Biography

Born in 1955, Hiromi Ito is one of the most important and highly regarded women writers in Japan. In the 1970s, she gained a reputation as a major voice of a new, liberated generation of young, female poets when she started exploring erotic desire and the experiences of motherhood in bold, free-spirited poetry that shocked and fascinated the Japanese public. She has published over a dozen volumes of poetry, including Ao ume (Unripe Plums, 1982), the two-volume Teritori ron (A Theory of Territory, 1985 and 1988), Noro to saniwa (co-authored with the feminist critic Ueno Chizuko, 1991), Kazoku Ato (Art of Family, 1992), and Watashi wa Anjuhimeko de aru (I Am Anjuhimeko, 1993).

After spending several years traveling back and forth between California and Japan, she settled with her two daughters in Encinitas, California. About the same time, she turned to the longer, freer forms of prose, which gave her the room to write at some length about her experiences as a migrant in a country that did not speak her language. In her novellas and essays, Ito applies her signature, colloquial style to explore modern migrancy: the legal difficulties of the immigration system, the experience of being a transplant in a new environment, the linguistic isolation of recent arrivals, and the implications of that isolation for self-expression and identity. Moreover, Ito refracts these issues through her feminist lens, writing articulately about the subaltern status particular to female migrants, especially those whose lack of English has condemned them to silence.

In recent years, Ito’s creative sphere has been rapidly expanding. She has collaborated with the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki and the feminist critic Chizuko Ueno, published articles on folkloric traditions, authored modern Japanese translations of pre-modern literature, and published more than a dozen volumes of essays on subjects ranging from the relationship between the sexes, motherhood, the oral traditions of Native Americans, to the pop songs from the 1960’s. As the critic Nobuaki Tochigi has noted, "she is an omnivorous poet who transmits and transforms a variety of literary legacies."

Activities at WMU

Ito was invited to Western Michigan University by Dr. Jeffrey Angles in WMU’s Department of Foreign Languages, who has been working with her to produce a book-length collection of English translations of her poetry entitled A Map Marked in a Foreign Tongue. According to Angles, "Ito is one of the most extraordinary and exciting writers working in the Japanese language today. Her work consistently attempts to give voice to women whom history has silenced, so she is has attracted lots of attention from feminist scholars in Japan and elsewhere. In fact, her work has been so influential that one critic went as far as to divide Japanese poetic history into ‘the era before Ito’ and ‘the era after Ito.’"

In her public discussion on October 3, Ito will be talking about her life in Japan and California, her experiences as a Japanese writer working in America, and the implications of migrancy for the development of world literature. She will also read her work in Japanese, along with Jeffrey Angles, who will read his English translations.