Steve Rabson completed a PhD in Japanese literature at Harvard University in 1979. Since that year he has taught at Brown University in the Departments of East Asian Studies, Comparative Literature, and Linguistics. He has published research on the fiction of Ōe Kenzaburō and Nagai Kafū and the poetry of Yosano Akiko, Shimazaki Tōson, and Yamanokuchi Baku. He is the author of Okinawa: Two Postwar Novellas (1989). Between 1966 and 1968 he served in the United States Army, with overseas assignments that included eight months in Okinawa.
