Announcement. Talk by Laura Moretti, Thursday, 02 April 2026, The Power of Touch: Movable Books in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Marianne Simon-Oikawa
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to the next session of the conference series Current Research on East Asia organised by the Graduate School of East Asian Studies of Université Paris Cité, which will be held on Thursday, 02 April 2026, between 17:00 and 18:30, in room Léon Vandermeersch at Université Paris Cité (481C, 4th floor, 5 rue Thomas Mann, 75013 Paris, France). The session will be in hybrid form.
https://u-paris.fr/lcao/cycle-de-conferences-current-research-on-east-asia/
Zoom-link:
https://u-paris.zoom.us/j/82935801024?pwd=cDJubHVoWmEwb1ZmclIxVUhlZUVHQT09
Meeting ID: 829 3580 1024
Passcode: 068941
The Power of Touch: Movable Books in Nineteenth-Century Japan
Laura Moretti (University of Cambridge, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies)
Abstract: In 1809 cultural lion Santō Kyōden and prominent illustrator Utagawa Toyokuni spiced up the world of the Japanese commercial book with what would have most likely appeared as a curious gimmick: a flap. This flimsy sheet of paper pasted on the printed page acted as an invitation for the reader to become an agent of visual and narrative change. We might be tempted to discard it as a vapid variation of turning the page. Yet, the nineteenth-century Japanese print industry was enthralled by the allure of interactivity untethered by this peculiar design and experimented with a variety of movable components in both books and single-sheet prints. This talk interrogates the material qualities of this rich textual tradition to explore the meanings unleashed by their interactive nature. How was the craze for quick changes on the kabuki stage remediated in print? How could revenge be taken in one’s hand, literally? How could space be expanded in one’s hand and to what effects? What did it mean to uncover naked bodies and unfold sensuous pleasures by operating the printed surface? How can these materials be placed in the wider ecology of playthings? By exploring these questions, I hope to provoke wider reflections on the act of reading and on the power of touch in the age of the digital image, while challenging the too-oft invoked association of movable books with children’s literature.
Profile : Laura Moretti is Professor of Early Modern Japanese Literature and Culture at University of Cambridge. Her research projects are inherently interdisciplinary, placed at the intersection of literature, art history, book history, textual scholarship, and palaeography. Working with both books and visual media, including woodblock prints and board games, and combining rigorous close reading of a wide range of archival materials with bold intellectual arguments, Professor Moretti's research challenges our understanding of literature and wishes to retrieve textual traditions that have been silenced after the encounter of Japanese literature with "modernity”.
Professor Moretti's first book in English, Recasting the Past: An Early Modern Tales of Ise for Children (Brill, 2016) focusses on how a canonical text of Japanese court literature has been infused with new life in the second half of the eighteenth century when it was remediated as a piece of graphic narrative. Her second book, Pleasure in Profit. Popular Prose in Seventeenth-Century Japan (Columbia University Press, 2020), the first comprehensive study of the birth of Japanese commercial publishing, recasts books as tools for knowledge making, arguing that popular prose engaged its audience cognitively as well as aesthetically and emotionally to satisfy a burgeoning curiosity about the world.
Best wishes,
Marianne Simon-Oikawa