Michiko Suzuki

Michiko Suzuki is professor of Japanese and Comparative Literature at University of California, Davis. Her areas of expertise include modern and contemporary Japanese literature, women’s writing, Japanese film, feminism, gender and sexuality, and early twentieth-century global sexology. In addition to these fields, she also specializes in kimonos and related Japanese wear. Her recent monograph, _Reading the Kimono in Twentieth-Century Japanese Literature and Film_ (University of Hawai‘i Press), examines what these clothes communicate within specific literary, historical, and cultural contexts. In her “free time” she repurposes old kimonos, remaking them into Western-style clothing so that they can take on new lives.