Anri Yasuda Wins Modern Japan History Association’s Conroy First Book Prize for ‘Beauty Matters’
MJHA hails a literary study for exploring the Japanese novel as "a uniquely capacious instrument for social critique and political agency."
The Weatherhead East Asian Institute is thrilled to congratulate Anri Yasuda, assistant professor of Japanese in the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Virginia, on winning the 2026 F. Hilary Conroy First Book Prize from the Modern Japan History Association (MJHA) for her book Beauty Matters: Modern Japanese Literature and the Question of Aesthetics, 1890–1930.
Published by Columbia University Press in 2024, Beauty Matters is a volume in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute series. It focuses on a handful of Japanese fiction writers at the turn of the last century—Natsume Sōseki and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa foremost among them—as they balanced private, intensely personal aesthetic and philosophical concerns with the claims society and culture made on the individual at a time of disorienting change.
The F. Hilary Conroy First Book Prize is awarded annually to an outstanding English-language book on modern Japan or Japanese history by a first-time author. In the MJHA announcement of the 2026 award, Prize Committee Chair Miram Kingsberg Kadia of the University of Colorado wrote:
Beauty Matters investigates the ineffable, non-discursive qualities of socially engaged art through the Japanese novel. The book traces a genealogy of meditations on the seemingly contradictory task taken up by Japan's self-consciously modern writers: to expose unpleasant psychological and social truths while producing aesthetically pleasing compositions. In her own beautiful prose, Yasuda plumbs the writings, lives, and visual art inspiration of Natsume Sōseki, Mori Ogai, Akutagawa Ryūnosuke, and Mushanokōji Saneatsu, showing the novel as a uniquely capacious instrument for social critique and political agency in the early twentieth century.
Paul Barclay of Lafayette College and Nick Kapur of Rutgers University also served on this year’s Prize Committee.
Professor Yasuda received her BA, MA, and PhD from Columbia University, and also earned an MA from Waseda University in Tokyo.
“This is a wonderful honor, and I am very grateful,” she said of her award. “It is particularly meaningful for me that my work, about how literature goes beyond purely ‘literary’ concerns to engage critically and affectively with various pressing issues in modern life, has been recognized by the MJHA, an organization that supports the study of modern Japan from multiple disciplinary perspectives. I thank the Weatherhead Institute for their support, and everyone at Columbia who helped shaped my thinking that grew into this book.”
Interested readers can learn more about Beauty Matters via the author Q & A we published on this site last summer. We salute Professor Yasuda on her well-deserved honor.