We are pleased to share the recording of our first in-person event of 2021, “A Conversation With Asako Serizawa,” in celebration of her new book, Inheritors. The program includes two deeply moving readings of the novel by Serizawa herself, followed by a Q & A conducted by Professor Susan Napier. Through this conversation, we delve into important discussions surrounding the extraordinary impact of war, and our duty to face painful histories.

Asako Serizawa was born in Japan and grew up in Singapore, Jakarta, and Tokyo. A recent fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, she has received two O. Henry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She currently lives in Boston. Inheritors is her first book.

Susan Napier is the Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric at Tufts University. She formerly held the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Chair of Japanese Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Napier grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and received all her degrees from Harvard University. She has been a visiting professor at Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Keio University in Tokyo, and Sydney University in Australia. She is the author of five books, Escape from the Wasteland: Yukio Mishima and Kenzaburo Oe, The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle, and From Impressionism to Anime: Japan in the Mind of the West. Her most recent book, Miyazakiworld, was published in 2018 and has been translated into ten languages. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a Rockefeller Foundation Residency at the Bellagio Institute in Italy, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Guggenheim Grant.