About the Conference

2017 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916), often proclaimed the greatest Japanese novelist of the twentieth-century. This occasion, as well as 2016’s centennial anniversary of the author’s death, has prompted a new round of re-readings and re-writings of this brilliant author and literary theorist. But what comes next? With new papers exploring Sōseki in transnational and global frameworks, as well as rethinking his relation to various questions of genre, we think about the shifting situation of Sōseki in our turbulent historical moment.