Staff profile

Dr. Fusako Innami is Associate Professor in Japanese and Performance Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University as well as the author of Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan (Michigan, 2021, Open Access). The book examines touch as the mediated experience of the memories of previous touching and the accumulation of sensations, all of which create an interstitial space between those in contact. In Touching the Unreachable, phenomenological and psychoanalytical approaches are cross-culturally interrogated by engaging with literary touch to constantly challenge what may seem like the limit of transferability regarding concepts, words, and practices. The book aims to decentralize a Eurocentric hegemony in its production and use of theories and brings Japanese cultural and literary analyses into further productive intellectual dialogues. The book received runner-up in the British Comparative Literature Association’s inaugural First Book Prize 2025.

Her work has also been recognized by the International Federation for Theatre Research (New Scholars’ Prize, 2^nd place, 2012), Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, and US-UK Fulbright Commission (Fulbright All Disciplines Scholar Award, 2024–25), to be based in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Her second book project, Dancing Traces: Performance, Topography, Gestural Writing, concerns ephemeral performance and its traces. How do we recollect live performances that are not available in recordings, but only remain in the form of reviews, scores, pictures, or digitized archives? Her project gathers traces of dancers’ transcultural movements, contacts, and memoirs, exploring gestural forms of reconstructing past performances.

Before coming to Durham in 2015, she worked on the sensation of falling bodies for her MA project in Performance Studies at New York University, and her doctoral work on touch in modern Japanese literature at the University of Oxford. As an academic, dance reviewer, and practitioner, Fusako conducts dance workshops, “Touch,” to translate touch in literature back to moving bodies; and an ongoing international collaboration, “Translating Embodiedness,” to develop new methodologies for translating embodied practices across media.

Research Interests

• life writing,
• performance and performativity (Performance and Performativity - Durham University),
• phenomenology and psychoanalysis,
• the senses and perceptions,
• intimacy,
• operatic orientalism,
• translation, including the translation of bodily experiences into language, inter-medial translation, and the circulation of concepts and theories.

Fusako's research concerns bodily experiments, individualities, and the theory of embodiedness with a focus on modern Japan. Artistic and intellectual encounters around this period in East Asia, Europe, and the US facilitated the sharing of aesthetic features and transcultural collaborations that have shaped the understanding of phenomenal bodies. She would be happy to supervise Master's and Doctoral students working on relevant themes/topics as above.

 

• 2012: New Scholars Prize (2nd place), International Federation for Theatre Research:
• 2024: Fulbright All Disciplines Scholar Award, US-UK Fulbright Commission:
• 2025: First Book Prize 2025 (Runner-up), British Comparative Literature Association:

Authored book

• Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan
  
  Innami, F. (2021). Touching the Unreachable: Writing, Skinship, Modern Japan. University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11747440

Book review

• Review of Allison Alexy and Emma E. Cook, eds. Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict
  
  Innami, F. (2021). Review of Allison Alexy and Emma E. Cook, eds. Intimate Japan: Ethnographies of Closeness and Conflict. Japan Forum, 33(4), 780-781. https://doi.org/10.1080/09555803.2021.1979082

Chapter in book

• The Flesh, Subject, Embodiment in Postwar Japan: Through Nikutai and Gutai
  
  Innami, F. (2022). The Flesh, Subject, Embodiment in Postwar Japan: Through Nikutai and Gutai. In G. Siary, T. Takemoto, V. Vuilleumier, & Y. Zhang (Eds.), LE CORPS DANS LES LITTÉRATURES MODERNES D’ASIE ORIENTALE : DISCOURS, REPRÉSENTATION, INTERMÉDIALITÉ (The Body in Modern Asian Literature: Discourse, Representation, Intermediality) (pp. 359-374). Collège de France. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.12570
• Komaki Masahide no sokuseki to Shanghai Ballet Russes (Komaki's Footsteps and the Shanghai Ballet Russes)
  
  Innami, F. (2022). Komaki Masahide no sokuseki to Shanghai Ballet Russes (Komaki’s Footsteps and the Shanghai Ballet Russes). In From Alexandria to Tokyo: Art, Colonialism and Entangled Histories. Mori Art Museum.
• Gendered High and Low Culture in Japan: The Transgressing Flesh in Kawabata’s Dance Writing
  
  Innami, F. (2019). Gendered High and Low Culture in Japan: The Transgressing Flesh in Kawabata’s Dance Writing. In J. Coates, L. Fraser, & M. Pendleton (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Gender and Japanese Culture (pp. 373-381). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315179582-37

Journal Article

• Falling Dance: Hijikata’s Recomposition of the Body via Bacon
  
  Innami, F. (2021). Falling Dance: Hijikata’s Recomposition of the Body via Bacon. The Senses and Society, 16(1), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2021.1874142
• Ethics of Incorporation: (Im)possibility of Accepting Otherness in Kawabata's ‘One Arm’
  
  Innami, F. (2016). Ethics of Incorporation: (Im)possibility of Accepting Otherness in Kawabata’s ‘One Arm’. Culture, Theory and Critique, 57(3), 373-390. https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2015.1073113
• Co-sleeping: engaging with the commodified dozing body in Kawabata, Yoshimoto, and Yamazaki
  
  Innami, F. (2015). Co-sleeping: engaging with the commodified dozing body in Kawabata, Yoshimoto, and Yamazaki. Contemporary Japan, 27(1), 33-52. https://doi.org/10.1515/cj-2015-0003
• The Departing Body: Creation of the Neutral in-between Sensual Bodies
  
  Innami, F. (2011). The Departing Body: Creation of the Neutral in-between Sensual Bodies. Asian Studies = Azijske študije, XV(3), 111-130. https://doi.org/10.4312/as.2011.-15.3.111-130
• Performance Reviews: Sadler's Wells, Kabuki/Ichikawa Ebizo
  
  Innami, F. (2010). Performance Reviews: Sadler’s Wells, Kabuki/Ichikawa Ebizo. DANCEART, 33.
• Performance Reviews: Brazilian company coming to Japan / Group colpo performance from New York
  
  Innami, F. (2008). Performance Reviews: Brazilian company coming to Japan / Group colpo performance from New York. DANCEART, 29.
• Performance Reviews: Australian Dance Theater "HELD"
  
  Innami, F. (n.d.). Performance Reviews: Australian Dance Theater "HELD". DANCEART, 27.
• Performance Reviews: London's overseas performance "Cymbeline" by Yukio Ninagawa
  
  Innami, F. (n.d.). Performance Reviews: London’s overseas performance "Cymbeline" by Yukio Ninagawa. DANCEART, 36.
• Performance Reviews: NY Information Mark Morist and Kanji Segawa, NOEMI LEFRANCE Performance
  
  Innami, F. (n.d.). Performance Reviews: NY Information Mark Morist and Kanji Segawa, NOEMI LEFRANCE Performance. DANCEART, 31.
• Interview: 19th World Culture Prize Winner La Mama / Producer: Ellen Schart
  
  Innami, F. (n.d.). Interview: 19th World Culture Prize Winner La Mama / Producer: Ellen Schart. DANCEART, 28.

Other (Print)

• 'A figure on a painted screen', in Madama Butterfly
  
  Innami, F. (2016). ’A figure on a painted screen’, in Madama Butterfly (K. Anderson, Ed.; pp. 18-20). Glyndebourne Tour 2016.