Remembering in Progress: The Histories We Carry and the Stories We Hear

This special roundtable discussion with Yu Miri, our 2022 Berkeley Japan Prize winner, focuses on her work-in-progress play, OBON, which is based on oral history interviews that she recently conducted with approximately fifty members of the Japanese American community in Chicago. Yu Miri will first give a short presentation about her experience of writing this play, with an emphasis on her deliberate efforts to listen to the voices of her interviewees without turning their lives into a story that belongs to the author herself. Following the presentation, three CJS members - Dan O’Neill (EALC), Miryam Sas (Comparative Literature) and Andrew Leong (English) - will join her for a roundtable conversation and discuss several key concepts related to the play, such as postmemory and tojisha.