In Memoriam

Biography

David Holloway taught courses on Japanese literature, popular culture, and "the body." Having completed graduate degrees at the University of Colorado at Boulder (2007) and Washington University in St. Louis (2014), his specialization was contemporary Japanese fiction with emphasis on gender and sexuality. His academic interests included youth cultures and subcultures, transgression, and Japan's "lost decade." Publications include "Gender, Body, and Disappointment in Kanehara Hitomi's Fiction" (Japanese Language and Literature, 2016) and "Topographies of Intimacy: Sex and Shibuya in Hasegawa Junko's Prisoner of Solitude" (US–Japan Women's Journal, 2016).

Selected Publications

• “No Future in Sakurai Ami’s Tomorrow’s Song,” Japanese Language and Literature 54, no. 2 (October 2020): 301-322. https//:doi.org/10.5195/jll.2020.91 ISSN 1536-7827 (print) 2326-4586 (online)
• “The Monster Next Door: Monstrosity, Matricide, and Masquerade in Kirino Natsuo’s Real World,” Japanese Studies 39, no. 3 (August 2019) DOI:10.1080/10371397.2019.1643708
• “Fat Phobia in Matsuura Rieko’s ‘Himantai kyōfushō,’” Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 18, no. 1 (April 2018): 43-58.
• “The Unmaking of a Diva: Kanehara Hitomi’s Comfortable Anonymity,” in Diva Nation: Female Icons from Japanes Cultural History, ed. Laura Miller and Rebecca Copeland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 215-236.
• "Topographies of Intimacy: Sex and Shibuya in Hasegawa Junko's Prisoner of Solitude." US-Japan Women's Journal, no. 49, 2016, pp. 51-67. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/article/614615.
• "Gender, Body, and Disappointment in Kanehara Hitomi's Fiction." Japanese Language and Literature, vol. 50, no. 1, Apr. 2016.

Posthumous Publication

After years of perseverance, determination, and hard work on behalf of David's mentors, colleagues, and friends, the posthumous publication of his book The End of Transgression in Japanese Women's Writings is now available from the Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

This book argues for a new articulation of the ways in which transgression is theorized in contemporary literature by Japanese women.

Exploring the rhetorical and discursive mechanics of literary “bad girls” from fiction produced during the millennial turn (1990–2010), the book contends that women writers today deploy truant, unruly, restless, and aggressive female protagonists not to challenge the status quo but rather to reaffirm it. While Japanese women’s fiction has long been invested in cultivating an uncomfortable politics of opposition through “unladylike” themes such as sex, sexuality, and violence, the book argues that today authors turn to such acts of defiance to quietly advocate for the primacy of Japanese social order. Showing how transgression has not only lost its political and disruptive valence in contemporary women’s fiction, this book further reveals how discourses of dissent can be retooled to promote a conservative worldview.

A fascinating literary analysis which reads Japanese literature in relation to the receding value of rebellion today, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Japanese literature, gender, and cultural studies.