Giorgio Amitrano

Amitrano grew up in Naples, graduating from the University of Naples "L'Orientale"; his professors included Maria Teresa Orsi, Luigi Polese Remaggi and Namkhai Norbu. He won a scholarship to Tokyo in 1984. The following year he moved to Osaka, where he stayed until 1989, also teaching at Osaka University.[1][2]

He currently is full professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of Asian, African and Mediterranean Studies at L'Orientale.[3] He also presided the Faculty of Political Science of the same university, where he taught Language and Culture of Japan.[4] In 2012, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs nominated him head of the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo for a five-year term.[1]

He is the translator to Italian of the works of Banana Yoshimoto (alongside Gala Maria Follaco) and Haruki Murakami, as well as having translated some of the works of Yasunari Kawabata and Yasushi Inoue. His translations earned him the Alcantara Prize in 1999, the Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 2001, the Grinzane Cavour Prize in 2008, and the Monselice Prize (Special Jury Prize for Literary and Scientific Translation) in 2012.[2][5] In 2020, he was awarded membership of the Order of the Rising Sun.[6]

He is deputy editor of the journal Poetica; since 2004 he has written in the monthly magazine on literary and figurative arts Paragone, and he also collaborates to a number of Italian newspapers and cultural publications: Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, Il manifesto, Alias, L'Indice dei libri del mese and Nuovi Argomenti.

As a main author, the Italian School of East Asian Studies published his volume The New Japanese Novel: Popular Culture and Literary Tradition in the Work of Murakami Haruki and Yoshimoto Banana (1996) and Feltrinelli Il mondo di Banana Yoshimoto (1999, expanded in 2007). In 2007, he wrote the introduction to I miei cani by artist Giosetta Fioroni. In 2018, he published with DeA Planeta Libri Iro iro: il Giappone tra pop e sublime, where he analyzes present-day Japan between tradition and modernity.

• Amitrano makes a brief cameo in the role of a tour guide in the 1997 film The Vesuvians, in the segment La salita by Mario Martone.