The Limitless Possibilities of a Literature Beyond Borders: A Conversation with Tawada Yōko

Oct 5, 2021

Tawada Yōko’s many accolades include the prestigious Kleist Prize, awarded to an outstanding work of literature written in German. Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit is one of Germany’s leading scholars of Japan, who has received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Prize, Germany’s most prestigious academic award, for her scholarship on Japanese literature. The two met in Berlin for a wide-ranging discussion that covered adventures real and imaginary, translation, gender, and the future of the human race.

Bilingual Author Tawada Yōko: Crossing Political and Linguistic Borders

Tawada Yôko / Écrire en deux langues pour la promotion d’une littérature mondiale

Taniguchi Sachiyo 

December 10, 2020

Tawada Yōko, a Japanese writer who lives in Germany and writes in both Japanese and German, has become one of the world’s leading literary voices, winning Germany’s Kleist Prize in 2016 and an American National Book Award in 2018.

Yoko Tawada Conjures a World Between Languages

Writing one novel, Tawada alternated languages at five-sentence intervals.

Illustration by Pei-Hsin Cho

The Novelist Yoko Tawada Conjures a World Between Languages

Writing in Japanese and German, Tawada explores borderlands in which people and words have lost their moorings.

By Julian Lucas
February 21, 2022

According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. But their creator—a novelist, a poet, and a playwright—has chosen her estrangement. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even natural, about the way we use words. “Even one’s mother tongue,” she maintains, “is a translation.”

Biographies / Yoko Tawada

AT WORK

Yoko Tawada

Tawada’s stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.

New York Times

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Goethe Medal. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, and The Emissary.

By Yoko Tawada

Three Streets

Scattered All Over the Earth

The Emissary

Memoirs of a Polar Bear

The Bridegroom Was a Dog

The Naked Eye

Facing the Bridge

Where Europe Begins

ND