PMJS Publication Announcement: April 2026
Abigail MacBain
Dear colleagues,
Below please find our monthly bulletin compiling information on publications by and recommendations from PMJS members. All details below were submitted through the PMJS Publication Announcements online form.
Publication type: Article
Title: "Nation Formation in Early Japan: An Entangled History"
Author: Ethan Bushelle
Affiliation: Western Washington University, Associate Professor
Citation: Nations and Nationalism February 2026: 1–10.
Summary: The modernist argument that the nation of Japan emerged in the Meiji era (1868–1912) has achieved orthodoxy in the field of Japanese history. This article presents a challenge to this orthodoxy. My approach is two-pronged. First, adopting a descriptive definition of the nation as a politically unified ethnicity, I analyse the social and symbolic processes that contributed to the political unification of ethnically related communities under the rule of the Yamato kingdom in Japan's Kofun period (200–600). Second, redressing a lacuna in the heterodox study of nation formation, I advance a theory of the wider context for the emergence of the Yamato kingdom. Through analysis of the linguistic, archaeological and textual evidence in light of the genomic data, I show that the Yamato kingdom arose in response to movements of people and culture across Northeast Asia in the wake of Inner Asian expansion in Late Antique Eurasia.
Release Date: February 16, 2026
Website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nana.70063?af=R
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.70063
Contact: bus...@wwu.edu
Publication type: Article
Title: "Letters from Exile: Jesuit Knowledge Production on Japan in the Wake of the 'Christian Century' (1640–70)"
Author: Jaime González-Bolado
Summary: Jesuit writings have traditionally been the primary historical sources for analyzing the cultural, political, and religious dynamics of Japan during the so-called “Christian century” (1549–1639). However, the closure of the archipelago to Catholic influences has led to a scholarly oversight of the Society of Jesus’s efforts to continue gathering and documenting knowledge about Japan in their textual production. Through a detailed analysis of an extensive corpus of unpublished texts, primarily annual letters, this article addresses this historiographical gap by examining how the Jesuits collected information and constructed their reports on Japan after their expulsion. With limited access to first-hand accounts, the Jesuits relied on a network of informants spread across East Asia and employed various narrative techniques and discursive tools to ensure the credibility of their information. This study not only highlights an understudied corpus of Jesuit sources but also contributes to broader early modern European debates on knowledge production, illustrating how the Jesuits adapted their standards of veracity and source critique to navigate geopolitical constraints.
Release Date: February 2026
Website: https://brill.com/view/journals/jjs/13/1/article-p7_2.xml?ebody=Article%20details
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/22141332-12340018
Contact: jglez...@gmail.com
Publication type: Book
Title: Performing Transgression: Crowds and Bodies in Heian Japan
Author: Ashton Lazarus
Affiliation: University of Utah, Assistant Professor
Summary: "What happens when performance defies social and political boundaries? Performing Transgression offers a new cultural history of non-elite spectacle in Heian Japan (794–1185), uncovering how performances on the margins—boisterous dengaku music and dance, daring sangaku acrobatics, and the infectious lyrics of imayō songs—challenged and fascinated the aristocracy.
Ashton Lazarus reveals how these unruly arts were documented by the very elites they unsettled, appearing in historical chronicles, diaries, prose, poetry, and illustrated scrolls. More than mere precursors to later forms like noh and kyōgen, these performances formed a dynamic cultural force with real political impact. By tracing their influence through literary studies, performance studies, and historiography, Lazarus rethinks the interplay between politics, class, and culture in Heian Japan.
Performing Transgression illuminates how acts of defiance and creative expression resonate across time, offering fresh insights into the ways performance bridges the vanished past and the present."
Release Date: 3/10/2026
Website: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674303430
Contact: ashton....@utah.edu
Publication type: Book chapter
Title: "Religious Translation in the Early Modern Global World"
Author: Rebekah Clements
Affiliation: ICREA & Autonomous University of Barcelona
Summary: This chapter examines early modern Japanese translations of texts
belonging to the Buddhist and Confucian traditions. During this period, different translation strategies were applied to these kinds works in Japan, as proselytizers and commercial publishers adapted texts to meet the needs of religious and lay readers as well as male and female ones. The emergence of a commercial publishing industry and increasing literacy rates during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries changed the face of religious translation in Japan, while at the same time, in some contexts, conservatism reigned as ancient translation strategies continued to be applied—a situation that continues even into the present day.
Release Date: 2026
Publication type: Article
Title: “Music and Dance in the Medieval Cult of Prince Shōtoku”
Author: Abigail MacBain
Affiliation: University of Edinburgh, Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Premodern Japanese Studies
Summary: Prince Shōtoku veneration in medieval art, literature, and religious practice has been well-examined in English academic literature; however, the role of music and dance in his devotional cult has received little to no attention. While missing in his earliest biographies, from the tenth century onward, Prince Shōtoku was inserted into histories and narratives of specific performances transmitted from the Asian mainland, and foreign musical entertainment became the centerpiece at his annual death memorial. Through examining the narratives of three categories of music and dance in written and painted biographies, musical encyclopedias, and the performances themselves, this article demonstrates how crucial musical performance was in the worship and spread of the Prince Shōtoku cult, especially during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Moreover, these narratives relied upon his authority and legacy to localize and legitimate foreign music in Buddhist settings and authenticate instruments said to have been used or made by him.
Release Date: March 2, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/22118349-01501002
Contact: abigail...@ed.ac.uk
Publication type: Article
Title: "Medicine, Fiction, and Metaphor: The Medical Body, Health, and Disease in Late Eighteenth-Century Japanese Graphic Narratives"
Author: Angelika Koch
Affiliation: Leiden University
Summary: With a focus on Jippensha Ikku's Hara no uchi yōjō shuron(The Essentials of Healthy Living Inside the Abdomen; 1799), this article explores the role of metaphors in the portrayal of the medical body, health, and disease in late Edoperiod "yellow-cover" ( kibyōshi) fiction and popular prints and how the use of metaphor in these works fit within the broader intellectual currents of the times. The study shows how such graphic narratives built on the rich tradition of metaphorical ways of thinking about the body that had been inherent in Sino-Japanese medicine virtually since its inception. I examine how the influx of medical themes and their metaphorical heritage in late-Edo fiction took place against the backdrop of a marked increase in the circulation of medical knowledge for lay audiences in the Edo period—a process in which fiction itself played a part. In this context, I discuss two distinct yet interlinked lines of metaphorical thinking that enjoyed popularity in late-Edo fiction and popular prints, as well as in contemporary educational and health-related texts—namely, the tropes of health in relation to societal harmony on the one hand and moral education on the other.[...]
Release Date: 2026/3
Website: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/59/article/984605
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mni.2025.a984605
Contact: a.c....@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Publication type: Article
Title: "Distant Views of Waka Bay: Traditional Japanese Verse and the Question of Lyric"
Author: Ryan Hintzman
Affiliation: Indiana University Bloomington, Assistant Professor
Citation: Literary Imagination 28, no. 1 (2026), 58–83
Summary: Built around readings of poems on and about the poetic toponym Waka no ura ("Waka Bay"), this article surveys some fundamental issues of waka poetics. I consider the reception of uta in English-language literary studies and connect those histories to broader comparative conversations around "lyric poetry" and "the lyric." A handful of experimental close readings and translations provide fine-grained analyses of uta's distinctive verse techniques. I also offer a few broad propositions about how uta work and what they do.
Release Date: March 2026
Website: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986696
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lim.2026.a986696
Contact: rmhi...@iu.edu
Publication type: Book chapter
Title: "The Journey through Echigo: Reading Haibun in Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi"
Author: Robert F. Wittkamp
Affiliation: Kansai University
Citation: In: Wada Yoko 和田葉子 (ed.), Towns and Cities in the Literary Landscape (Ōsaka: Kansai Daigaku, Tōzai Gakujutsu Kenkyūsho Kenkyū Sōsho 関西大学東西学術研究所研究叢書).
Release Date: March 2026
Website: Due to access difficulties outside of Japan, the author has provided a PDF to the book chapter on their Academia.edu and ResearchGate accounts.
Contact: witt...@kansai-u.ac.jp
To recommend a title for next month’s announcement, please fill out the online form. Submissions can be submitted by authors themselves or by PMJS members who are eager to share other scholars’ recent publications.
For any questions or comments on the submission format, please contact Abigail MacBain (abigail...@ed.ac.uk). Note: Please do not email requesting a publication to be posted; only those submitted through the above form will be listed.