Speaker: Lynne Kutsukake
Moderator: M. Cody Poulton
Date: Wednesday, November 20/Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Time: 9:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m. JST; 7:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m. EDT
Registration in advance required: TBA 

The Art of Vanishing by Lynne Kutsukake is an intimate, explosive novel about creativity and female friendship set in 1970s Tokyo. It follows a fraught relationship between two young Japanese women who want to become artists, and explores what happens when one of them falls under the spell of a charismatic couple who claim to be “real” artists. Themes of art and authenticity, ambition and obsession, loyalty and betrayal are all set against one of the most interesting periods in Japanese cultural history.
Kutsukake will talk about the process of writing her novel, her fascination with Japan in the 1970s, and how trying to become a translator helped in her journey to becoming a fiction writer.

Lynne Kutsukake is a novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, The Translation of Love, published in 2016, won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. She has a master’s degree in Japanese literature from the University of Toronto, and she has lived, studied and worked in Japan during many different periods over several decades. She was a member of SWET in the 1980s. She has translated a collection of short stories by Mizuko Masuda, Single Sickness and Other Stories, and she had a long career as a Japanese studies librarian at the University of Toronto. The Art of Vanishing (2024, Knopf Canada) is her second novel. 
 
M. Cody Poulton is currently resident director of the Kyoto Consortium for Japanese Studies. Professor emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada, he specializes in Japanese performance. He is author of numerous studies on and translations of Japanese theatre, he has also translated kabuki and contemporary Japanese drama for such multivolume series as Kabuki Plays on Stage and Half a Century of Japanese Theater. In his spare time, he writes about life in Kyoto and continues to translate modern Japanese fiction and drama.