Prof. Dr. Judit Árokay Projects
Digital Literary Map of Japan 日本デジタル文学地図
Since 2016, together with Japanese colleagues, I have been pursuing the project of a digital map of Japanese poetic-literary places (Digital Literary Map of Japan, DLM). The project was initially funded by the Marsilius Kolleg of Heidelberg University, then by the National Institute of Japanese Literature in Tokyo, and later by Osaka University as well as JSPS Kaken (B, based at Osaka University, running until March 2026).
The project aims to present, on a digital map, geographical locations in Japan that evoke literary associations and have had a significant influence on the country’s cultural landscape. The names of famous places—called utamakura in Japanese—have been used in poetry since the 8th century, not only in verse but also in prose literature, Japanese theater, and visual art. Their importance lies in the poetic imagery they convey across the centuries up to the present, as they function as intertextual references. Without knowledge of them, understanding literary texts is hardly possible. The map, designed in two languages (Japanese and English), is already being used in teaching and research and is continuously being expanded.
Bunron 文論
Since 2014, together with colleagues, I have been co-editing the open-access online journal Bunron – Journal for Literary Japanese Studies, hosted by Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing (HASP). The journal publishes contributions in four languages (German, Japanese, English, and French), all of which undergo a double-blind peer-review process. Its aim is to increase the visibility of text-focused research within Japanese Studies by publishing work with a literary-theoretical orientation. The journal’s scope includes scholarly articles, translations, reviews, as well as reports on conferences and ongoing projects.
Bunron places great value on theoretically informed discussions of current issues and, while maintaining a literary-studies focus, is also open to text-analytical and text-critical contributions from related fields such as history, cultural studies, philosophy, and linguistics.
Travel Literature by Women in the Edo Period
In this project, I translate texts from the Edo period written by women about their travels. In selecting the texts, I do not prioritize their “literary value”; rather, I seek to explore the ways in which Edo-period travel accounts adhere to classical and medieval ideals and models of travel writing, and the extent to which they depart from them in order to open a view onto contemporary conditions. The texts vary in their aesthetic aspirations and often include Japanese or Chinese poems, but they also document the concrete circumstances of travel. They thus reveal a great deal about the education, interests, and mobility of women in a world in which Confucian ideals imposed narrow social boundaries on them—boundaries that they nonetheless found various ways to transcend.