From the Mast-Head

In this issue of Leviathan, the “Extracts” section is devoted to materials from the Tenth International Melville Conference, held in Tokyo last June. The conference was the product of collaboration between the Melville Society of Japan and the Melville Society, along with Keio University’s G-SEC American Studies Project. Organized around the topic “Melville in a Global Context,” the conference welcomed participants from around the world and from the critical and creative arts.

The Japanese Organizing Committee for the 2015 conference assembled a sumptuous program consisting of thirty panels and roundtable discussions, four plenary events featuring scholars and creative writers, a visual art installation, and tours of downtown Tokyo, Kamakura, and Yokosuka. Participants came from Abu Dhabi, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Scotland, and the United States. The Melville Society deeply appreciates the efforts that made the 2015 conference possible, undertaken by the Melville Society of Japan (Arimichi Makino, President; Takayuki Tatsumi, Vice President); the Japanese Organizing Committee (chaired by Professors Makino and Tatsumi; with members Shoji Orishima, Yukiko Oshima, Maki Sadahiro, Ikuno Saiki, Taras A. Sak, Mikayo Sakuma, Michiko Shimokobe, Naochika Takao, and Tomoyuki Zettsu); and the Keio University faculty (Hisayo Ohgushi and Toshiyuki Ohwada) and graduate students (Shogo Tanokuchi and others). The Melville Society looks forward to collaborating with the Melville Society of Japan on additional future projects.

Japanese scholars and readers have had a longstanding interest in Melville’s writings and life. Over the past hundred years, there have been over a dozen full translations of Moby-Dick in Japan. This number is remarkable, considering that, as the late Prof. Toshio Yagi explained (I had the honor of meeting the renowned scholar and recent translator in Tokyo in 2005), Moby-Dick is no easy book to render into Japanese. Prof. Yagi drew my attention to the challenges of tone, rhetoric, and status in the very first line of the narrative: “Call me Ishmael.” The Melville Study Center of Japan, founded by Prof. Arimichi Makino and reorganized five years ago as the Melville Society of Japan, since 1985 has published Sky-Hawk, an annual that recently was transformed into the official journal of the Melville Society of Japan. An impressive publication, Sky-Hawk currently is edited by Yukiko Oshima, Taras A. Sak, Mikayo Sakuma, and Tomoyuki Zettsu, and began its new series in 2013. Melville scholarship in Japan has been influenced by two crucial essay anthologies: Melville and Melville Studies in Japan (ed. Kenzaburo Ohashi, 1993) and Melville and the Wall of the Modern Age (ed. Arimichi Makino, 2010). Featuring work by leading Japanese Melville scholars, both volumes include essays on the range of Melville’s writings: not only his extended and short fiction but also the range of poetry he wrote in the last decades of his life. The work of Japanese scholars also was highlighted in a 2006 special issue of Leviathan on “Melville and Japan,” edited by A. Robert Lee.

This sustained interest in Melville made Tokyo the perfect location for the Tenth International Conference. And the topic—“Melville in a Global Context”—was especially apt, given the reception of Melville’s writing around the world, his regard for the Pacific in works from Typee through the late poetry, and his persistent concern with history, politics, and art beyond the borders of the United States in South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The artist YOUCHAN (Yuko Itoh) created a splendid logo for the conference, bringing together two icons of the United States and Japan (see the illustration accompanying this column). YOUCHAN’s image offers not quite “Moby Dick vs. Godzilla” (although one savors the prospect of that Toho Company production) but a White Whale breaching, superimposed over a silhouetted Godzilla-like creature engaged in its customary pursuit of urban renewal. The whale’s white body, displaying “the visible absence of color,” illuminates “the concrete of all colors” in the giant lizard, as though visually conveying, in a tone of exuberance rather than dread, the ambiguities at the end of Moby-Dick’s famous chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” The emanations from the whale’s spout curve down and then...