Michael Emmerich is Professor of Japanese literature at the University of California, Los Angeles and Director of the Tadashi Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities. He is the author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature, the editor of Read Real Japanese Fiction: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers and New Penguin Parallel Texts: Short Stories in Japanese, and the translation of numerous works of premodern, modern and contemporary Japanese Literature. In 2010, he was awarded the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature for his translation of Kawakami Hiromi's novel Manazuru.