In Discriminating Tales: The Politics of Buraku [Outcast] Narratives in Modern Japan, Sayuri Oyama, a candidate for the Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures, examines the persistence of discrimination against burakumin, Japan’s largest minority, considered to be the descendants of outcasts from the Tokugawa period (1600-1867). Oyama is concerned with how burakumin have been portrayed as subjects in literature, as well as how they have written and critically read literature about themselves. More broadly, this is to ask how literary texts function in the public discourse on marginalized identity in Japan.