost
(Columbia University Press, 2016).
Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan, co-edited with Keller
Kimbrough (Boulder, Colorado: University of Colorado Center for Asian Studies,
2011).
Articles and book chapters
“Bunka no shoyūsha,” in Shinchō Vol. 115 no. 6 (June, 2018): 198-199.
“Fantastic Histories: The Battles of Coxinga and the Preservation of the Ming in Japan,” in
Frontiers of Literary Studies in China Vol. 9 no. 1 (March, 2015).
“From the Beginnings of Kabuki to Nanboku and Mokuami,” in The Cambridge History of
Japanese Literature, edited by Haruo Shirane, David Lurie, and Tomi Suzuki (Cambridge
University Press, 2015).
“The End of the ‘World’: Tsuruya Nanboku IV’s Female Ghosts and Late Tokugawa Kabuki,”
Monumenta Nipponica 66, no. 2 (2011).
“Editors’ Introduction: Theater and Publishing in Early Modern Japan,” co-authored with Keller
Kimbrough, in Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan
(Boulder, Colorado: University of Colorado Center for Asian Studies, 2011)
“The Ghost of Oiwa in Actor Prints: Confronting Disfigurement,” Impressions: The
Journal of the Japanese Art Society of America 29 (2007-2008).
Encyclopedia Entries
“History of Japanese Ghosts,” Jeffrey. A. Weinstock, ed. An Encyclopedia of Literary and
Cinematic Monsters (Ashgate Publishing, 2013)
Academic Translations
“Minshūka, insatsu, tekusuto no shakaigaku,” translation into Japanese of an essay by Jamie
Newhard, in Haruo Shirane, ed., Ekkyō suru Nihonbungaku kenkyu (Tokyo: Benseisha,
2009).
Book reviews
Review of Robert Tuck’s Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in
Nineteenth-Century Japan, The Journal of Japanese Studies 45 no. 2 (Summer, 2019)
Review of Keller Kimbrough’s Wondrous Brutal Fictions: Eight Buddhist Tales from the Early
Japanese Puppet Theater, Asian Ethnology 76-1 (2017): 190-196.
Review of G.G. Rowley’s An Imperial Concubine’s Tale: Scandal, Shipwreck, and Salvation in
17th Century Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), Japanese Language and
Literature 47, no. 2 (October, 2013).
Review of Leith Morton’s The Alien Within: Representation of the Exotic in Twentieth-Century
Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), Japanese Language and
Literature 1 no. 44 (April, 2010).
Review of Michael Dylan Foster’s Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the
Culture of Yokai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), Monumenta Nipponica 64,
- 2 (Autumn 2009).
