03-31-2026 Why Ghosts Matter: An Underground History of Japan with Haruo Shirane

Tuesday, March 31, 6PM

The Allen & Shirley Leventhal Center
233 Bay State Road, Boston MA

Ghosts are a key to understanding anxieties about family, social injustice, and political violence in Japan. Unpacking four types of ghosts in Japan: political ghosts, ancestral ghosts, social ghosts, and non-human ghosts, the talk shows how these “ghost lineages” interlink, how they transform over time, and what they tell us about notions of personhood, community, power, and the non-human in Japanese history.

Haruo Shirane, Shincho Professor of Japanese Literature and Culture at Columbia University, is the author of Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons: Nature, Literature, and the Arts (2012), Traces of Dreams: Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the Poetry of Basho (1997), The Bridge of Dreams: A Poetics of The Tale of Genji (1987), and other books. He is an honorary member of the Japan Academy. The Allen & Shirley Leventhal Center 233 Bay State Road March 31 – 6 PM