COVID broke out; the conference was cancelled, and the six of us and the two organizers decided to put together a book of memoirs instead. Other American pioneers of Japanese studies joined, swelling the group to 31. The model essay provided by the editor followed the archetypal pattern of an oral history, in which the speaker, coming from an adverse environment, overcomes the hurdles of prejudices to reach freedom and success. I resisted the chronological format and chose to arrange my essay thematically. Rather than following a rags-to-riches formula, I described my life from an affluent childhood to the low-income livelihood of an academic.

My Shandean tendencies toward digressive storytelling tripled the expected length for my manuscript. I voluntarily cut some parts, and the editor eliminated many others. My relations with colleagues and experiences at IU and other institutions are missing, excepting anecdotes about my female students (those about my male students were condensed by the editor into one single endnote). About my collaborative work, only its administrative surface is presented. Nothing is said about my global collaborators or my assistants at my homebase. By way of speaking of my IU experience, please allow me to go down my memory lane without much regard to chronology.

While still at the University of Washington, Seattle, I gladly accepted IU’s offer of a lectureship on the basis of a single finished chapter of my dissertation. There were  three reasons for my choice: Henry H.H. Remak’s lecture on CMLT’s multidisciplinary research and teaching, delivered at the University of Washington, where I was a student of Comparative Literature; Irving Yucheng Lo’s Du Fu (Tu Fu) translations in Sunflower Splendor: an Anthology of Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, coedited by him and Wu-chi Liu (1990); and the administrative brilliance and warm personality of Breon Mitchell, CMLT’s chair, who had organized my campus visit and generously allowed me plenty of time to meet with separate groups of graduate and undergraduate students. Their comments on their studies reenforced my previous impression that IU was the best and liveliest program in our discipline in the country. The only negative aspect seemed to be the low AI salaries in both CMLT and EALC. Totally ignorant of differences in living costs between Seattle, WA, and Bloomington, IN, I took it upon myself to improve the financial lives of graduate students.

As soon as I joined IU, I began to seek grants for large-scale projects so that some graduate students could benefit. During the 30 years I was at IU, I won NEH grants so many times that the agency’s office of Research Division installed a “Wall of Fame,” featuring me as the biggest winner of NEH research grants. Funding from public and private agencies for organizing conferences, inviting speakers, creating new courses, and editing collaborative publications, etc. did benefit some graduate students while also training me in the art of fund-seeking. Grant-writing and project-directing filled up much of my life at IU.

I was lucky to have the help of talented teaching and research assistants, many of whom were CMLT students. While directing the world literature course, Xiaomei Chen, one such student, alarmed me by lecturing to the students in her section without leaving room for discussions or questions. It was evident that she was working hard to help the students in her section do well on tests. I shocked her by saying that people learn only what they can think themselves and that a class is for the students and the teacher to think together and learn from each other. After watching my dialogic teaching, Xiaomei changed her approach overnight, impressing me with her brilliant adaptability. Xiaomei, now UC Davis’ Distinguished Professor Emerita, was the Wertheim Distinguished Speaker at IU in January 2024.

As for research assistants, please refer to Zach Scalzo’s 6-column essay in Volume 23, Summer 2017 issue of Encompass, in which he described the behind-the-scenes operations of my project--the type of tasks the assistants performed, and the work and characteristics of individual assistants--far better than I could have done. On Jacob Emery’s recommendation of Zach as an enthusiastic easily interested thinker and an elegant writer, I hired him as a temporary substitute for the chief assistant who had needed time away. Zach proved Jacob’s words to the letter, and he soon became one of my chief assistants. He also acted as my project’s spokesperson: in addition to writing for Encompass and other newsletters, he organized and chaired a lunchtime book-forum on the Tokyo volume of the Anthology sponsored and hosted by the East Asian Studies Center, and later edited the entire script to make it widely available on internet. His play, “Homecoming,” later renamed “Us,” sounded like a combination of Ionesco and Pinter but distinct in highlighting gender. A reading of the play was once organized by his fellow students. He is someone who lives with high taste: his daily home-made bento was neatly arranged in a Japanese lacquer box, accompanied by lacquer chopsticks housed in a hand-made silk case. Before finishing his Ph.D., he moved to complete an MFA in playwriting at the University of Calgary. Both as playwright and stage director, he has been admirably productive. Currently, he is a permanent Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma.

Going back to the beginning, Cimberli Kearns was among my early research assistants who, along with Hiromi Oda (in Linguistics and Computer Science), worked with me for 5 years or more while I directed the “Sexuality and Edo Culture” project and taught a seminar, “Sexuality and the Arts,” for CMLT. Being the first such daring course, the seminar attracted national attention. I recall Breon advising me not to distribute my course syllabi and bibliography too liberally as they were part of our department’s assets, which gave me a sense of pride. Cim (pronounced “kim”) gave me imaginative ideas for my proposal, plans, and writings on the theme. Having taken Japanese language courses, Cim received the first prize in the Japanese government’s essay contest and was sent to Tokyo for a week to meet “anyone” she wished to meet. She, enthused about Rampo (1994), an avant-garde film that merged the life and fiction of the early 20^th century mystery writer Edogawa Rampo, chose to visit the house where Rampo had lived among his collection of weird books and objects and to meet Kenji Watanabe of Rikkyo University, who had represented his university in purchasing Rampo’s house. She wrote her dissertation on American horror films and moved along with her husband, Chris Kerns, also a Ph. D from CMLT, to the University of Minnesota, and, according to Google, to Montana State University. I last saw Cim shortly after they moved to Minneapolis when she accompanied Chris to Bloomington for a Big Ten Deans’ Conference. She earned a graduate degree in academic administration, and, I believe, has pursued a career as an education advisor.   

A relaxed free spirit was Kristin Reed, who loved gardening and craftwork, which gave her homey atmosphere about her, inviting me to grow close to her. At lunch time, we took long walks downtown to look at the flowers she had planted outside the Monroe County Library or at her craftwork displayed in a shop window. While still a graduate student, she organized a panel on translating modernist poetry for the national conference of American Association of Literary Translators held on IU’s campus. She taught at prisons and enjoyed “the most attentive group of students anywhere,” as she put it. She didn’t tell me about the dissertation she was writing but I knew David Hertz was her advisor. I occasionally reported to her on being taken to concerts by David and Rachel and on David’s piano performances at their home. After her Ph.D., she applied only to the Virginia Commonwealth University. I now realize that she, being a political activist, targeted a university known for its liberalism. I occasionally look her up online and find her leading protest movements and heading a campus workers’ union in Virginia. When I gave a virtual lecture a few years ago at UC Berkeley, I was thrilled to see Kristin’s name in the first comment.

The sound of Morgane Flahault’s name always stays in my mind. The silent 5 letters in her last name show off its French origin and somehow let me imagine a noble origin. She was the first queer theorist I had encountered, and I learned the basics from her conversations as well as from her lifestyle. She loved plants to such an extent that she worked for IU’s gardens. She also performed . . . belly dancing in downtown Bloomington. When I looked for some four-letter words for Dylan McGee’s witty translation of a political satire, entitled, “Oppekepe,” she effortlessly supplied dozens of them. Unfortunately, my co-editor Charles Inouye, not favoring dirty words to express anger for more polite Japanese, eliminated most of them. The expression, “Maison de chat,” for a house of ill-repute, was her idea. To be close to her mother, she returned to Toulouse in southern France where she teaches English. When I organized a neighborhood haiku competition, with poet-translator John Solt as the judge, she submitted:   

Candlelit backyard:

Skinny, witchy, black kittye

Sashays in Me-Ow!

She wanted me to imagine the kitten gliding like a drag queen. I like the verb that recalled the word “chat.”

Sometime before Morgane, Cliff Flanigan and I were proud to receive, as a new graduate student, Julia Whyde, who planned to pursue medieval studies as well as East-West comparative literature. She became one of my project’s assistants while also managing conferences for the Medieval Studies Institute. At my office, she proved to be an extraordinary editor; she improved the writing level of many of the manuscripts, including mine. The ideas in her MA thesis on reading the body in art and religion were intriguingly new to me. I remember a comparative arts discussion we had looking at the Renaissance painting of the “Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian” and a nude photograph by Eikoh Hosoe of the novelist/ playwright Yukio Mishima posing as Saint Sebastian, or rather, reenacting the painting to show off his trained muscles. Julia continued to edit for the project for years after she moved to Wyoming to teach at Caspar College, serving as the director of its Writing Center. Being a bookworm, she has sent me reports on discovering extraordinary materials in Wyoming. She, her husband and their daughter visited me in Bloomington. I am hoping they come to see me in Berkeley as well. A year or so ago, she was appointed Dean of Arts and Sciences at Caspar College.

Sally Morrel-Yntema, a Ph.D. student in CMLT and Near Eastern Studies, was a fine copy-editor and an imaginative organizer. She created a chronological list of events during the Meiji period for our bulletin board while also putting in order the paratextual additions to the Tokyo volume of my Anthology. When I developed severe food allergies, I could no longer invite assistants to lunch downtown and asked them to bring their lunches or go out to the Memorial Union. Sally’s fiancé, a lawyer, would bring her lunch, and the three of us had fun chatting--chiefly about opera. After they were married and settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Paul Losensky, her dissertation advisor, and I tried in vain to get her to complete her dissertation. She was busy helping her husband’s political campaign. The last we heard was that she was happily settled in Saipan, where her spouse worked at the office of Attorney General, and spends her time enjoying the island’s nature and culture.

Along with Zach Scalzo, Ali Frauman worked as the other chief NEH assistant for about 5 years. Ali’s languages included middle English, German, Norwegian, and Old Norse. They loved teaching English composition. popular culture and medieval studies. Their background and abilities were such that while Rosemarie McGerr was on leave due to injuries from an accident, she entrusted her courses to Ali. Through their library job, Ali had also been well trained on digitizing printed materials, so they were able to digitize a large number of texts and illustrations for the Anthology. Both of us suffered from severe allergies so we tended to occupy our lunch break chatting about our problems with pets and certain foods. The chapter I read in their dissertation on the use of mythology in modern media was expertly written but their perfectionism kept them touching up their  dissertation long after their defense. I finally asked them to focus entirely on the dissertation and to come back when they became a Ph.D. They never did. Their LinkedIn says they are participating in Teach for America in Tulsa, OK.  

In terms of the breadth of academic training and professional experience, Alan Reiser, the bibliographer for our project, was extraordinary. He had studied Greek, Latin, Japanese, and comparative literature before he went to Japan as a missionary, after which he became the CEO of a software company in Tokyo and Osaka. He came to IU to major in comparative literature as well as Japanese language pedagogy. With his business career behind him, he was no longer a young entry-level graduate student. I resolved to help him earn his Ph.D. quickly. While working with us, he also taught Greek and Latin in the Department of Classical Studies, and later, taught English at the Université de Paris Nanterre. Since he expressed interest in Inoue Hisashi, Japan’s popular comic and satirical writer, I gave him my collection of the entirety of Inoue’s books. He was drawn, instead, to Yoko Ogawa’s mysterious fiction about passivity, loss and disappearance. I think he translated some of her stories. Alan, infinitely sensitive about Ali’s and my allergies, not only kept his dog away but also thoroughly cleaned himself before coming to our office. Still, Ali had an attack of hives every time she sat with him in the same room. His Japanese was already better than a run-of-the-mill native speaker, but he won a one-year fellowship from Nippon Foundation to study at the Interuniversity Center, Yokohama. Before his departure, he made three separate visits (with Japanese style courtesy) to ask me for a dedication and signature for his past teacher and friends in the copies he had purchased of the Tokyo volume of the Anthology, inadvertently leaving Ali complaining about their discomfort each time. When he appeared for the last time to say goodbye, I had to shoo him away-- annoyed by Ali’s repeated objection to his polite presence at the door of our office. In the aforementioned haiku contest, Alan, with several poems in Japanese, won the judge’s Best Poet prize. So many years later, he seems to remain a Ph.D. candidate while being active in teaching and learning. It took me long to realize that he is there simply to enjoy life as a graduate student rather than throwing himself into the world of annual reports, tenure review, and campus politics. I have stopped rushing him to finish his dissertation and get started on a university faculty.    

Meaghan Murphy is the longest runner among all the research assistants I have known. After I lost the balance on my NEH grant to the College (the assistants being immediately fired as a result), I continued to work on the extended part of my Anthology project by paying my assistants (Ali, Meaghan, and a few others) out of my own pocket. Meaghan and Takatomo Inoue (History and Philosophy of Science) continued to work for a few years during which time I planned a conference resulting from the Anthology, cochaired by Charles Inouye of Tufts University. Even after I moved to California, Meaghan has remained my copyeditor and Muse in my writings of all sorts. She was my comrade in the battle with the manuscript-length problem for the Trailblazers book. She visited me and my family to explore Berkeley but COVID had shut down the UC Berkeley campus as well as museums and theaters in the vicinity. We hope she visits again before long. There is something mysterious about her quiet but keen curiosity about unknown places. She went to Hangzhou to teach English, wishing to learn a “live” language instead of Greek and Latin, her primary specialties, she explained. Hangzhou is an ancient city, governed once by Bai Juyi, the T’ang dynasty poet most popular in ancient Japan. The city was also known for West Lake, the landscape of which was repeatedly represented in paintings and poetry throughout history. From that base, she has travelled to Yunnan, a region that borders with Sichuan within China but also Tibet, Vietnam, and Laos. She seems to favor border regions as well as expansive landscapes. I have received photos taken by her of breathtaking landscapes featuring rivers and lakes. She seems to travel alone like those ancient Buddhist monks in China and Japan. Currently she is completing her dissertation with Akin Adesokan on conspiracy theory in ancient mythology and contemporary media.

As for myself, I retired from teaching in 2007 in order to focus on the project of compiling a three-volume anthology in English of early modern Japanese urban literature (from the 17^th century to the early 20^th century), which involved many of my research assistants mentioned above. I moved away from Bloomington in 2020 upon the publication of the last volume of this Anthology although plans for the resulting conference and book were incomplete. Four years later, I am still trying to settle into a tiny apartment in a retirement “Village” in California. After disposing of my collection of books and furniture, I sit in the middle of seven bookcases, three filing cabinets, and two desks. I keep myself busy organizing lecture events surrounding famous friends who happen to visit me from afar, suggesting operas and films for showing within the Village, passing on recommended articles from the New Yorker and the New York Times, and generally telling people what to do.