Yū Miri, one of Japan’s most acclaimed playwrights and novelists, will present staged readings of her work-in-progress “OBON.” Based on oral history interviews that Yu and her collaborator Michael Bourdaghs (Robert S. Ingersoll Distinguished Service Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations) have carried out with approximately fifty members of Chicago’s Japanese American community, the play brings together professional actors with community member interviewees to reimagine the multi-generational history of a Japanese American Chicago, including the 20,000 persons who moved to the city from wartime incarceration camps and their descendants, as well as more recent arrivals from Japan and elsewhere.

Free to the public

Presented in association with the University of Chicago. This reading is sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies, the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, and the Division of Arts and Humanities at U of C.

Running Time: 1 hour 15 minutes with no intermission