Paul Schalow is a professor of Japanese literature at Rutgers University, where he teaches classes on fiction related to the atomic bomb, Japanese women’s writing  and East Asian civilization. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 1985. His translation of Ihara Saikaku’‘s The Great Mirror of Male Love was awarded the 1990 Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese by Columbia University’s Donald Keene Center. His most recent book is A Poetics of Courtly Male Friendship in Heian Japan, published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2007.