Lecture

15 January 2026 at 6.30pm

A text like Finnegans Wake can understandably be met with a degree of intimidation from an unfamiliar audience. But what if it were possible to make the experience of browsing through the text easy and enjoyable?

The Finnegans Web project in Japan was launched on Bloomsday 2025 with the aim of making Finnegans Wake accessible to all. On Thursday, 15 January 2026 at 6:30pm, Finnegans Web co-founder Kenji Hayakawa presented an overview of the project as well as the inner workings of its two main pillars, the Notes and the New Translation. This talk offered practical insights into ways of encouraging and supporting a wider readership to pick up and enjoy a book like Finnegans Wake.

Kenji Hayakawa is a translator and interpreter based in Dublin, Ireland. Working with the English-Japanese pair, he has translated a wide range of material including books by Yoko Tawada, Noam Chomsky, Dipesh Chakrabarty and others. He is the founder and host of Reading Finnegans Wake, a Japanese-language weekly livestream programme endorsed by the Embassy of Ireland in Japan, the James Joyce Centre and the Blooms & Barnacles Podcast. Currently, he is working on a new Japanese translation of Finnegans Wake.

You can access his translation at www.finneganswake.net.

The James Joyce Centre is supported by the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.