BOOKS

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A valuable contribution to studies of not just rakugo, but also Japanese humor and performance more generally … a valuable intervention in research on local culture in a modern Japan that is often defined by its unity. Shores’s book will be a core text in building the reception of rakugo in its multiple forms in English-language scholarship … useful for many readers, from scholars to undergraduates. 

⸻Aaron Gerow, Yale University, Monumenta Nipponica

PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES

“Japanese Gastronomic Imagination Through Rakugo Performance.” Food, Culture & Society 28, no. 5 (2025)

“Billiken as Transcultural Object from American Mascot to Japanese Pop Deity.” Asia Pacific Perspectives 19, no. 1: 21-63  (2025).

“A Celebrity’s Fifteen-Year Reign and Reinvention of Kamigata Rakugo.” Japanese Studies 43, no. 1: 1-26 (2023).

“An Argument for Rakugo as Literature.”  Journal for the Society for Asian Humanities 53: 264-84 (2022).

“Everybody’s Comfier with a Good Pillow: Rakugo’s Makura Prologues.” Asian Theatre Journal 38, no. 2: 462-487 (2021).

“Using Yoshikono and War to Save Rakugo in Osaka.” Japan Forum 30, no. 3: 394-420 (2018).

“Jippensha Ikku, Hizakurige, and Comic Storytelling.” Early Modern Japan: An Interdisciplinary Journal 20: 46-75 (2012).

“Travel and Tabibanashi in the Early Modern Period: Forming Japanese Geographic Identity.” Asian Theatre Journal 25, no. 1: 101-121 (2008).

BOOK CONTRIBUTIONS

“Japan’s Folkloristic Monsters Spring for Human Morals” in Moral Dimensions of Humour: Essays on Humans, Heroes and Monsters. Edited by Benjamin Nickl and Mark Rolfe (Tampere University Press, 2024).

“The Makura of Rakugo: Tradition and Modernity” in Humour in Asian Cultures: Tradition and Context. Edited by Jessica Milner Davis (Taylor & Francis, 2022).

“Rakugo’s Negotiation of Militarism during the World War II Years” in Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War. Edited by W. Puck Brecher and Michael Myers (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019).

“Mishima Yukio (1925-1970)” in Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History. Edited by Howard Chiang (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019).

“Spotlight – Popular Arts: Rakugo and Misemono” in A History of Japanese Theatre. Edited by Jonah Salz (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

“Laughter After Wars: Rakugo Under the American Occupation” in Rising from the Flames: The Rebirth of Theatre in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952. Edited by Samuel L. Leiter (Lexington Books, 2009).

BOOK REVIEWS

David Humphrey, The Time of Laughter: Comedy and the Media Cultures of Japan (University of Michigan Press, 2023). 289 pp. Monumenta Nipponica 79:1 (2024), 147-53.

Shige (CJ) Suzuki and Ronald Stewart, Manga: A Critical Guide by (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). 266 pp. The European Journal of Humour Research 12:1 (2024), 260-3. 

Ian McArthur, Henry Black: On Stage in Meiji Japan. Clayton: Monash University Publishing, 2013. 274 pp. Asian Theatre Journal 32:2 (2015), 675-80.

Melek Ortabasi, The Undiscovered Country: Text, Translation, and Modernity in the Work of Yanagita Kunio. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2014. 329 pp. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78:3 (2015), 662-4.

Damian Flanagan, Yukio Mishima. London: Reaktion Books, 2014. 256 pp. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 78:2 (2015), 426-7.

Keller Kimbrough and Satoko Shimazaki, eds., Publishing the Stage: Print and Performance in Early Modern Japan. Boulder: Center for Asian Studies, University of Colorado Boulder, 2011. 247 pp. Japanese Language and Literature 46:1 (2012), 67-73.

Lorie Brau, Rakugo: Performing Comedy and Cultural Heritage in Contemporary Tokyo, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. 257 pp. Asian Theatre Journal 26:1 (2009), 191-4.

TRANSCRIPT

「キーン先生による日本文学の評価そして落語」(Japanese Literature Evaluated by Donald Keene, and Rakugo), inaugural lecture by invitation for the Donald Keene Memorial Foundation Lecture Series. Held at Ono Memorial Auditorium, Waseda University, 31 May 2024.