Assistant Professor of Japanese Kyoko Omori spoke at a University of Sydney, Australia, workshop on December 3-4. The workshop focused on a Japanese vernacular modernist magazine, Shinseinen (New Youth). Shinseinen enjoyed its heyday in the 1920s-30s by providing youth with (occasionally experimental) detective fiction, photographs, illustrations and essays on the latest cultural phenomena. The participants of the workshop attempted to reveal the magazine's engagements with various intellectual and cultural movements of the early 20th century. Omori's talk shed light on the theoretical writings of a leading literary critic, Hirabayashi Hatsunosuke, in promoting detective fiction as a most modern literary genre.
