Achim Stegmüller

In his new novel *The Process of Modernization*, Achim Stegmüller masterfully weaves together the peasant uprisings of 500 years ago with power struggles at a university in Kyoto—told like a Brueghel-esque “hidden object” painting. At the center of it all are art history professor Kobayashi and a young, melancholic German teacher who is tasked with organizing an art history symposium on the Peasants’ War. The task fascinates him, but he is increasingly drawn into a maelstrom of revelations and historical reflections, personal conflicts, and university intrigues. *
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A panorama that tells of conflicts of loyalty, unfulfilled longings, and a glimmer of hope. And also of a person who gradually realizes that he is being oppressed.

Achim Stegmüller lives in Kyoto, where he works as a German lecturer at a university. Around the turn of the millennium, he studied at the German Literature Institute in Leipzig, then Japanese Studies in Tübingen. He publishes prose and poetry and has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Else Lasker-Schüler Drama Prize for *Als wir uns in Shanghai begegneten* (2010) and the Kyoto Literature Award in the Overseas category (2024 and 2026).

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