Working in the United States makes it easier for me to attend the annual convention of MLA (Modern Language Association of America) I joined in 1984, when I was a graduate student at Cornell University. Founded in 1883, MLA has held annual conventions and published PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association), the most prestigious academic journal in the field of English and other languages, offering various opportunities for its international members to share scholarly discoveries and examine trends in the fields of literary studies and critical theory. In the 21^st century, MLA became the greatest association of literary studies in the world with a membership of over 20,000 in one hundred countries. Having attended its annual conference since 1984, I could reinvent my own theoretical approaches to Anglo-American literature. MLA doubtlessly transformed me from a careless student into a professional Americanist.

Therefore, I was primarily pleased that the January 2004 issue of PMLA featuring the special topic “Literatures at Large” published my transnational article “Literary History on the Road: Transatlantic Crossings and Transpacific Crossovers” (https://www.jstor.org/stable/1261489), which led to a serious and constructive debate with a major adaptation theoretician John Bryant over Edward Said’s misreading of the last sequence of Moby-Dick and confusion between Captain Ahab and his bosom friend Fedallah the Parsee  (https://www.jstor.org/stable/41058303). This is why I invited Professor Bryant to give a “Tricultural” lecture on “Melville and Mutiny” at Keio Academy of New York on March 6^th, 2023.

Last year at MLA 2025 in New Orleans (January 9-12)  I was gratified that Professor Philip Phillips, the current president of Poe Studies Association (PSA) awarded me its Honorary Membership. Professor Phillips’s citation and my acceptance speech are available in the July 2025 issue of The Edgar Allan Poe Review (https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/edgar-allan-poe/issue/26/1). The year of 2025 also saw the publication of Professor Phillips’s edited collection of essays Poe Spaces: Within and Beyond the Spatial Turn (Palgrave-Macmillan) including my own article “Paranoid Space in ‘The Purloined Letter’:  Poe, de Man, Nixon.” Although I first wrote its Japanese version in 2017 during the first Trump presidency, it took me nearly a decade completing the English version. However, a number of critical responses and comments from the readers of the project during the decade encouraged me to further elaborate the original manuscript. Thus, this article succeeds in radically reinterpreting Poe’s major detective fiction “The Purloined Letter” (1844) in the context of the Poe Revival in the 1970s, closely intertwining major post-structuralists Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man’s fascination with the act of stealing in literature with their deep interest in the Watergate Scandal in the same decade. Therefore, I feel deeply proud of the originality of the end product. This is why I and the distinguished members of PSA celebrated the publication of the collection at Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto on the shore of Lake Ontario during the MLA 2026 weekend (January 8-11).

Lastly but not least, I would also like to share with you the big news: Professor Andrew Campana of Cornell University, who conducted research at Keio University as a Harvard Ph.D. candidate a decade ago, and who gave a “Tricultural” lecture entitled “Poetry across Media in Contemporary Japan” on November 19^th, 2022 at Keio Academy of New York, received the prestigious award at MLA26 in Toronto, that is, the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies for his book “Expanding Verse: Japanese Poetry at the Edge of Media” (University of California Press, 2025). As you will quickly notice, his 2022 Tricultural lecture was part of its manuscript.

What makes this book remarkable is that the author does not start with an orthodox literary historical meditation but radically redefines Japanese poetry in the context of hypermedia. Take a glance at the opening of his introduction:

A cinematic script that could not possibly be filmed; a set of voices, chopped up and multiplied on a tape recorder; a declaration in front of a train station by an activist with cerebral palsy; a pop song about menstruation performed on live TV by a woman wearing giant dragonfly wings; hundreds of augmented reality roses floating above the streets of Tokyo. All of these were called poems by their creators at different points over the last hundred years in Japan (Expanding Verse 1)

You will immediately be intrigued with the author’s own lyrical prose. Profoundly familiar with the history of Japanese poetry, the author dares not to pay attention to what we have believed to be genuine poetry published in authentic magazines and anthologies but highly appreciates poetry produced in non-print media. Starting with avant-garde poetry in the Taisho era, this book reaches its climax with the fifth chapter entitled “World Webs: Augmented Reality Poetry and Japanese Sign Language Poetry Online” featuring the post 3/11 poems created through the Sekai Camera app by ni_ka (nika Moriya a.k.a. Hitoka Moriya). The author emphasizes the way the 3/11 Eastern Japan multiple disasters induced the AR poet ni_ka to replace her text-based air tags with the poems full of other symbols of mourning and healing; flowers, candles and paper cranes. Yes, her AR poetry revolutionizes the way we express our emotions in the digital context. Thus, Andrew Campana reinforces his argument with Kotani Mari’s theory: “Kotani Mari, the feminist science fiction scholar, noted that their [ni_ka’s AR poem’s] impact ‘was enormous, most dramatically in the post-3/11 world,’ and wondered if ‘ni_ka’s work prefigured 2016’s wildly successful Pokémon Go AR app and its popularization of a ‘Sekai Camera-esque sense of augmented reality” (Campana 145).

Congratulations, Andrew. Your provocative work opened the door to the frontier of 21^st century poetics.