modern Japanese literature, culture, and intellectual history; popular music; literary and critical theory I try always to remember that literature is a dialogic undertaking. Whatever value a literary work may harbor is generated through ongoing dialogues between writers and readers. This approach requires us to remain attentive to relations between a given text and those that it responds to, as well as those that respond to it—including nonliterary sources. It also means that we need constantly to rethink the here-and-now from which we respond to a literary text. Engaging in dialogue means not only asking questions, but also being questioned. In that light, as a scholar of modern Japanese literature, I stress the importance of moving beyond the boundaries of Japan. Japanese literature moves within and across multiple global networks, and its meanings are fundamentally shaped by those dialogues. I also have a strong commitment to engaging actively with our counterparts in Japan. I have edited or co-edited several volumes that introduce Japanese works of critical theory, literary scholarship, and philosophical inquiry, to English-language readers. My own current research includes a radical rethinking of the work of Natsume Sōseki. I am dissatisfied with existing scholarship on Sōseki: I think it misrepresents the fundamental answer to the question "What is literature?" that Sōseki offers. I am completing a book manuscript (tentative title: Owning Up to Sōseki: The Properties of World Literature) that explicates the claim that he makes upon readers, especially those of us who approach him from the English language. I engage Sōseki's fiction and critical essays in relation to ideologies of modern property ownership, the discursive structure of literary and scientific knowledge, and the ethical practices of reading and writing. Like Sōseki, I also think the realm of the literary extends beyond fiction, poetry, and drama. I have strong ongoing interests in philosophy, critical theory, social history, popular culture, and film and media studies. In Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon: A Geopolitical Pre-History of J-Pop (Columbia University Press, 2012), I explore Japanese popular music from 1945 through the early 1990s, looking at how songs performed by such figures as Kasagi Shizuko, Sakamoto Kyū, and Yellow Magic Orchestra engaged creatively with the shifting historical situation of Japan's Cold War. I practice literature in other modes as well: I am an active translator, and I continue to write fiction on a daily basis.