Interview with Keller Kimbrough

Asian Ethnology Podcast

Interviewer: Ben Dorman, co-editor Asian Ethnology

Recorded 29 June 2017, Nagoya, Japan

This episode's guest is Keller Kimbrough, professor of Japanese at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Keller Kimbrough’s research interests include the literature and art of late-Heian, medieval, and early Edo-period Japan. He discusses, amongst other publications, his work in Asian Folklore Studies and Asian Ethnology.

Episode Summary

• Intro 0:47
• Reasons for studying Japanese literature 2:55
• Discussion on “Preaching the Animal Realm in Medieval Japan” (see Publications listing below); how images of hells were used for financial gain 6:49

• Challenges in obtaining permissions to print images 9:11
• Discussion on “Bloody Hell! Reading Boys’ Books in Seventeenth-Century Japan” (see Publications listing below); “extravagant representational violence,” obsession with “media violence” going back centuries 14:46
• Personal interest in “graphic” tales with action; the pleasure of “finding stories”; interest in kabuki and setsuwa (“spoken story”: genre of folktales, myths, legends); the story of “Little Yoshitsune Slays a Thousand”; parallels in contemporary literature and media 18:38
• Discussion of Wondrous Brutal Fictions (see Publications listing below); late medieval oral tradition (sekky?) adapted to puppet theatre (bunraku); “textual archeologist” 22:35
• Current project – “samurai fiction” (k?wakamai warrior fiction); “pulp fiction” and the heroics of sacrifice 27:18
• Future work – Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds (see Publications listing below) and other projects 29:20
• Interest in textual tradition and the culture of publishing 30:18
• Outro 30:45

Publications mentioned in this episode

Preaching the Animal Realm in Medieval Japan, Asian Folklore Studies 65-2.

Bloody Hell! Reading Boys’ Books in Seventeenth-Century Japan, Asian Ethnology 74-1.

Monsters, Animals, and Other Worlds: A Collection of Short Medieval Japanese Tales, Edited by Keller Kimbrough and Haruo Shirane, Columbia University Press (February 2018)

Music used with kind permission of the performer, shamisen master Koji Yamaguchi.

Copyright 2017 by Asian Ethnology Podcast