Headmaster's Voice
Biography:
Takayuki Tatsumi (1955-) is Professor Emeritus of Keio University, Tokyo, Japan and headmaster of Keio Academy of New York (2022-). Since he received Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1987, Tatsumi has long taught American Literary History and Critical Theory at Keio University and other institutions. He served as president of the American Literature Society of Japan (2014-2017), president of the Poe Society of Japan (2009-2020) and vice president of the Melville Society of Japan (2012-).
His major books include: New Americanist Poetics (Seidosha, 1995, the winner of the 1995 Fukuzawa Yukichi Award), Full Metal Apache: Transactions between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Duke UP, 2006, the winner of the 2010 IAFA [International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts] Distinguished Scholarship Award) and Young Americans in Literature: The Post-Romantic Turn in the Age of Poe, Hawthorne and Melville (Sairyusha, 2018). Co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies (Routledge, 2019), he has also published a variety of essays in PMLA, Critique, Extrapolation, American Book Review, Mechademia, The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature and elsewhere on subjects ranging from the American Renaissance to post-cyberpunk fiction and film.
For more detail, visit the following URL:
http://www.tatsumizemi.com/p/
https://issuu.com/keioacademyny/docs/tatsumi_svita2023_latest?fr=sN2E1YjY1MzM5Njg
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#40 The Years of the Dragon-Snake
A Happy New Year!
I’ve just come back to Keio Academy of New York.
According to the Zodiac calendar, 2024 was the year of the dragon, whereas 2025 is the year of the snake.
I find this sequence very interesting, for my family name Tatsumi (「巽」) consists of the image of dragon (Tatsu「辰」=「龍」) symbolizing power and that of snake (Mi「巳」=「蛇」) representing transformation. This chimera (Dragon-Snake!)embodies radical transfiguration. Accordingly, the scenario of my life seems to have always already been inscribed deep within the very nomenclature. This is the reason why 60 years ago I was fascinated with Conan Doyle’s representation of dinosaurs as paleontological dragons in The Lost World (1912) and initiated into science fiction.
By the same token, however, given that the zodiac calendar also functions as the twelve points of the compass, my name “Tatsumi” refers to the geographical direction of the southeast, to which Far East people find the Americas. At this point, you should not forget the title of Kawada Shoryo’s biography of John Manjiro Drifting toward the Southeast : The Story of Five Japanese Castaways (漂巽紀畧) which narrates the way a fourteen year- old boy Nakahama Manjiro (1827-1898) was rescued by Captain Whitfield’s whaleship John Howland and the way he was to master English, Mathematics and Navigation in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. It is well-known that with his help the convention of Kanagawa, that is, the Japan-Us Treaty of Peace and Amity between the Tokugawa Shogunate and the United States was signed successfully. Appointed as translator, he also joined the Japanese Embassy to the United States in 1860, making friends with Fukuzawa Yukichi and Katsu Kaishu.
Thus, I’ve always been amused by the etymology or the very “speech act” of my own name, which from the beginning had already destined me to become an Americanist.