Eve Zimmerman
Professor of Japanese
Focused on Japanese literature, how female writers refashion the category of "girlhood" in postwar fiction, manga, and memoir.
Eve Zimmerman teaches Japanese literature, Japanese popular culture (manga), literary translation, postwar fiction, and a course on the figure of the girl in modern East Asia. From 2018-2023, she served as director of Wellesley College’s Newhouse Center for the Humanities, bringing the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami to campus for a semester in her last year.
Thanks to her students’ interest in Japan’s popular culture, Zimmerman became interested in the topic of Japanese girlhood. Her latest book looks at the figure of the girl in women’s writing of the 1970s-1990s (Girl Refracted: Postwar Japanese Women Writers and the Age of Adolescence). Earlier in her career, Zimmerman also wrote a literary ethnography about fiction writer Kenji Nakagami, Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction (Harvard, 2007). She has translated a book of his short stories, The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto (Stone Bridge, 1999), as well as “Remaining Flowers” a story by Nakagami that appeared in The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories (edited by Jay Rubin, 2018). Now she is translating Nakagami’s masterpiece, Dead Tree Coast, or, as Nakagami himself once wrote, “Akiyuki is stirring again.” Her other translation, Strawberry Road (Kodansha, 1991) won the U.S. Japan Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature. She has also published on Japan’s vernacular architecture (minka) with her sister, Claire, a historian of architectural photography (“Ethnographic Architectural Photography: Futagawa Yukio and Nihon no Minka”) in The Journal of Architecture (2015).
She has two daughters, who grew up on the Wellesley campus: Emma Lloyd who is doing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Berkeley; and Zoe Lloyd (zoelloydmusic), who is a singer-songwriter based in Los Angeles.
Recent Publications:
“Enkan suru koten bungaku” (The Return of Classical Literature), Tsuda University Gengobunka kenkyūjōho, No. 39 (July 2024): 10-32.
“Teaching Nakagami Kenji’s The Cape through Translation,” Teaching Postwar Japanese Fiction, Modern Language Association (Spring, 2023): 58-72.
“Remaining Flowers,” by Nakagami Kenji, trans. Eve Zimmerman, Penguin Collection of Contemporary Japanese Fiction, ed., Jay Rubin, September 2018: 140-149.
Afterword to Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, In Praise of Shadows (trans. Gregory Starr), 87-91.
“The Child of Memory: City Topoi in Tsushima Yūko’s Short Fiction of the 1980s,” in Tokyo: Space, Text, Memory, Barbara Thornbury and Evelyn Schulz, eds., Maryland: Lexington Books, 2017: 159-178.
“Angels and Elephants: Historical Allegories in Ogawa Yōko’s 2006 Mīna no kōshin (Mena’s Procession),” U.S.-Japan Women’s Journal, vol. 49 (2016): 68- 96.
Co-authored with Claire Zimmerman, “Ethnographic Architectural Photography: Futagawa Yukio and Nihon no minka,” Journal of Architecture 20:4 (2015): 718-750.
Books:
Out of the Alleyway: Nakagami Kenji and the Poetics of Outcaste Fiction
The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto
Education
- B.A., University of Pennsylvania
- Ph.D., Columbia University in the City of New York