Joshua Roth in Person

Join us on Wednesday, April 22 at 7 PM as Joshua Roth presents his new graphic memoir, Life Lines: Art, Memory, Relationship. He will be joined in conversation by Arnav Adhikari.

Life Lines is an ethnographic exploration of elder care as a creative and relational process, centered on the author's journey caring for his aging father. Over five years, these shared moments opened up new understandings of his father's inner world, revealing the social and personal forces that shaped his life, dreams, and disappointments.

Blending personal narrative with ethnographic insight, Life Lines invites readers to reflect on the profound and often challenging journey of caring for an aging parent. As generations age and more families navigate the realities of advanced old age, this book offers a hopeful vision: caregiving can be more than a duty - it can become an opportunity for parents and adult children to forge deeper, more emotionally enriching relationships.

Through art, conversation, and shared discovery, Life Lines shows how we can move beyond care fatigue and disconnection, transforming the later years of life into a time of renewed connection, understanding, and appreciation.

Joshua Hotaka Roth describes himself as “a skinny guy from Queens, New York with a funny middle name. Hotaka means ‘tall rice stalk,’ generally imagined bending under the weight of mature grains.” The name of one of Japan’s tallest snow-capped mountains, Roth’s mother chose it for him based on fond memories of her mountain-climbing days as a student in Japan. Roth’s first research project explored the ways that people imagine identity and difference in migration. It resulted in several articles and a book, Brokered Homeland (Cornell University, 2002). He has also written a series of articles on the history of driving in Japan looking both at the governance of driving, as well as the meaning people find in their cars. The Covid pandemic interrupted research in Japan. Covid coincided with the increased care that he needed to set up for his parents, who, in their 90s, were living on their own in an apartment in NYC. The graphic memoir, Life Lines: Art, Memory, and Relationship (University of Toronto Press, 2026), was his Covid project. This project has spurred him to investigate the representation of aging and care in Japanese contexts.

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