JATBOOK Webinar: Beyond the Human Subject: When Corey Wakeling translates Natsumi Aoyagi’s Done Being Nurtured

Done Being Nurtured (Spite Press, July 2026) by Natsumi Aoyagi is a singular work of Japanese literature by a pioneering, interdisciplinary figure. Natsumi Aoyagi (青柳菜摘), born in 1990, is a Nakahara Chuya Prize-winning poet, novelist, and essayist, and a renowned multimedia artist working under the moniker "datsuo". Aoyagi has collaborated with numerous other prominent artists, from designer Kei Ninomiya to architect Arata Isozaki. Language according to Aoyagi is a mutable, multi-perspectival dispositif with the potential for exposing worlds unseen by human beings; Aoyagi is more a poet of the posthuman than of nature, more a conceptualist of enigmas than of messages.

Writer, scholar, and translator Corey Wakeling discusses Aoyagi’s nonstandard Japanese and the unique architecture of her book. Corey shares some of the tactics he explored in order to render Sodatsu no wo yameru in English in its Spite Press publication, Done Being Nurtured. From the title’s provenance, to the many undefined speakers of the poems, to the insect-inspired vision of the overall composition, few of the commonplace assumptions about how to translate from Japanese to English managed to resolve these special qualities of Aoyagi’s pioneering collection.

Date & Time: September 26 (Sat.), 2026 15:00-16:30 JST (90 min.)
Speaker: Corey Wakeling, Writer, translator, and scholar
Moderator: Ko Iwata (岩田 香)

Type: Zoom webinar, recording available (until the end of October)
We will send you the Zoom link to your registered email address no later than the day before the session.

JAT member: Free
Non-member: 2,000 yen
Student: 500 yen (Please upload your student ID)

No refund is issued once payment is completed.
Recording available until the end of October
Archive available for JAT members
Register by: September 25, 2026 (Fri.) 24:00 JST

Organized by: Japan Association of Translators (JAT) JATBOOK
Contact: JATBOOK [email protected]

[Pre-seminar survey]
We would like to make this session as interactive as possible and will take questions as time permits. Please share your questions for the speaker using the link below.
Survey closes: September 25, 2026 (Fri.), at 24:00 JST
https://forms.gle/b2TH3UXDvKaY...

[Profile]
Corey Wakeling
Writer, translator, and scholar Corey Wakeling has lived in Japan since 2015. He is the author of four collections, the most recent, Uncle of Cats, being published by Cordite Books in 2025. A fifth collection, Endless Fields: Ploughing for Clothes, is forthcoming with Shearsman in late 2026. He is an associate professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo. Corey received a PhD in English from the University of Melbourne in 2013, and is the author of monograph Beckett’s Laboratory (Bloomsbury, 2021), co-editor of anthology Outcrop (Black Rider Press, 2013), and writer of numerous essays on modern and contemporary literature and performance. His translations of contemporary Japanese writers have been featured in leading journals such as Fence, Asymptote, Second Factory, and Another Chicago Magazine, galleries such as Mori Gallery (Tokyo) and a83 (Manhattan), and theatres such as the Honda Theatre (Shimokitazawa).

Moderator
Ko Iwata（岩田 香）
Ko Iwata has been a J2E translator for many years. Also teaching translation at a major translation and interpreting school. Studied at Simul Academy. Her field varies but currently she works in the aviation industry editing promotional copies.

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