Contributor Bio: Pam Kennedy

English | Japanese

I’m Pam Kennedy. I was born in 1988 and raised in Atlanta. Currently I am a senior at the College of William and Mary, and I am majoring in Government and East Asian Studies. I studied Japanese language and cinema in Hikone, Shiga Prefecture, in Japan during the Spring 2009 semester.

My current interest in post-bubble Japanese culture is the work of novelist Kanehara Hitomi, who wrote “Snakes and Earrings” and “Autofiction.” During the summer of 2009, I conducted research on these two novels in the context of post-bubble Japanese society. I will continue this research by further examining ways in which Ms. Kanehara expresses the disillusionment of the post-bubble era youth in her books.