Japan Society Presents Performing Arts Program Lecture 'Suicide Culture & Its Influences On Artists'

Japan Society, through its Performing Arts Program, presents a lecture that looks at how the subject of Japanese suicide been expressed through the arts both inside and outside of Japan.

The lecture, Suicide Culture & its Influences on Artists, features Dr. Kirsten Cather and Kristine Haruna Lee, and takes place Wednesday, January 23 at 7:30pm at Japan Society (333 East 47th Street). Dr. Kirsten Cather, who is currently writing a book entitled Scripting Suicide in Modern Japan, opens the program with a focus on the representation of suicide in Japanese culture, from well-known suicide spots through history to Aokigahara Forest today. Taiwanese-Japanese-American playwright Kristine Haruna Lee joins Dr. Cather in the second half of the evening to discuss the influences behind her latest play Suicide Forest, set to premiere in February 2019 at The Bushwick Starr.

Set against the backdrop of post-bubble 1990s, Suicide Forest is about a salaryman desperately searching for his self-worth, who meets a lonely teenage girl grappling with her sexuality in a nightmarish, male-defined society. When the two find an awkward companionship in each other, they expose their darkest desires fueled by masochism and shame, and must now confront life and death as the notorious Aokigahara Forest, aka Suicide Forest, looms in their imagination. Directed by Tokyo-born and Brooklyn-based director Aya Ogawa), Suicide Forest is a bilingual play that breaks through the silence and submissiveness often associated with Japanese and Japanese-American identity, examining the role of community and the inner struggles of emotional, psychic and social suicide. Directly following Dr. Cather and Lee's discussion, there will be a brief reading of an excerpt from the play and a Q&A session with the audience.

Lecture Tickets & Information:

Wednesday, January 23 at 7:30pm-followed by a Q&A session

Tickets are $15 / $10 Japan Society members.

Tickets can be purchased by calling the Box Office at 212-715-1258 or in person at Japan Society (M-F 11:00am - 6:00pm and Sat-Sun 11:00am - 5:00pm). Japan Society is located at 333 East 47th Street, between First and Second Avenues (accessible by the 4/5/6 at 42nd Street-Grand Central Station or the E at Lexington Avenue and 53rd Street). For more information, call 212-832-1155 or visit http://www.japansociety.org

Dr. Kirsten Cather teaches Japanese film, literature and culture in the Asian Studies Department at University of Texas at Austin. After studying abroad at Doshisha University in Kyoto and majoring in Japanese as an undergraduate at Connecticut College, she spent several years working for Japanese and American corporations in Tokyo and New York. She then went on to earn her Ph.D. in Japanese literature with a secondary specialization in film from UC Berkeley back in 2004. Her first book, The Art of Censorship in Postwar Japan (University of Hawai`i Press, 2012) analyzed landmark censorship trials of "obscene" literature, films, photography and manga. Now for her current book project, Scripting Suicide in Modern Japan, she considers how and why individuals write in the face and wake of suicide.

Kristine Haruna Lee was born in Hong Kong, raised between Tokyo and Seattle, and is now a Brooklyn-based theater maker whose work navigates non-linear playwriting, the practice and performance of auto-theory, and the construction of visually rich performance landscapes for the theater. Her experimentation with language is often a portrayal of personal and collective experiences operating within cross-cultural memory and consciousness, and the conflicts that arise when dealing with plurality, desires, and fragmentation of racialized, gendered and sexual identities. With her theater company harunalee, she utilizes handmade and craft objects to create visually stunning and visceral performances that mediate on the more disruptive bodies of thought that sit within one's deeper, psychic spaces. Since 2010, Lee has created six original works with harunalee that have been hailed by The New York Times as, "full of impulses and ideas, and splendid, fractious energy." Lee is a recipient of the Map Fund Grant, Lotos Foundation Prize for Directing, the New Dramatist Van Lier Fellowship, and was a member of The Public's Devised Theater Working Group and P73 Interstate 73 Writer's Group. Currently, she is a part of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab with collaborator Jen Goma and is an affiliated artist with New Georges and Wook Taut Majesty. Lee teaches playwriting and performance at NYU Experimental Theater Wing, Playwrights Horizons Theater School, PACE University, York College and Abrons Arts Center.