Writing

My writing has been described as “illuminating… a transportive, thrilling escape” (Publishers Weekly), “lively… crackling with wit and humor and emotional honesty” (Professor Aaron Fox, Columbia University), “so utterly engaging” (Professor Steven Pond, Cornell University), and embodying “a frankness that is often simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny, cringe-worthy, and insightful” (Professor Kevin Fellezs, Columbia University).

My first book, JAPANTHEM: Counter-Cultural Experiences, Cross-Cultural Remixes (Three Rooms Press, 2022), is a collection of vignettes that explore the analytical possibilities of storytelling (many of which were featured in my doctoral thesis on contemporary Japanese music). This is the only book to juxtapose traditional, J-pop, and underground Japanese music at once; it’s also the only book on Japanese underground music written by a woman. Select blurbs and reviews can be found at the bottom of this page.

I write a column for the Tokyo-based indie music magazine Ele-King (essentially the Pitchfork of Japan). Japanese readers can find more of my articles in the Winter 2023 and 2024, as well as Summer 2025 print manuscripts.

Among other writings to be published in 2026, I have a forthcoming feature for the Brooklyn Rail on what I call “underground music economics” (and a sweet little essay for the Long Trail News).

Other publications include:

Forthcoming Projects:

Two television pilots (2024): please contact me directly for more information

Am I, Too, Not a Pianist? (2024): a darkly funny play that questions the boundary between master and amateur, as well as technique and interpretation.

Doctor Waitress (complete and seeking representation, 2023): a memoir about leaving academia, an anthropological snapshot of the archetypically Italian social club where I started over as a waitress in Brooklyn in 2018, and a story of a woman determined to make it as a creative in New York City.

The Metaphysical Bartender (tentative title, in progress 2018 – present): an experimental biography/theoretical primer cataloguing the philosophical and mathematical theories espoused by this guy: a beloved cult-hero Brooklyn bartender.

Common Sense Japanese (in progress, 2023 – present ): a no-nonsense basic Japanese language textbook (interspersed with [fun!] essays about the author’s experiences with particularly tricky grammatical structures).

Reviews Official and Unofficial for JAPANTHEM:

“Jillian Marshall gives us an unvarnished account of her journey through graduate studies in anthropology and her time conducting fieldwork in Japan, which is, by turns, exhilarating, gut wrenching, poignant and comical. She doesn’t hold back, peeling off the layers of her discomfort with academe as well as her negotiations with the intricacies of Japanese sociality, which more often than not leaves her both seething with frustration and smothered by anxiety. Writing with a frankness that is often simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny, cringe-worthy, and insightful, Marshall’s brazen honesty gives us something beyond the more typical falling in and out of love with Japan narrative many non-Japanese recount after living for any length of time there. Neither a love song to Japan nor a takedown of Japanophilia, Marshall offers a nuanced “outsider’s insider” picture of Tokyo, Osaka, and Akita, introducing readers to musicians as diverse as the older female traditional bon odori dancers to the young male experimental dance music DJs she interacts with, concluding with a bittersweet rapprochement with a country that she has always had, as she puts it in the title to chapter three, a “hate/love” relationship.” —Kevin A. Fellezs, Associate Professor of Music, Columbia University

“In this illuminating debut, Marshall offers an outsider’s look into Japanese culture via its music . . . Throughout, her sharp observations are interspersed with moving moments of introspection, as when she quietly muses that Japan may be ‘the only place in the world… where my heart feels like it can rest.’ This transportive work is a thrilling escape.” —Publishers Weekly

“Japanthem is a lively, sparkling, and very personal book, both about Japanese music and culture and about Marshall’s ambivalent relationship to academia. Born as a doctoral dissertation, the book couldn’t be further from the dry and scholarly reading experience of an academic book, which is the idea. Yet the author’s expertise and lived experience as a ‘researcher’ figure centrally in the story she tells, and her knowledge of Japan’s musics, culture, media, and language. Part travel writing, part memoir, part ethnography, Japanthem immerses you in the author’s encounters with diverse facets of Japan and its music. The portrait of Japan that emerges is quirky, funny, and humane, both loving and, at times, appalled. Marshall closely observes Japanese musical culture and yet holds it at a certain distance, seen honestly through her outsider’s eyes. Throughout, Marshall’s writing crackles with wit and humor and emotional honesty, richly drawn characters and complicated situations.” —Aaron A. Fox, Associate Professor of Music, Columbia University; author, Real Country: Music and Language in Working-Class Culture

“Jill Marshall’s writing is so utterly engaging . . . Her style reminds me of Molly Ivins at her most cutting and sarcastic and breathtakingly honest. Her methodology and her self-reflective authorial stance remind me of John Miller Chernoff’s African Rhythm and African Sensibility(University of Chicago Press, 1978). Or the “comedy of academic manners” of David Lodge’s The Campus Trilogy novels. —Steven F. Pond, Associate Professor of Music, Cornell University; author, Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters: The Making of Jazz’s First Platinum Album

“Jillian Marshall is a kindred spirit: I too love Japan, music, and champion the bridging of academia with the public sphere. What a fun, accessible journey in a place considered too often, and incorrectly, as inscrutable.”  —Nancy Snow, Senior Adviser, Kreab Tokyo; author, Japan’s Information War

“I read the whole thing in one sitting”— seven separate people, including a publisher that didn’t end up going with me and my father

”I disagree with some of the choices you made, but I love you anyway” — my 96-year-old Great Aunt