Fusako Innami Receives Runner-Up in the British Comparative Literature Association's Inaugural First Book Prize

PS alum Fusako Innami's (MA '08) Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (University of Michigan Press, 2021) has been recognized as the runner-up for the British Comparative Literature Association's inaugural First Book Prize 2025. The Award honors an outstanding first monograph, published between January 2021 to December 2023 in the field of comparative literature (from any period, language, geographical range).  

Regarding Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan,  the judges write that "it is an exciting book that examines literary and textual descriptions of vision and touch as acts of translation and mediation across the senses, particularly when vision and description substitute for touch. It is a theoretically sophisticated study that offers an insightful discussion of relationality through the skin and interactions of the body and language in the writings of Kawabata Yasunari, Tanizaki Jun’ichirō, Yoshiyuki Junnosuke, and Matsuura Rieko."