The Japan U.S.-Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature

Tom Hare is William Sauter LaPorte ’28 Professor in Regional Studies, in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. His intellectual interests include Japanese drama and Buddhism, writing systems, Egyptology, portraiture, and the interaction of literature and the arts. He did his PhD in Far Eastern Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan and studied the musicology of noh at Tokyo University of Fine Arts (Tôkyô Geijutsu Daigaku). He taught in the Departments of Asian Languages and Comparative Literature at Stanford University before moving to Princeton. He is the author of Zeami: Performance Notes (Columbia University Press, 2008), Zeami’s Style (Stanford University Press, 1986) and ReMembering Osiris (Stanford, 1999). He is currently working on a project on performance and practice in Buddhist Japan.

Michael Emmerich is Assistant Professor of Premodern Japanese Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is currently completing a manuscript about the early modern and modern canonization of The Tale of Genji as a classic of both Japanese and world literature. He is the translator of numerous novels and short-story collections by authors as diverse as Kawabata Yasunari and Takahashi Gen’ichirô, and is the editor of Read Real Japanese Fiction and the forthcoming New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese.