KEIO RESEARCHERS INFORMATION SYSTEM

Other Disclosed Information 【 Display / hide 】

Other Disclosed Information 【 Display / hide 】

• k.sako[at]keio.jp

Career 【 Display / hide 】

Career 【 Display / hide 】

• 2021.04

  -

  Present

  Professor

• 2013.04

  -

  2021.03

  Associate Professor

• 2009.04

  -

  2013.03

  Assistant Profeessor

• 2025.03

  -

  2026.03

  Downing College, University of Cambridge, Visiting Fellow

• 2019.01

  -

  2022.12

  University of Huddersfield, School of Music, Humanities and Media, Visiting Research Fellow

display all >>

Academic Background 【 Display / hide 】

Academic Background 【 Display / hide 】

• 2002.04

  -

  2008.03

  The University of Tokyo, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, Department of English Language and Literature

  Graduate School, Withdrawal after completion of doctoral course requirements, Doctoral course

• 2007.11

  University of Warwick, Faculty of Art, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies

  United Kingdom, Graduate School, Completed, Doctoral course

• 1999.04

  -

  2002.03

  Gakushuin University, Graduate School of Humanities, Graduate Course in English and American Literature

  Graduate School, Completed, Master's course

• 1999.03

  Gakushuin University, Faculty of Letters, Department of English and American Literature

  University, Graduated

• 2000.09

  University of Oxford, Visiting Graduate Student in English

  United Kingdom, University, Other

Academic Degrees 【 Display / hide 】

Academic Degrees 【 Display / hide 】

• PhD, University of Warwick, 2007.11

• MA, Gakushuin University, Coursework, 2002.03

Research Areas 【 Display / hide 】

Research Areas 【 Display / hide 】

• Humanities & Social Sciences / European literature (Post-war/Contemporary British Literature and Culture)

Books 【 Display / hide 】

Books 【 Display / hide 】

• Intergenerationality, age, and environment in children's picturebooks

  Falcus S., Sako K., Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging, 2024.04

  　View Summary

  Following work by scholars such as Vanessa Joosen ("Age Studies") and engaging with recent critiques of the child in time, this chapter brings aging studies and children's literature studies together to explore intergenerationality and what it may mean for our understanding of ourselves as temporal and relational beings. Furthermore, we bring an ecocritical perspective to this inquiry and consider how children's literature about intergenerational connection may help to imagine ourselves beyond human time and space. We consider the representation of the grandparent and grandchild in Stardust (UK, 2017) and Jiichan no naisho no umi (Japan, 1993), paying specific attention to the employment of the natural world in both text and illustrations. Our analysis reveals that the temporal convergence at the heart of the intergenerational relationship is closely associated with non-human, even planetary, time. Natural spaces are partly nostalgic in these books, but they also present the possibility of other ways of thinking about time beyond the linear, anthropocentric model. Our comparison of Japanese and UK texts also suggests how adult-child relationships and the mobilization of the natural world in their depictions are contextually specific. Ultimately, the chapter reiterates the importance of thinking about aging from life-course and posthumanist perspectives.

  • Access to Document (DOI)

• 'Contemporary Narratives of Dementia in Japan.' In Paul Crawford and Paul Kadetz (eds), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Health Humanities

  Katsura Sako, Springer, 2023.10,  Page： 1-8

  , Accepted

  • Access to Document (DOI)

• ‘Ageing and Care in Contemporary Women’s Writing: Doris Lessing’s The Diary of a Good Neighbour and Margaret Drabble’s The Pure Gold Baby’ In Gina Wisker, Leanne Bibby and Heidi Yeandle (eds), Legacies and Lifespans in Contemporary Women's Writing

  Katsura Sako, Palgrave, 2023.07

  Contact page： 165-187

  • Access to Document (DOI)

• 'Dementia in Japanese Cinema: Family and Rural Nostalgia.' In Sarah Falcus, Heike Hartung and Raquel Medina (eds), Bloomsbury Handbook of Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film

  Katsura Sako, Bloomsbury, 2023.06

  Contact page： 313-324

• "A Few Good Old Men: Revising Ageing Masculinities in Last Tango in Halifax." In Sara Martín and M. Isabel Santaulària (eds), Detoxing Masculinity in Anglophone Literature and Culture: In Search of Good Men

  Maricel Oró-Piqueras and Katsura Sako, Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2023.03

  Contact page： 251-266 , Accepted

  　View Summary

  The ideal ageing masculinity is expressed in the fit able body that signifies physical and sexual functionality and productive citizenship. British TV series Last Tango in Halifax (2012–2020), however, questions this idealised configuration. Focusing on the main male protagonist, Alan Buttershaw, this chapter analyses the various ways in which the series depicts his caring personality and the vulnerable ageing masculinity that he represents, through romantic and intergenerational narratives and in relation to other characters who differently highlight and interrogate hegemonic masculinity. As the analysis demonstrates, Alan is one of the ‘few good old men’, a form of ageing masculinity characterised by caring and an openness to vulnerability, qualities that are often repressed in youth.

  • Access to Document (DOI)

display all >>

Papers 【 Display / hide 】

Papers 【 Display / hide 】

• The Family, Generation and Kinship in the Television Series Years and Years

  Katsura Sako and Maricel Oró-Piqueras

  Journal of British Cinema and Television (Edinburgh University Press)  23 ( 1 ) 72 - 89 2026

  Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Lead author, Accepted

  • Access to Document (DOI)
  • Access to Document (DOI)

• 'Gardens, Age and Generation in Children’s Picturebooks'

  Katsura Sako & Sarah Falcus

  Anglo Saxonica 23 ( 1 ) 1 - 11 2025.05

  Research paper (scientific journal), Corresponding author, Accepted

  • Access to Document (DOI)
  • Access to Document (DOI)

• “Gardens, Age and Generation in Children’s Picturebooks”

  Sako K., Falcus S.

  Anglo Saxonica 23 ( 1 )  2025

  　View Summary

  Children’s literature is inherently a dialogue between child and adult, or more broadly, those at different stages of the life course. Bringing age studies and studies of children’s literature together, this article considers how children’s literature depicts and explores age stages and intergenerationality, focusing on the role of the garden in this. In children’s literature, the garden often functions as a meeting place for the child and the older adult, a space that is associated with, and activates assumptions about, both childhood and older age. To explore this potential, we examine three contemporary picturebooks in English that depict an intergenerational relationship between a child(ren) and a grandparent, and include a garden central to the narrative: Roxane Marie Galliez and Seng Soun Ratanavanh’s Time for Bed, Miyuki (2017), Allan Ahlberg and Gillian Tyler’s The Snail House (2000) and Lizzy Stewart’s There’s a Tiger in the Garden (2016). As our analysis demonstrates, they represent the garden as a liminal space, where the associations with childhood and older age are mobilised in ways that both reinforce and challenge age norms and stereotypes as well as the dichotomous view of age stages.

  • Access to Document (DOI)

• 'Futurity, the life course and aging in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun'

  Katsura Sako & Sarah Falcus

  Frontiers of Narrative Studies (DeGruyter)  9 ( 1 ) 121 - 136 2023.07

  Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Lead author, Accepted

  • Access to Document (DOI)
  • Access to Document (DOI)

• Successful ageing and the spectre of the fourth age in the Netflix TV series Grace and Frankie

  Sako K., Oró-Piqueras M.

  Journal of Aging Studies 65 2023.06

  Research paper (scientific journal), Joint Work, Lead author, Accepted,  ISSN  08904065

  　View Summary

  With its potential to engage a large audience and mark emerging social tendencies and with the rich narrative space that the seriality can bring, TV series can be a valuable cultural site through which to explore ageing as an experience in time. The Netflix's longest-running TV series Grace and Frankie (2015–2022) exhibits such potential, bringing together ageing and friendship into the popular cultural domain. Set in the contemporary US, the show closely follows two over-70, newly divorced, female protagonists and friends, Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin). Depicting the new opportunities and experiences they gain and drawing on the star persona of Fonda and Tomlin, the show presents an optimistic narrative of ageing into old age. This optimism, however, is more ambivalent about ageing than it appears, as it emerges from the context of the neoliberalization of ageing in the US and other Western societies. Considering friendship, entrepreneurship, the ageing woman's body and sexuality, and care in the show, we demonstrate how the show's optimism is premised on the construction of the neoliberal, successfully ageing subject in the two protagonists and on the othering of the fourth age, “‘black hole’ of ageing,” as a time and space marked by the failing of the body, vulnerability and dependency (Higgs & Gilleard, 2015, 16). While the show's explicit engagement with the bodily ageing in some ways makes it more relevant to older audience, its evocation of the fourth age reflects and reinforces the broader cultural anxiety around it. Ultimately, the show brings in the fourth age only to reiterate the two protagonists' credentials as successful agers.

  • Access to Document (DOI)

display all >>

Papers, etc., Registered in KOARA 【 Display / hide 】

Papers, etc., Registered in KOARA 【 Display / hide 】

• Ageing, dementia, care in contemporary fiction

  Sako, Katsura

  科学研究費補助金研究成果報告書 2023

• Ageing and death in contemporary children's picturebooks in Japan and the UK

  Sako, Katsura

  学事振興資金研究成果実績報告書 (慶應義塾大学)  2023

• Ageing and illness in British and Japanese children's picturebooks 1950-2000 : historical and cross-cultural perspectives

  Sako, Katsura

  科学研究費補助金研究成果報告書 2022

• Cross-cultural analysis of dementia in picturebooks for children

  Sako, Katsura

  学事振興資金研究成果実績報告書 (慶應義塾大学)  2018

• Ageing and subjectivity in contemporary British fiction and culture

  Sako, Katsura

  科学研究費補助金研究成果報告書 2016

display all >>

Reviews, Commentaries, etc. 【 Display / hide 】

Reviews, Commentaries, etc. 【 Display / hide 】

• Review of Novels in English and Ageing

  Katsura Sako

  The Book Review Press (Bukyu Publishing Corporation)  3458   5 - 5 2020.08

  Book review, literature introduction, etc.

• Review of Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturing in Contemporary Japan by Jason Danely

  Katsura Sako

  Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdiscplinary Journal (The Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University)  5 2020.07

Presentations 【 Display / hide 】

Presentations 【 Display / hide 】

• “Not-so-secret Gardens: Age, Generation and ‘Greenness’ in Children’s Picturebooks”

  Katsura Sako and Sarah Falcus

  [International presentation]  Cultural Landscapes Seminar Series, 

  2026.03

  , 

  Oral presentation (invited, special), Centre for National Parks and Protected Areas, University of Cumbria

• “Ageing, Walking and Home in Walking Memoirs”

  Katsura Sako

  [International presentation]  Ageing and Space (Downing College, University of Cambridge) , 

  2025.12

  , 

  Oral presentation (general)

• "Kinship, the Generational Relationship and the Future in Contemporary Speculative Fiction"

  Katsura Sako

  Literature, Film, and the Desirability of Life Extension (University of Oxford) , 

  2025.12

  , 

  Oral presentation (invited, special)

• "Ageing and Narratives of Walking"

  Katsura Sako

  The Lifespan: Perspectives on Ageing and the Life Course from the Medical Humanities, the Health Sciences and Age Studies, 

  2025.06

  , 

  Oral presentation (general)

• 'Ageing and Walking a Path'

  Katsura Sako

  [International presentation]  European Network in Aging Studies (Lleida) , 

  2025.04

  , 

  Oral presentation (general), University of Lleida

display all >>

Research Projects of Competitive Funds, etc. 【 Display / hide 】

Research Projects of Competitive Funds, etc. 【 Display / hide 】

• Ageing, Time and the Future in Contemporary Fiction

  2023.04

  -

  2028.03

  Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research , Research grant, Principal investigator

• Ageing and Illness in British and Japanese Children's Picturebooks 1950-2000: Historical and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

  2018.04

  -

  2023.03

  Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Research grant, Principal investigator

• Ageing, Dementia, Care in Contemporary Fiction

  2017.04

  -

  2023.03

  Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Katsura Sako, Research grant, Principal investigator

• Meanings and Experiences of Ageing and Subjectivity in Contemporary British Fiction and Culture

  2013.04

  -

  2017.03

  Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Research grant, Principal investigator

• Ageing in Post-war and Contemporary British Literature

  2010.04

  -

  2013.03

  Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research, Research grant, Principal investigator

display all >>

Courses Taught 【 Display / hide 】

Courses Taught 【 Display / hide 】

• LITERATURE 2

  2024

• LITERATURE 1

  2024

• ENGLISH SEMINAR (UPPER INTERMEDIATE)

  2024

• ENGLISH (STUDY SKILLS)

  2024

• ENGLISH (STUDY SKILLS)

  2023

display all >>

Academic Activities 【 Display / hide 】

Academic Activities 【 Display / hide 】

• European Network in Aging Studies Advisory Board Member

  2022.10

  -

  Present

Memberships in Academic Societies 【 Display / hide 】

Memberships in Academic Societies 【 Display / hide 】

• European Network in Aging Studies, 

  2011.10

  -

  Present

• Contemporary Women's Writing Association, 

  2011.04

  -

  Present

• 日本英文学会, 

  2003.04

  -

  Present