Thank You for Coming to Japan

Photo courtesy of Mikayo Sakuma.

The Tenth International Melville Conference, “Melville in a Global Context,” was held June 25–29, 2015, and organized by the Melville Society with the Melville Society of Japan (MSJ). The Melville Study Center of Japan (the predecessor of MSJ) had been encouraged over the years by Melville scholars—John Bryant, Carolyn L. Karcher, Wyn Kelley, A. Robert Lee, Sanford Marovitz, Samuel Otter, Elizabeth Schultz, and Robert K. Wallace, to name a few—to host an international conference in Japan. Finally it materialized in the heart of Tokyo, at Keio University where the MSJ’s vice-president Takayuki Tatsumi teaches. The MSJ was founded only four years ago, but some Japanese Melvilleans have had a history of scholarly “community,” which has been united under Arimichi Makino, our MSJ president, since 1985 when he started to publish an annual Melville journal titled Sky-Hawk.

With Mikayo Sakuma—who sent by far the largest number of e-mails among the organizing members—and Tomoyuki Zettsu, I put together the conference program. It was deeply moving to see 130 scholars, gathered from all over the world, for 30 sessions and special programs. We were honored to have renowned scholars such as Carolyn L. Karcher, a leading scholar of race and slavery in Melville’s work, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer John Matteson as moderators; though their major interest at present may have shifted from Melville, their hearts are still with us.

Let us quickly review some of the memorable scenes, starting with the keynote speeches. Natsuki Ikezawa, a Japanese cosmopolitan-writer who is deft at grasping the essence of pre- and post-modernity, connected Moby-Dick and The Crying of Lot 49 in his “Literature of the Quest: Melville and Pynchon.” Elizabeth Schultz, the mastermind of the Tokyo conference, showed one hundred images during her impressive presentation, “The Art of Moby-Dick.” Yōji Sakate, a Japanese playwright and theater director, presented “The Account of the Director of T Hospital” from his series of short plays titled Bartlebies. Sakate connected the recent phenomenon in Japan of hikikomori, or withdrawn youth, to Bartleby and to the victims of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, with a deep understanding of human suffering. Karen Tei Yamashita, a Japanese-American novelist and a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, talked about her forthcoming autobiographical novel Scintillations: Letters to Memory, a reflection on her family history in the United States. First, though, her insight into Ishmael in Moby-Dick as “Ishimaru” (or round stone in Japanese), a character in her 1990 novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, with its emphasis on survival, was witty and moving.

The upper gallery and back space of one of our presentation rooms had paper-cut artworks by Peter Martin, a New Bedford, Massachusetts, artist who was ushered into Moby-Dick by Robert Wallace. During his artist’s talk, as Martin raised the cut cover of his work Trust, he was like a magician conjuring up the essence of the work.

I have attended seven out of ten international Melville conferences (though I have wanted to attend them all), starting with the unforgettable first one in Greece. You can tell how much I love them. My indebtedness to the Melville Society began when I went to the 1996 MLA convention, held in snowy Chicago, on my sabbatical. The Melville session was held at the Newberry Library, apart from the regular venue. I was excited to see many renowned Melville scholars, whom I knew only through their writings, assembled in one place, and I was delighted to know they were—as they still are—vibrant and close with each other. At a dinner after the session, all were excited about the conference in Greece, to be held the next year. I caught their fever and found myself repeating, “I, too, will go to Greece!” At that time, how could I have dreamed of becoming an organizing member for another international conference in less than two decades?

Geography counts. I wonder how different Melville looked...