https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=2779
Susan Blakeley Klein is Professor Emerita of Japanese Literature and Culture in the East Asian Studies Department, School of Humanities at University of California, Irvine. She received her PhD in East Asian Literature from Cornell University. Her research spans premodern and modern Japanese theatre and dance, Japanese religions, and feminist critical theory. Across this work, she examines how literature and theatre attempt to symbolically resolve particular cultural problematics, attending closely to both the thematic and performative dimensions of texts and to the ways those dimensions reflect their historical contexts. As a feminist scholar, she is particularly interested in exposing the blind spots and limitations of contemporary Western theory when it encounters texts from different temporal and cultural settings.
She participated in all three meetings of the “New Directions in Noh Workshop,” both as a commentator and as a presenter. In her two presentations, she traced the genre's structural and affective afterlives in landmark Japanese cinema and kabuki. For such work, the workshop offers an especially valuable setting: noh specialists who situate her readings against the tradition itself, while her arguments encourage the group to consider noh as a living resource for later art forms.
Her interest in the afterlives of noh was already evident in her earlier publication, "Noh, Shakespeare, and Pedagogy in Kurosawa’s Kumonosujō (Throne of Blood)” (2013), where she argued that noh in Kurosawa's film is not ornament but a dramaturgical engine that shapes meaning and closure. She extended this line of inquiry at the 2024 workshop with a draft article on the allegorical use of the noh play Kakitsubata in Yasujirō Ozu's 1949 film Late Spring (Banshun). That paper was then presented in 2026 at the Association for Asian Studies annual conference and is being prepared for publication. At the 2026 Noh Workshop meeting, she turned to kabuki with a paper on the parodic transformations of the noh play Dōjōji in Tsurya Nanboku’s last play, Kinnozai Sarushima Dairi. Here again, she is returning to an earlier project on the demonic feminine in noh, now examining how the demonic feminine is played with and parodied in Edo period theater. By following noh into kabuki and film, her projects stipulate that dramaturgy, affect, and performance in noh can illuminate much later works, and that those works can in turn reveal new aspects of noh.
Books published:
Dancing the Dharma: Religious and Political Allegory in Japanese Noh Theater (Harvard University Asia Center for Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2021).
Allegories of Desire: The Esoteric Literary Commentaries of Medieval Japan (Harvard University Asia Center for Harvard-Yenching Institute, 2003)