Tryan Grillo, who is joining the Weatherhead East Asian Institute as the 2017-2018 Dorothy Borg Postdoctoral Scholar in East Asia and the Americas, will be reading from his new translation of Yoshiki Tanaka’s science-fiction novel Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Volume 4: Stratagem at the Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York City at 3:00 PM on Saturday, September 9, 2017. Please click here for further information.
Dr. Grillo received his doctorate in Japanese Literature in 2017 from Cornell University, where his research focused on (mis)representations of animals in Japanese popular culture, as well as intersections of Asian Studies and Posthumanism. His dissertation, “Cats, Dogs, and Cyborgs: Transcending the Human-Animal Divide in Contemporary Japanese Literature,” is a study of Japanese animal-themed writings from the mid-1990s to the present that visualizes the role of genre, impacts of recent national history, and the influences of Japan’s woefully unrecognized “pet boom.”
Before pursuing his Ph.D., Dr. Grillo completed his M.A. in Japanese Language and Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His M.A. thesis examines the Japanese novel Murder in the Red Chamber by Ashibe Taku, who spent a full decade rewriting Cao Xueqin’s Chinese classic Dream of the Red Chamber as a murder mystery. Dr. Grillo would go on to publish his translation of Ashibe’s novel in 2012. On that front, Grillo has been a professional translator for over a decade, translating 12 books of Japanese fiction into English to date, including: Parasite Eve by Sena Hideaki (Vertical, 2005), Paradise by Suzuki Kōji (Vertical, 2006), and Mr. Turtle by Kitano Yūsaku (Kurodahan Press, 2016), with three more full-length translations set to be published by early 2018 next year.
