September 29, 2022 | ASUC Student Union: Martin Luther King Jr. Building, Stephens Room
Speakers: YU Miri, YANAGI Takeharu
Moderator: Junko Habu, UC Berkeley
In this special undergraduate class lecture of September 29, 2022 at UC Berkeley, YU Miri, an internationally acclaimed novelist, talks about her reasons why she decided to move to Odaka, Minami-soma in Fukushima Prefecture, and her experiences of listening to local residents’ voices, weaving stories, and working with community members. This will be followed by a short presentation by Mr. YANAGI Takeharu on the ecology of plants and insects in Minamisoma. YU Miri is a citizen of South Korea who was born and grew up in Japan, and who writes her works in Japanese. The English version of her recent novel "Tokyo Ueno Station" (translated by Morgan Giles) won the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature in the U.S. YU Miri is the recipient of the 5th Berkeley Japan Prize awarded by the UC Berkeley Center for Japanese Studies, and this special lecture was held in conjunction with the Berkeley Japan Prize Award Ceremony on September 30, 2022.