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• Scattered All Over the Earth New Directions (New York, NY), 2022

1. Scattered all over the earth LCCN 2021044581 Type of material Book Personal name Tawada, Yōko, 1960- author. Uniform title Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete. English Main title Scattered all over the earth / Yoko Tawada ; translated by Margaret Mitsutani. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : New Directions Paperbook Original, 2022. Projected pub date 2203 Description pages cm ISBN 9780811229289 (paperback) (ebook)

• Three Streets (Yoko Tawada (Author), Margaret Mitsutani (Translator)) - 2022 New Directions , New York, NY
• Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (Yoko Tawada (Author), Susan Bernofsky (Translator)) - 2024 New Directions , New York, NY
• Suggested in the Stars (Yoko Tawada (Author), Margaret Mitsutani (Translator)) - 2024 New Directions , New York, NY

• Yoko Tawada website - http://yokotawada.de/english/

  Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, educated at Waseda University and has lived in Germany since 1982, where she received her Ph.D. in German literature. She received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog. She writes in both German and Japanese, and in 1996, she won the Adalbert-von-Chamisso Prize, a German award recognizing foreign writers for their contributions to German culture. She also received the Goethe-Medal, an official decoration of the Federal Republic of Germany and the prestigious Kleist Prize (2016).

  E-Mail-Address: tawadaoo@yahoo.co.jp

• The New Yorker - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/the-novelist-yoko-tawada-conjures-a-world-between-languages

  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
  Portrait of Yoko Tawada.
  Writing one novel, Tawada alternated languages at five-sentence intervals.Illustration by Pei-Hsin Cho

  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.”

  Tawada’s latest novel, “Scattered All Over the Earth” (New Directions), imagines a world in which Japan has disappeared. Stranded in Denmark, a refugee named Hiruko searches for fellow-survivors, torn between longing for her mother tongue and the desire to fashion a new one. Her odyssey becomes a fairy-tale test of the commonplace idea that, as one character puts it, “the language of a native speaker is perfectly fused with her soul.” Tawada has been described as the world’s leading practitioner of “exophonic literature,” or writing in a foreign language, a description that her unique practice has made applicable to nearly all her work. “I have to let my German go when I work with Japanese,” she has said. “I don’t want to get familiar with one language.” The constant shuttling has more to do with existential displacement than with cross-cultural exchange: Tawada, as the new novel’s English translator, Margaret Mitsutani, has observed, is “not nearly as interested in crossing borders as she is in the borders themselves.”

  Sometimes these boundaries are geographic. In her short story “The Shadow Man,” Tawada imagines the philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo’s journey from enslavement in Ghana to the courts of eighteenth-century Europe, pausing over the long ocean crossing. In other cases, the divide is metaphysical. Tawada’s novella “The Bridegroom Was a Dog,” a slim erotic fable, concerns a schoolteacher whose suitor may or may not be a dog. Most of the time, the borders themselves occupy a borderland between real and unreal.

  In Tawada’s dreamlike travelogue “Where Europe Begins,” an early short story, a young Japanese woman travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway tries to identify where, exactly, one continent shades into another, but none of the passengers can agree. Gradually, she descends into a trance brought on by reading Tungus and Samoyed fairy tales, which cut across the journey like a polar wind. The woman learns from an atlas that Japan is, tectonically, a “child of Siberia that had turned on its mother and was now swimming alone in the Pacific . . . a seahorse, which in Japanese is called Tatsu-no-otoshigo—the lost child of the dragon.” She begins to dread the finality of arrival.

  As a young woman, Tawada took the same six-thousand-mile railway trip, on a visit to Germany in 1979; she left Japan permanently three years later. “When I was a child, I thought all people in the world spoke only Japanese,” she has said. But a larger world of letters revealed itself through her father, who owned a bookshop in Tokyo and imported titles from abroad. Tawada studied Russian literature at Waseda University and yearned to pursue further study in the Soviet Union—an impossibility, as it turned out, because of the Cold War. Instead, Tawada went to Hamburg, where she initially took a job at one of the companies that supplied her father’s bookshop. At Hamburg University, she fell under the influence of writers like Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin, and especially Paul Celan, a German-speaking Jew from Romania, whose poetry became a model for her anti-nationalist vision of language and translation.

  Tawada published her first book, a bilingual poetry collection, in 1987, and steadily won acclaim in Germany and Japan. A major breakthrough came in 2004, with the novel “The Naked Eye.” She wrote it in German and Japanese simultaneously, alternating languages at five-sentence intervals, as though playing a solitary game of exquisite corpse. Perhaps her finest work, it is narrated by a Vietnamese high-school student who’s abducted in East Berlin before delivering a speech to other Communist youth leaders. She escapes to Paris, where what might have been a tragedy shades into a down-and-out adventure as absurd and exhilarating as Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground.”

  The girl takes refuge from street life in an obsession with the films of Catherine Deneuve. Her trips to the cinema become portals to an alternate reality—never mind that she can’t understand a word. Eventually, a wealthy compatriot takes her in, but the girl finds that her “stomach” can no longer endure Vietnamese, and she refuses to learn French. Movies are the only language that her freedom requires, as she confides to Deneuve’s image: “I was studying a science that had no name. I was studying it on the screen, along with you.”

  The displacement is yet more surreal in “Memoirs of a Polar Bear,” a saga published in 2011 about three generations of ursine acrobats in Berlin. It is, as improbable as it sounds, a historical novel: Tawada fictionalizes the lives of Tosca, the Canadian-born star of the East German state circus, and her son, Knut, whom she rejected at birth, and whose miraculous survival at the Berlin Zoo sparked a worldwide craze in the early two-thousands. Tawada augments the family with an imperious matriarch from Moscow, who defects to West Germany and writes a best-selling memoir entitled “Thunderous Applause for My Tears.”

  The novel is at once a sardonic parody of émigré literature, a meditation on climate change, and an earnest consideration of what it means to live in the interstices of species, countries, and cultures—especially those around the Arctic, where so many borders disappear. Tawada returns again and again to the miraculous unlikelihood of all communication. In a trick called “the kiss of death,” a human trainer places a sugar cube on her tongue and offers it to her polar-bear companion. The bear and the human have improvised the stunt in a shared dream, which neither can be certain is real until the moment their tongues meet. “A human soul turned out to be less romantic than I’d imagined,” the bear reflects. “It was made up primarily of languages—not just ordinary, comprehensible languages, but also many broken shards of language, the shadows of languages, and images that couldn’t turn into words.”

  After the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, in 2011, Tawada’s preoccupation with linguistic precarity found a new focus. She was among the many Japanese writers who spoke out against atomic energy, and when she toured the abandoned city she was struck by the fragments of orphaned language: a “Closed Today” sign on the door of a beauty salon, unread newspapers stacked in an office. They were mute testaments, she wrote, to a meltdown in “the core of trust for continuity”—an unease that she channelled, in 2014, in her novel “The Emissary.” Set in an irradiated Japan where the young die early while their elderly caretakers are condemned to live forever and watch, it imagines a society decaying from within. Tokyo is abandoned: “In banquet halls, the smell of cigarettes smoked long ago froze in the silver silence . . . and rats took leisurely naps inside high-heeled shoes.”

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  Tawada satirizes the reactionary isolationism that so often preys on disaster. The remnants of Japan’s government ban travel and foreign imports, in an echo of the islands’ isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate. The language withers; the protagonist, an elderly writer, notes, “The shelf life of words was getting shorter all the time.” Meanwhile, a secret society sends the young abroad to find help. The novel’s original title, “Kentoshi,” alludes to a series of delegations sent by Japan’s imperial court in the seventh century to study China, whence they brought back everything from new Buddhist sects to tea. Bold exchanges, the novel suggests, will be needed to survive the future’s ecological devastation—or even to find words to describe it.

  “Scattered All Over the Earth,” Tawada’s playful and deeply inventive new novel, isn’t quite a sequel to “The Emissary,” but it shares the conceit of a Japan amputated from the world. The first installment of a trilogy, it begins in Copenhagen, where a graduate student in linguistics named Knut is watching a televised panel on vanished countries. Among the speakers is Hiruko, a young woman originally from “an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia.” During her years of seeking asylum, she has invented a language called Panska, which is intelligible throughout Scandinavia. Knut is transfixed: “The smooth surface of my native language broke apart, and I saw fragments of it glittering on her tongue.” He finds Hiruko and joins her search for another surviving native speaker of Japanese.

  Hiruko lives in Odense, Denmark, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, where she teaches refugee children to speak Panska using folkloric picture dramas. Tawada applies the same fairy-tale conventions—mistaken identity, unexpected metamorphosis—to the dilemmas of finding linguistic shelter in a world of rising seas and ceaseless migration.

  When people lose their homes, words lose their moorings: is it better to resist the drift or to swim with the tide? Panska may be the future, but Hiruko still yearns for “my native language, the one I used to breathe in along with the air that filled my lungs, that went down my gullet along with the sweet-and-sour taste of soy sauce and mirin and seeped into the cotton lining of my stomach.”

  Linguistic dilemmas repeatedly find their way to the culinary realm. One recurring joke is the European assimilation of sushi, which Knut innocently describes to Hiruko as “Finnish home cooking.” When she objects, Knut shows her a local sushi shop decorated with a Finnish cartoon creature resembling a hippo—Moomin, from Tove Jansson’s beloved children’s series—as proof of the cuisine’s nationality. But Hiruko counters that Moomin, too, is Japanese, noting the nineties anime show that catapulted the character to worldwide celebrity. She replies in Panska:

  moomin to my country as exile came . . . finland between ussr and western europe in difficult balance was caught, great stress for moomin loss of weight caused, to restore round body shape moomin exile. became, as lover of snow, in my area lived.

  Such games of telephone intensify as more people attach themselves to Hiruko’s quest. Knut accompanies her to the German city of Trier, where they hope to meet a Japanese chef at a workshop on making dashi. But when they arrive they learn that the chef, Tenzo, has suddenly left town. His crestfallen girlfriend, Nora, a German, agrees to join them in following him, as does Akash, a trans woman from India who falls in love with Knut. The characters all take turns as narrator, contributing their own incongruous understanding; Tawada elevates the comedy of mistranslation to a principle of narrative.

  Tenzo, as it happens, isn’t Japanese at all. He’s an Indigenous Greenlander originally named Nanook, who stumbled into a Japanese identity while living in Denmark and Germany; because of his work and his anime-inspired hair style, everyone, including Nora, has assumed that he’s from the “land of sushi.” The character is an elaborate joke at the expense of ethnolinguistic authenticity: he has, ironically, assumed a Japanese identity to escape the assumptions around being an “Eskimo” in Denmark. Yet Tenzo’s escape from one authenticity trap only leads him to another, when he’s forced to leave for Oslo to keep Nora from learning that he isn’t Japanese.

  His masquerade also reveals unexpected lines of kinship. “Nanook” is the name of a legendary Inuit polar-bear king—an allusion to Tawada’s earlier novel and her long-standing interest in the Far North as a realm beyond national borders. When Hiruko asks Tenzo where he’s from, he says Karafuto, a former prefecture of Japan that is now Russia’s island of Sakhalin. It’s a place where Indigenous Siberians once lived alongside groups native to the Japanese archipelago, such as the Ainu. A further connection is suggested when Knut reveals that his great-grandfather was a polar explorer. Perhaps these lost children of the Arctic are related, after all.

  Tawada wrings a lot of punning mileage from the concept of a “mother tongue.” Her male characters are all in flight from women. Tenzo is fleeing not just Nora but also a Danish benefactor, who gave him a scholarship out of maternal affection for the “Eskimos.” Knut is avoiding his real mother, mostly because of her instinctive grasp of the way he uses language to evade responsibility. His repulsion leads him toward Hiruko, whose Panska sounds freeingly strange—but she, of course, is in the grip of an ambivalent longing for her native speech. The linguistic love triangles culminate in a somewhat chaotic dénouement, filled with comedy and coincidence. Hiruko does eventually find another native speaker, but the encounter comes with a twist that undermines the whole search.

  Tawada has always had a talent for ventriloquizing eccentrics, following singular minds through fugue and limbo. “Scattered All Over the Earth” departs from this model by introducing a team of such characters—a shift from exploring the inner worlds of linguistic displacement toward Babel-like allegory. As metafiction, it succeeds brilliantly, sketching a grim global dilemma with the sort of wit and humanism that Italo Calvino, in a discussion of lightness in literature, described as “weightless gravity.”

  But the novel occasionally falters in its efforts to imbue the characters with psychological depth; splitting the difference between a high-concept fairy tale and a realist novel is a hard trick to pull off. Family traumas and romantic dramas can feel like laborious pretexts to illuminate some aspect of language as lived experience. Akash, for instance, is conveniently drafted into the narrative by falling in love with Knut not long after he recognizes her language: “You knew that we were speaking Marathi, didn’t you? I am truly amazed.” There’s a lot of syntactically stiff exposition. A reader who doesn’t know Japanese can only guess at how much of this rests with Mitsutani’s translation—and how much is Tawada’s stylistic choice. Perhaps a novel about the messy birth of a language isn’t supposed to sound “natural,” a concept that Tawada has always viewed with suspicion.

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  Hanging over the search for a native speaker is all the ethnocentric baggage that the concept implies. When Hiruko and the others reach Oslo, they find that they have arrived in the wake of Anders Behring Breivik’s devastating 2011 mass shooting, a grisly protest against immigration. The atrocity functions as a strange footnote to their adventure: Tenzo is meant to compete in a dashi competition at an Oslo sushi restaurant owned by an ultranationalist who also happens to be named Breivik—and who soon falls under suspicion of killing a whale. The turn of events skewers Japanese and Norwegian nationalism (both countries attempt to justify whaling through appeals to culinary tradition) by undercutting each society’s imagined uniqueness. Recipes, whales, and words all get around; even in a culture’s most chauvinistic totems, Tawada seems to say, there are traces of the foreign.

  Her novel is, in fact, an oblique rejoinder to the founding text of its language’s literary tradition: “Kojiki,” an eighth-century chronicle of the archipelago’s divine origins, and the oldest extant book in Japanese. Tawada has often mocked its austerity, especially its telling of how deities conceived the sun goddess—and, through her, the imperial family. “Scattered All Over the Earth,” by contrast, pays homage to a rejected child of the gods: Hiruko, the bastard “leech-child” of a goddess who has violated the mores of feminine modesty. Like Moses, Hiruko is set adrift in a boat made of reeds, a dead end of Japanese myth that Tawada rewrites as a feminist, migrant-centered beginning. What might it look like, she asks, if the heroes of our myths weren’t founders of nations but stateless castaways, inventors of motherless tongues? ♦

  Published in the print edition of the February 28, 2022, issue, with the headline “Motherless Tongue.”

• The Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/11/16/between-two-languages-an-interview-with-yoko-tawada/

  Between Two Languages: An Interview with Yoko Tawada
  By Alexandra Pereira November 16, 2018AT WORK

  Yoko Tawada (b. 1960), who writes in Japanese and German and has been translated around the world, studied Russian literature in Tokyo before hotfooting it to Hamburg: “Russian writing was just the greatest, but I couldn’t study in the Soviet Union for political reasons, so I got a job in Hamburg.” She settled in Berlin, and has now published numerous novels, plays, poems, and essays. Her latest novel, The Emissary (translated by Margaret Mitsutani), won the inaugural National Book Award for translated literature this week.

  Among the finest of Tawada’s works are short stories about adapting to new cultures, both physically and linguistically. The daughter of a nonfiction translator and academic bookseller, Tawada learned to read in over five languages; she speaks English, but doesn’t write it. “I feel in between two languages, and that’s big enough,” she told me. Her stories often turn on feeling outside the culture, as an immigrant, as a citizen witnessing great national change, or even as a tourist.

  In between collecting several other prizes, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Goethe Medal, Tawada has fashioned the dream bohemian existence for herself in Berlin, writing forewords and books and collaborating with the likes of Wim Wenders and Ulrike Ottinger.

  When we met at Denmark’s Louisiana Literature Festival this past summer, I made it a personal mission to ask Tawada polar bear questions she hadn’t heard before. Tawada, who has a long-standing interest in the Cold War and socialism, based the protagonist of her best-selling Memoirs of a Polar Bear on the Berlin Zoo’s star resident, Knut, who was born and raised in captivity, and died in captivity as well. “Danish sounds quite polar-bear-ish,” the author said. Tawada peppers her speech with German phrases and portmanteaus. She is cheeky, full of light, and modestly, sagaciously witty.

  INTERVIEWER

  When do you write?

  TAWADA

  I look like a person who cannot think when I wake up, because I’m still quite between the sleep and the dream and the waking, and that’s the best time for business.

  INTERVIEWER

  Of the three bears’ stories in Memoirs of a Polar Bear, which was the most challenging to write? Did you feel a deeper responsibility, emotionally, to any one of the three?

  TAWADA

  The first bear [Knut’s grandmother, a dancer turned author fleeing Soviet Russia], perhaps. And Knut was in my mind with each of them, naturally, but I am not Knut.

  INTERVIEWER

  You’re not?

  TAWADA

  I’m not Knut! The second bear is also okay … and there it was most difficult to measure the historical facts, to research.

  INTERVIEWER

  I noticed the way you switch, in the book, between the words paw and hand.

  TAWADA

  Yes, it’s a story about human and animal rights. The circus was important for the socialists, it demonstrated a control of nature. In the Middle Ages, court cases were brought against animals. Essentially, though, Memoirs is a novel about writing, and it’s inspired by Kafka, Heinrich Heine, Bruno Schulz. On a symbolic level, the Cold War is what drives the bears. Snow is so important, not warmth or the sun. Winter is a time when we are thinking more deeply.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you feel that writing for you, as a multilinguist, is an anarchic act?

  TAWADA

  Being multilingual is tricky. I feel more as though I am between two languages, and that feels like enough. To study that in-between space has given me so much poetry. I don’t feel like one of those international people who juggles many tongues.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you spend much time in nature?

  TAWADA

  German people often go to the forest, and I like it, too. In Tokyo, they don’t have the forest, so people have bonsai trees as their computer wallpaper and go “forest bathing” via their screens. I must say, I prefer Norway’s forests and landscapes. For meditative reasons I love to do Tai Chi in Berlin.

  INTERVIEWER

  In The Emissary, Japan isolates itself from the world after a disaster. Children become frail, and the elderly are the only ones with real agency. Yoshiro witnesses the decay of his great-grandson. You write, “When he had seen Mumei’s baby teeth drop out one after another like pomegranate pulp, leaving his mouth smeared like blood, Yoshiro had been so distressed he’d wandered aimlessly around the house for a while.” He also has a close relationship with his knife. “When he grasped the handle, a second heart began to beat in Yoshiro’s hand.” Why this violent imagery?

  TAWADA

  The Japanese knife is just so very good. The idea is about quitting the industry of cars and modern electrical appliances and going back to the things Japan produces very well.

  INTERVIEWER

  In The Emissary it’s the older generation who must keep the frail, younger generation alive. How did this idea come to you?

  TAWADA

  On top of the aging population in Japan, there was the Fukushima disaster. The old people did not become sick from nuclear poisoning, but small children did. Some of the elderly claim they are impervious to it. It’s also a story about the isolation of Japan following national disasters.

  INTERVIEWER

  Japan does seem to be a modern, advanced country, and yet it is hit by natural and chemical disasters like no other.

  TAWADA

  And there’s an island mentality still, even after the event. That people must stay in the damaged territory and rebuild it. People in Europe are different. People fled Chernobyl.

  INTERVIEWER

  The Japanese sensibility of staying with the pain and learning, rather than abandoning: that seems slightly masochistic, but also Shintoist?

  TAWADA

  Absolutely. It comes from history: it was always better to stay than to leave. To stay independent and to remain connected to the ancient. In the fictional world of The Emissary, new public holidays are declared. I’ve always liked the sound of the Day of the Ocean [created in 1941 to commemorate the Meiji emperor and his 1876 voyage in the Meiji Maru] and Day of the Mountain [inaugurated December 11, 2016], et cetera, but in reality, because most of them were created under the former emperor, I don’t like them. It’s the government’s way of getting around the law that forbids tying politics with religion. The Japanese cannot, for example, celebrate the emperor’s birthday with a holiday. That’s Shintoism. Instead they have something like Ocean Day. Much like in East Germany.

  INTERVIEWER

  There’s a sense of nostalgia in the book. Yoshiro yearns for the simple days of yesteryear. “This was how Yoshiro wanted to live: shedding not blood, not tears, but a steady stream of juice.” Do you feel that your student days in early-eighties Germany—a relatively free-spirited, happy time, by all accounts—laid the foundations for the novels you’ve produced in recent years?

  TAWADA

  Everything began for me in Hamburg in the eighties. It was like nowhere else, you could just go in and out of any classes you liked. It opened up my learning and my reading. In my early Russian-literature days, Dostoyevsky became a sickness, an addiction for me. Then came Walter Benjamin, Edgar Allan Poe, Gertrude Stein, and Jorge Luis Borges.

  INTERVIEWER

  Do you think people still run away to Berlin, and if so, why?

  TAWADA

  The city is unlike anywhere else. It’s like a big artist’s project. Writers, artists, performances, concerts, lectures, constantly. It’s a stage and not a city.

  Alexandra Pereira is a British writer whose work has appeared in Playboy, Vice, Condé Nast Traveler, and Stride. She is an editor at Pariah Press and lives in Copenhagen.

• The Hindu - https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/reading-asia-for-me-europe-is-fiction-an-interview-with-author-yoko-tawada/article67810293.ece

  Reading Asia | ‘For me, “Europe” is fiction’: an interview with author Yoko Tawada
  In an interview with Sohini Basak, Germany-based Japanese writer Yoko Tawada shares what themes she is drawn to, how she envisions Asia in her novels, and much more
  Published - February 05, 2024 12:37 pm IST

  SOHINI BASAK
  Yoko Tawada. File.
  Yoko Tawada. File.

  In this monthly column, writer Sohini Basak sets out to interview contemporary writers from Asia to understand the nuances of cultural practices, power hierarchies, literary lineages, gender norms, all the while asking the question: Is there an Asian way of thinking? The hope for the column is to not only celebrate, but also sharpen our understanding of the countries geographically closest to us, and heighten our collective curiosities about the shared colonial histories, mythologies, sentimentalities and anxieties. Here’s an excerpt from her interview with author Yoko Tawada:

  Writing in both Japanese and German, author Yoko Tawada often teases out the textures of inhabiting a body moving between multiple languages. She moved to Germany from Japan when she was twenty-two and lives there still. Her work — short stories, plays, poetry, essays, novels — have received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chimasso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal, and though it might matter to no one, I place my bets on Tawada receiving the Nobel Prize every year. Her recent novels Scattered Across the Earth, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, and The Last Children of Tokyo, have received a lot of attention, I would urge readers of the column to seek out the short stories in Where Europe Begins and on a late afternoon, when the sun makes mysterious shadows on your bedroom wall just after a short spell of rain, to step into the world of the delicious novella, The Bridegroom Was a Dog.

  You have often written about disappearances; of languages, dialects, communities, nations, traditions, species. Would you say that it’s a theme you’ve always been drawn to?

  Not “language” in general, but the playful function of the brain, without which no human being can learn their mother tongue. In adulthood, it helps us to discover new ways of thinking. I am not so interested in regional languages as a topic, but the diversity of language is important to me. This also includes old languages, sociolect and language errors of a medical nature. “State” is more of a problem than a theme Above all, I would like the state not to be a prison, but a roof. Everyone wants to have a roof over their head, otherwise they would be homeless. “Tradition” as a fixed form is of little interest to me, but everything that is carried on from the past as a memory is important.

  ‘The Emissary’ was first published in 2014 and we read it in 2018 in Margaret Mitsuani’s translation. I’m haunted by it because so much of the dystopian Japan you create in the book could be easily about India. Could you tell us about the first sparks of inspiration for the book?

  I have been thinking about the current social situation in Japan, which already existed before the disaster in Fukushima. I was thinking about the specific phenomena in Japan. But I realized that they could also be observed in other countries. The literature sometimes helps you to look at your own situation more clearly from a distance.

  In ‘Scattered All Over the Earth’, set in Europe, the Indian character Akash wants to study places that have lost speech. If I could bring your background into the equation: you’ve studied Russian literature, lived in Germany for decades, and you write in both German and Japanese. Your stories are set in imaginary or real cities in Asia and Europe. Would you say there might be an Asian way of thinking and speaking?

  For me, “Europe” is fiction. But I appreciate good fiction. Europeans have been trying to build this fiction for hundreds of years. You can also call it a vision. There have been problems like orientalism, but at least from today’s point of view I think this fiction and the EU based on it is a better idea than any imperialism or nationalism.

  It is not easy to build “Asia” as one’s own vision. Above all, you have to know what we get out of it. At the end of the 19th century, Japan had the idea of forming a great Asian empire and this idea did nothing, even harmed the neighbouring countries. I have lived in Europe for 40 years and what I hear about “Asian” thinking is often clichéd or esoteric. If there is a meaningful Asian way of thinking, it should be one that enables stable peace in Asia.

  How has your relation to writing about animals evolved over the years? In earlier stories, I found a slippery-ness, for example, in the scales that appear on a character’s body in ‘The Bath’ or the rumours that animate the village in ‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog’. Recently, the animals have become more solid. In ‘Memoirs of a Polar Bear’, the polar bear narrator remarks: ‘Now language remained at my side, touching soft spots with me.’

  Your description of the change in the role of animals in my literature is very interesting to me. Thank you for that. In the past, I could feel more physically how the boundary between animal and human could disappear. Today, people and animals, but also plants and stones, are “storytellers” for me. They tell stories in a language that I cannot understand, and this fact changes my languages. The animals can be a co-narrator or a second narrator in the shadows, or the narrator of my soul.

  The book critic Parul Seghal once reported how you sometimes begin a performance by reading out a poem from a white glove. I was instantly reminded of the American cover for your forthcoming novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. What role does poetry play in your everyday life? Are you still writing poems?

  I continue to write poetry, in Japanese and in German. I feel I write as much poetry as prose. Because with poetry you try to achieve the most radical form of language. So the everyday form of communication stops, and language goes hand in hand with music and art on a journey into uncertainty.

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Yoko Tawada
  Japan (b.1960)

  Yko Tawada ( Tawada Yko, born March 23, 1960) is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany. She writes in both Japanese and German.

  Tawada was born in Tokyo, received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, then studied at Hamburg University where she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature. She received her doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich. In 1987 she published Nur da wo du bist da ist nichtsAnata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (A Void Only Where You Are), a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition.

  Tawada's Missing Heels received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, and The Bridegroom Was a Dog received the Akutagawa Prize in 1993. In 1999 she became writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four months. Her Suspect on the Night Train won the Tanizaki Prize and Ito Sei Literary Prize in 2003.

  Tawada received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, a German award to foreign writers in recognition of their contribution to German culture, and the Goethe Medal in 2005.

  Genres: Literary Fiction

  New and upcoming books
  July 2024

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  Paul Celan and the Trans-Siberian Angel
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  Spontaneous Acts
  October 2024

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  Suggested in the Stars

  Novels
  The Naked Eye (2009)
  Portrait of a Tongue (2013)
  The Emissary (2018)
  aka The Last Children of Tokyo
  Scattered All Over the Earth (2022)
  Paul Celan and the Trans-Siberian Angel (2024)
  Spontaneous Acts (2024)
  Suggested in the Stars (2024)
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  Collections
  Where Europe Begins (2002)
  Facing the Bridge (2007)
  Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016)
  Three Streets (2022)
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  Novellas and Short Stories
  The Bridegroom Was a Dog (2012)
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  Yoko Tawada

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Yōko Tawada
  Yōko Tawada in 2022
  Yōko Tawada in 2022
  Native name
  多和田葉子
  Born March 23, 1960 (age 64)
  Tokyo, Japan
  Occupation Writer
  Language Japanese, German
  Education
  Waseda University
  Hamburg University
  University of Zurich
  Genre Fiction, poetry
  Notable works
  The Bridegroom Was a Dog
  Suspect on the Night Train
  Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts / Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai
  Notable awards
  Gunzo Prize for New Writers
  Akutagawa Prize
  Tanizaki Prize
  Noma Literary Prize
  Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature
  Goethe Medal
  Kleist Prize
  Website
  yokotawada.de
  Yōko Tawada (多和田葉子 Tawada Yōko, born March 23, 1960) is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany. She writes in both Japanese and German. Tawada has won numerous literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the Goethe Medal, the Kleist Prize, and a National Book Award.

  Early life and education
  Tawada was born in Nakano, Tokyo.[1] Her father was a translator and bookseller.[2] She attended Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School.[3] In 1979, at the age of 19, Tawada took the Trans-Siberian Railway to visit Germany.[4] She received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, and upon graduation moved to Hamburg, Germany, where she started working with one of her father's business partners in a book distribution business.[5] She left the business to study at Hamburg University, and in 1990 she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature.[6] In 2000 she received her doctorate in German literature from the University of Zurich, where Sigrid Weigel, her thesis advisor, had been appointed to the faculty.[7][8] In 2006 Tawada moved to Berlin, where she currently resides.[9]

  Career
  Tawada's writing career began in 1987 with the publication of Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts—Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (Nothing Only Where You Are), a collection of poems released in a German and Japanese bilingual edition. Her first novella, titled Kakato o nakushite (Missing Heels), received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991.[7]

  In 1993 Tawada won the Akutagawa Prize for her novella Inu muko iri, which was published later that year with Kakato o nakushite and another story in the single volume Inu muko iri.[10] Arufabetto no kizuguchi also appeared in book form in 1993, and Tawada received her first major recognition outside of Japan by winning the Lessing Prize Scholarship.[11] An English edition of the three-story collection Inu muko iri, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, was published in 1998 but was not commercially successful.[5] New Directions Publishing reissued the Mitsutani translation of the single Akutagawa Prize-winning novella in 2012 under the title The Bridegroom Was a Dog.[12]

  Several other books followed, including Seijo densetsu (Legend of a Saint) in 1996 and Futakuchi otoko (The Man With Two Mouths) in 1998. Portions of these books were translated into English by Margaret Mitsutani and collected in a 2009 book titled Facing the Bridge.[13] Tawada won the 1996 Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German literary award for non-native speakers of German.[14] In 1997 she was writer in residence at Villa Aurora, and in 1999 she spent four months as the Max Kade Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[15][16] She won the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature for her 2000 book Hinagiku no ocha no baai,[17] and both the Sei Ito Literature Prize[18] and the Tanizaki Prize in 2003 for Yogisha no yako ressha (Suspects on the Night Train).[19][20]

  Tawada took a bilingual approach to her 2004 novel Das nackte Auge, writing first in German, then in Japanese, and finally producing separate German and Japanese manuscripts.[21] The novel follows a Vietnamese girl who was kidnapped at a young age while in Germany for a youth conference. An English version, translated from the German manuscript by Susan Bernofsky, was published by New Directions Publishing in 2009 under the title The Naked Eye.[22] In 2005, Tawada won the prestigious Goethe Medal from the Goethe-Institut for meritorious contributions to German culture by a non-German.[23] From January to February 2009, she was the Writer-in-Residence at the Stanford University Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.[24]

  In 2011, inspired by the story of the orphaned polar bear Knut, Tawada wrote three interlocking short stories exploring the relationship between humans and animals from the perspective of three generations of captive polar bears. As with previous work, she wrote separate manuscripts in Japanese and German.[25] In 2011 the Japanese version, titled Yuki no renshūsei, was published in Japan. It won the 2011 Noma Literary Prize[26] and the 2012 Yomiuri Prize.[27] In 2014 the German version, titled Etüden im Schnee, was published in Germany.[2] An English edition of Etüden im Schnee, translated by Susan Bernofsky, was published by New Directions Publishing in 2016 under the title Memoirs of a Polar Bear.[28] It won the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.[29]

  Tawada won the 2013 Erlanger Prize for her work translating poetry between Japanese and German.[30]

  In 2014 her novel Kentoshi, a near-future dystopian story of a great-grandfather who grows stronger while his great-grandson grows weaker, was published in Japan.[31] An English version, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, was published in the US by New Directions Publishing in 2018 under the title The Emissary.[32] and as The Last Children of Tokyo by Portobello Books/Granta Books in the UK.

  In 2016 she received the Kleist Prize,[33][34] and in 2018 she was awarded the Carl Zuckmayer Medal for services to the German language.[35] Also in 2018, she received the National Book Award for Translated Literature (the inaugural year of that award) for her novel The Emissary, translated by Margaret Mitsutani. In 2022, her novel Scattered All Over the Earth, also translated by Mitsutani, was a National Book Award for Translated Literature finalist.

  Writing style
  Tawada writes in Japanese and German. Scholars of her work have adopted her use of the term exophony to describe the condition of writing in a non-native language.[36][37] Early in her career Tawada enlisted the help of a translator to produce German editions of her Japanese manuscripts, but later she simultaneously generated separate manuscripts in each language through a process she calls "continuous translation."[38] Over time her work has diverged by genre as well as language, with Tawada tending to write longer works such as plays and novels in Japanese, and shorter works such as short stories and essays in German.[39] She also tends to create more neologisms when writing in German than when writing in Japanese.[40]

  Tawada's writing highlights the strangeness of one language, or particular words in one language, when seen from the perspective of someone who speaks another language.[41][42] Her writing uses unexpected words, alphabets, and ideograms to call attention to the need for translation in everyday life.[43] She has said that language is not natural but rather "artificial and magical,"[44] and has encouraged translators of her work to replace word play in her manuscripts with new word play in their own languages.[45]

  A common theme in Tawada's work is the relationship between words and reality, and in particular the possibility that differences in languages may make assimilation into a different culture impossible.[46] For example, Tawada has suggested that a native Japanese speaker understands different words for "pencil" in German and Japanese as referring to two different objects, with the Japanese word referring to a familiar pencil and the German word referring to a pencil that is foreign and "other."[47] However, her work also challenges the connection between national language and nationalism, particularly the kokugo/kokutai relationship in Japanese culture.[48]

  Tawada's stories often involve traveling across boundaries.[49] Her writing draws on Tawada's own experiences of traveling between countries and cultures,[50] but it also explores more abstract boundaries, such as the boundary between waking life and dreams,[51] between thoughts and emotions,[52] or between the times before and after a disaster.[43] For example, the main character in her short story "Bioskoop der Nacht" dreams in a language she does not speak, and must travel to another country to learn the language and understand her own dreams.[51] Tawada's work also employs elements of magical realism, such as the animal and plant anthropomorphism in Memoirs of a Polar Bear, in order to challenge otherwise familiar boundaries, such as the distinction between human and animal.[53][40] Challenging boundaries is further explored in The Last Children of Tokyo, in which the catastrophe against which the novel is set "reconnects humans with non-human agencies, questioning the very meaning of the exclusive concept of “human”. By imagining children as going back to an earlier stage rather than ever improving – a meandering that is reflected in the novel’s non-linear, associative narration – Tawada terminates their ties to futurity, and with it the capitalist myth of continuous progress."[54]

  Tawada has cited Paul Celan and Franz Kafka as important literary influences.[55][56]

  Bibliography
  Originally in Japanese
  Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts / Anata no iru tokoro dake nanimo nai, 1987, Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, OCLC 55107823 (bilingual edition)
  Inu muko iri, Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 978-4-06-206307-4
  Arufabetto no kizuguchi, Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1993, ISBN 978-4-309-00860-8
  Seijo densetsu, Ōta Shuppan, 1996, ISBN 978-4-87233-285-8
  Futakuchi otoko, Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1998, ISBN 978-4-309-01244-5
  Hinagiku no ocha no baai, Shinchōsha, 2000, ISBN 978-4-10-436101-4
  Yōgisha no yakō ressha, Seidosha, 2002, ISBN 978-4-7917-5973-6
  Yuki no renshūsei, Shinchōsha, 2011, ISBN 978-4-10-436104-5
  Kentoshi, Kodansha, 2014, ISBN 978-4-06-219192-0 (published in 2018 in English as The Last Children of Tokyo (UK) and The Emissary (US))
  Ōkami ken, with Ikuko Mizokami, Ronsosha, 2021, ISBN 978-4-8460-1972-3
  Originally in German
  Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts / Anata no iru tokoro dake nanimo nai, 1987, Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, OCLC 55107823 (bilingual edition)
  Opium für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen, 2000, Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, ISBN 978-3-88769-156-1
  Das nackte Auge, Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2004, ISBN 978-3-88769-324-4
  Etüden im Schnee, Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2014, ISBN 978-3-88769-737-2
  Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel, Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2020, ISBN 978-3-88769-278-0
  Book-length works translated to English
  Where Europe Begins, translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden, New Directions Publishing, 2002, ISBN 978-0-8112-1515-2
  The Bridegroom Was a Dog (Inu muko iri, 犬婿入り), translated by Margaret Mitsutani, Kodansha, 2003, ISBN 978-4-7700-2940-9. This edition includes Missing Heels (Kakato o nakushite).
  Facing the Bridge, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, New Directions Publishing, 2007, ISBN 978-0-8112-1690-6
  The Naked Eye, translated by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-0-8112-1739-2
  Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright, University of Ottawa Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-7766-0803-7
  Memoirs of a Polar Bear, translated by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions Publishing, 2016, ISBN 978-0-8112-2578-6
  The Last Children of Tokyo (UK) / The Emissary (US), translated by Margaret Mitsutani, New Directions Publishing, 2018, ISBN 9780811227629
  Opium for Ovid (Limited Edition), translated by Kenji Hayakawa, Stereoeditions, 2018 – ongoing. Collection of 22 separate books.
  Scattered All Over the Earth, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, New Directions Publishing, 2022, ISBN 9780811229289
  Three Streets, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, New Directions Publishing, 2022, ISBN 9780811229302
  Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (US) / Spontaneous Acts (UK), translated by Susan Bernofsky, New Directions Publishing / Dialogue Books, 2024, ISBN 9780811234870 (US) / ISBN 9780349704234 (UK)
  Suggested in the Stars, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, New Directions Publishing, 2024
  Selected shorter works translated to English
  "Hair Tax," translated by Susan Bernofsky, Words Without Borders, April 2005 issue[57]
  "Celan Reads Japanese", translated by Susan Bernofsky, The White Review, March 2013[56]
  "The Far Shore", translated by Jeffrey Angles, Words Without Borders, March 2015 issue[58]
  "To Zagreb", translated by Margaret Mitsutani, Granta 131, 2015[59]
  "Memoirs of a Polar Bear", translated by Susan Bernofsky, Granta 136, 2016[60]
  Recognition
  1991 Gunzo Prize for New Writers[7]
  1993 Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog (Inu muko iri, 犬婿入り)[10]
  1993 Lessing Prize Scholarship[11]
  1996 Adelbert von Chamisso Prize[14]
  2000 Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature[17]
  2003 Sei Ito Literature Prize[19][18]
  2003 Tanizaki Prize for Suspect on the Night Train (Yogisha no yako ressha, 容疑者の夜行列車)[20]
  2005 Goethe Medal[23]
  2011 Noma Literary Prize[26]
  2012 Yomiuri Prize[27]
  2013 Erlanger Literaturpreis [de][30]
  2016 Kleist Prize[33]
  2017 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation (shared with translator Susan Bernofsky)[29]
  2018 Carl Zuckmayer Medal[35]
  2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature for The Emissary (shared with translator Margaret Mitsutani)[61]
  2019 Asahi Prize[62]
  2022 Honorary doctorate, SOAS University of London[63]
  2023 Prix Fragonard for The Emissary (shared with the book's French translator, Dominique Palmé)[64]
  Further reading
  Bettina Brandt, "Scattered Leaves: Artist Books and Migration, a Conversation with Yoko Tawada", Comparative Literature Studies, 45/1 (2008) 12–22
  Bettina Brandt, "Ein Wort, ein Ort, or How Words Create Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada", Women in German Yearbook, 21 (2005), 1–15
  Maria S. Grewe, Estranging Poetic: On the Poetic of the Foreign in Select Works by Herta Müller and Yoko Tawada, Columbia University, New York 2009
  Ruth Kersting, Fremdes Schreiben: Yoko Tawada, Trier 2006
  Christina Kraenzle, Mobility, space and subjectivity: Yoko Tawada and German-language transnational literature, University of Toronto (2004)
  Petra Leitmeir, Sprache, Bewegung und Fremde im deutschsprachigen Werk von Yoko Tawada, Freie Universität Berlin (2007)
  Douglas Slaymaker (Ed.): Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, Lexington Books (2007)
  Caroline Rupprecht, ‘Writing Emptiness: Yoko Tawada’s The Bath, The Naked Eye, and Flucht des Mondes,’ Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian German Avant-garde, 2020. 55-78.
  Caroline Rupprecht, ‘Haunted Spaces: History and Architecture in Yoko Tawada’ South Central Review 33:3 (2016)111-126.
  Caroline Rupprecht, ‘Co pani robi w Niemzcech? Yoko Tawada & Emine Sevgi Ozdamar’ Tygiel Kultury, 7-9 (Łódź, 2005) 124-128.

• From Publisher -

  Yoko Tawada
  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.

  Photo credit: Nina Subin

On at least one occasion, the writer Yoko Tawada has given a public presentation of her work by reading aloud a poem written on a white glove. Reaching the end of the text, she pulls the glove off her hand, turns it inside out, and reads from the other side.

It's a moment of cultivated eccentricity, to be sure, but also something of an artist statement. To Tawada -- the acclaimed author of tender, screwy parables about outsiderdom -- we are clad in language. It is a second skin; it determines the limits of our perception.

Tawada writes in Japanese and German, drifting between the two languages, sometimes within the same book. (She moved to Germany in 1982, in her early 20s, and has lived there since.) For her novel ''The Naked Eye'' (2009), she began in German, switched to Japanese and carried on, chapter by chapter, in whatever language she felt like. Then she translated the book into both languages and sent it off to her publishers in both countries.

Translation is an explicit theme in her fiction. She often writes from the point of view of animals, and takes a Nabokovian delight in neologisms (my favorites from her work: ''stingword,'' ''headtheater''). ''When you learn a language -- as a child, or as a foreigner -- you don't just learn words but also how to make them, you learn the mechanism of the language, and you can keep making new words,'' she told one interviewer. Tawada turns sentence structures inside out, just like that white glove. Every word feels frisked, investigated down to its root.

Her new novel, ''The Emissary,'' translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is a contentedly minor work. It has a recessive, lunar beauty compared to the sunny ambition and inventiveness of its predecessors, including her masterpiece (with the self-explanatory title), ''The Bridegroom Was a Dog'' (2012), and ''Memoirs of a Polar Bear'' (2016), which followed three generations of a distinguished literary family of polar bears.

The new book is set in Japan after an unnamed disaster (nuclear fallout is suggested). The country has quarantined itself from the rest of the world. The only wild living things left are spiders and crows. Language has started to vanish, too. The shelf life of words seems to have shortened; they pass out of fashion quickly and aren't replaced. Men go through menopause. Children are so enfeebled that heartsick pediatricians begin to kill themselves.

Only the elderly remain robust -- none more guiltily than Yoshiro, who is raising his great-grandson, the impossibly, almost unbearably sweet Mumei, who grows kinder and more tolerant as his body wastes away. When Mumei's teeth begin to fall out, he reassures the horrified Yoshiro, ''Don't worry, Great-grandpa, sparrows get along fine without teeth.''

Tawada is a great disciple of Kafka's; he ''predicted reality,'' she is fond of saying. And while she shares certain of his preoccupations -- with otherness and evoking animal life -- hers is a more prosaic mission: She mirrors reality. Although her work is frequently described as strange -- which it is, determinedly -- there is always a stark social critique at its core. ''Memoirs of a Polar Bear'' is, after all, an immigrant novel and a stirring defense of the human right to migration. ''For polar bears, national identity has always been a foreign concept,'' she writes in that novel. ''It's common for them to get pregnant in Greenland, give birth in Canada, then raise the children in the Soviet Union. They possess no nationality, no passport. They never go into exile and cross national borders without a visa.''

''The Emissary'' is as bleak a portrait of contemporary Japan as you could imagine. Tawada takes on the graying of the population and the trauma of the 2011 tsunami and the ensuing radiation leakage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Hovering above all this, as always, is Tawada's interest in the issue of translation, but this time the gulf is between what Susan Sontag called the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick.

It's quite a premise, but remains just that. The book feints at a narrative and at wrestling with the issues it raises -- about the temptations and dangers of isolationism, the desire to imagine the lives of others, how the Fukushima tragedy tapped into Japan's history of radiation poisoning going back to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Tawada seems content to evoke mood, to polish her sentences to a high sheen. Her language has never been so arresting. But as Virginia Woolf wrote, novels are composed of paragraphs, not sentences. ''The Emissary'' is stalled there, at the level of a flickering brilliance that never kindles into more. From a writer with Tawada's gifts, mere beauty can be a disappointment.

The EmissaryBy Yoko TawadaTranslated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani138 pages. New Directions. $14.95.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS (PHOTOGRAPH BY NINA SUBIN)

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Sehgal, Parul. "Disaster Leaves Japan In Desolate Quarantine." New York Times, 18 Apr. 2018, p. C4(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A535074752/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cd920d37. Accessed 12 July 2024.

The Emissary

Yoko Tawada, trans, from the Japanese by

Margaret Mitsutani. New Directions, $14.95 trade paper (128p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2762-9

An anxious writer frets over his wastrel of a great-grandson in this inventive dystopian novel from Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear). Its environment "irreversibly contaminated," near-future Japan has been cut off from the outside world, leaving 108-year-old Yoshiro trapped with his great-grandson Mumei in a spartan "temporary" house. The population is divided between those born before the calamity--whose life spans have been mysteriously lengthened--and those enfeebled by it: "The aged could not die; along with the gift of everlasting life, they were burdened with the terrible task of watching their great-grandchildren die." Yoshiro dreams of escape, but it is Mumei who, despite his inability to walk or chew properly, is selected as one of several "especially bright children to send abroad as emissaries." Mumei's deteriorating condition is signalled by his hair turning grey, and soon he begins having difficulty breathing. These health problems complicate his potential deployment; while he awaits a decision, he turns to the more urgent task of comforting Yoshiro. Tawada's novel is infused with the anxieties of a "society changing at the speed of pebbles rolling down a steep hill," yet she imagines a ruined world with humor and grace. (Mar.)

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"The Emissary." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 5, 29 Jan. 2018, pp. 164+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A526116502/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c5fd1c7d. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Tawada, Yoko THE EMISSARY New Directions (Adult Fiction) $14.95 4, 24 ISBN: 978-0-8112-2762-9

In this slim, impactful novel, surrealist master Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear, 2016, etc.) imagines a dystopian Japan reckoning with its own identity.

In the wake of an economic and environmental tragedy that eerily echoes 2011's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government implements an "isolation policy," cutting the country off from the outside world. Central Tokyo is deserted, the country's soil is contaminated, its plants have mutated, and its people are living under a capricious governing body that has not only waged a war on words (the term "mutation" having been replaced by the more agreeable "environmental adaptation"), but has proven to have a penchant for tinkering with the laws: "Afraid of getting burned by laws they couldn't see, everyone kept their intuition honed as sharp as a knife, practicing restraint and self-censorship on a daily basis." A writer unsettled by the turn his country has taken, Yoshiro's main concern is the declining health of his grandson, Mumei. In this new era, children are wise beyond their years, but their bodies are brittle, aging vessels, and the elderly have become a new kind of species, cursed with the gift of everlasting life, "burdened with the terrible task of watching their great-grandchildren die." Left in Yoshiro's care after the death of his mother and disappearance of his father, Mumei, feeble (and toothless) as he is, fills his grandfather's interminable days with life. Despite the gloomy circumstances, Tawada's narrative remains incandescent as she charts the hopeful paths both grandfather and grandson embark upon in their attempt to overcome mortality's grim restraints. Striving to persist in a time when intolerance abounds and "the shelf life of words [is] getting shorter all the time," Mumei's searching curiosity and wonder toward the world inspire faith that, even in the darkest of days, humanity cannot be forsaken.

An ebullient meditation on language and time that feels strikingly significant in the present moment.

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"Tawada, Yoko: THE EMISSARY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A527248074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=518bc65a. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Yoko Tawada

The Emissary

Trans. Margaret Mitsutani. New York. New Directions. 2018. 128 pages.

In her latest book, Yoko Tawada describes a dystopian Japan after an unspecified disaster: the ground is contaminated, food growth is limited to certain regions, and animals are so scarce that many children have never seen so much as a rabbit. To protect itself, Japan adopts an isolationist policy so extreme that language is often self-policed to exclude words with foreign origins. This is the ambiguous future in which The Emissary finds its subject, Yoshiro, and his great-grandson, Mumei. But even more has changed than that--the youth are fragile, sickly, and delicate, while the elderly overpopulate, pulling their offspring and their progeny through as they become older and older themselves. Yoshiro worries and dotes on his charge, often racked with guilt, which he associates as an emotion of his generation. Mumei, on the other hand, is an optimistic and charming force of hope.

The style in which Tawada explores this juxtaposition is not unlike her previous novels, most notably Memoirs of a Polar Bear . Her narrators weave between past and present, their internal musings and the external setting they inhabit. She is generous with metaphors, sprinkling them through the perspectives of her narrators' own fantastical imaginations, paranoia, or creative struggle. In one striking passage, Mumei vividly describes functioning as an octopus, and it is oddly relatable despite its absurdity.

Tawada expertly catches the feeling of trances--the normalization of adhering to laws that have no precedent for enforcement, or the daze of simple everyday routines. Her world-building is based on detailed descriptions that border on newspaper-variety mundanity, and in contrast her characters are described with vibrant vignettes of feelings and flashbacks while remaining vague as to their inspirations. The overall result is a dream world, not nightmarish but somewhat frightening and yet still familiar and comforting: health advice is still constantly contradictory; younger people are still the subject of their seniors' complaints. The blend feels like a mess of the subconscious and conscious, each having important things to say to complement and strengthen the other. A master of convincing contradiction and amusing wit, Yoko Tawada has produced a novel with bits of humor quietly dominating like weeds in a barren posturban world.

Jacky Tideman

Oklahoma City

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Tideman, Jacky. "Yoko Tawada: The Emissary." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2018, pp. 68+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A529356896/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fe4380cc. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Yoko Tawada Three Streets Trans. Margaret Mitsutani. New York. New Directions. 2022. 64 pages.

IN "MAJAKOWSKIRING," the second story in Yoko Tawadas Three Streets, an unnamed narrator encounters an undead writer. Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, but in contemporary Berlin, on a street that bears his name, the Russian poet--or perhaps his ghost--is having his say on matters great and small. "A moment ago, he'd been talking about lost love and pineapples," the narrator notes, "and now he was going on about 'terrible times' and politics." This might seem like a bizarre cameo appearance, but within the context of this slender, captivating book, it's perfectly reasonable.

Tawada, whose novel The Emissary won the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, writes a singular, uncanny brand of fiction. In Three Streets, women, men and human-adjacent beings land in slow-simmering metaphysical adventures. Her characters face predicaments and puzzles that present the reader with interesting new ways to think about language, inspiration, history, and chance. Each of the books three stories is set in Berlin, where the author, who was born in Tokyo, now lives. Each takes its title from a street named for a dead artist. Each features a nameless narrator.

In "Kollwitz Strasse," our narrator is in an expensive grocery store filled with affluent young families when a "ghost-child" materializes and drags her to the candy aisle. The young specter uses antiquated words and seems unfamiliar with post-World War II products. The narrator, noting that this is plainly "not a child of this age," is reminded of Käthe Kollwitz; the artists black-and-white prints depicted Germans who, like Kollwitz herself, lost nearly everything during the world wars. Outside, the narrator sees a city with no discernible colors. Has she become a figure in a Kollwitz etching? Like Tawada's other stories, this one doesn't spotlight a single, easy meaning, though it seems clear that she's remarking on complacent twenty-first-century consumerism, the transformative power of art, and the wounds of war.

"Pushkin Allee" opens with the narrator disembarking from a subway, only to see that her "body had shrunk to the size of a child's" (like many strange developments in these dreamlike stories, this happens without warning or explanation). She spots a girl on a bike, which evokes vivid recollections of her own childhood. For a moment, it's the 1960s, and a Japanese TV broadcaster is talking about the anniversary of the end of Second World War. This leads to dark musings about secret police and blood-drenched borderlands. In an open field, which she imagines might've once been the site of carnage, people practice yoga. Her walk through the present-day city becomes a reflection on Cold War Berlin, occupying armies, the plight of innocents during periods of deadly strife, and the ways in which nations confront, or flee from, the past's harsh truths.

"Majakowskiring" is just as thought-provoking, if even less straightforward than the other two tales. Haunted by the doomed Mayakovsky, the story centers on another discombobulating walk through a Berlin that may have "slipped back in time." She watches an antinuke march, notes that today's clouds "all have human faces," sees that Mayakovsky appears robust--and quite talkative. What follows is an oblique rumination on randomness, political resistance, and language. Apropos of nothing specific, the narrator laments that she rarely hears "words like 'imagination or creativity' anymore." Tawada herself would never say so, but few writers embody these words better than her.

"The mystery of what it means to be human"--this phrase, which pops up early in "Kollwitz Strasse," is an apt description of what Tawada aims to explore in these stories. From one moment to the next, her narratives can be mystifying. In time, though, they cohere into engrossing meditations on historical memory and the oft-baffling nature of life in this century.

Kevin Canfield

New York

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Canfield, Kevin. "Yoko Tawada: Three Streets." World Literature Today, vol. 96, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2022, pp. 60+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A723644340/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=93075092. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Three Streets Yoko Tawada, trans. from the Japanese by Margaret Mltsutani. New Directions, $15 trade paper (64p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2930-2

In Tawada's ruminative collection of three fantastic tales (after The Emissary), a nameless, wandering narrator moves between contemporary Berlin and an imaginary realm of poets and ghosts. A trip to an organic food store with a ghostly child in "Kollwitz Strasse" sets the narrator to thinking about the sketches of Kathe Kollwitz, a German artist who drew heartrending pictures of "poverty that individuals can't be held responsible for." In "Majakowskiring," the narrator walks through a quiet part of what was once East Berlin, thinking about a woman who's "a typical West Berliner" and therefore couldn't be bothered to visit that neighborhood, then enters a mysterious restaurant in which a photograph of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky comes to life. And in "Pushkin Allee," the narrator envisions the lives and motivations of Red Army soldiers, workers, and a German child memorialized in a park. Though the stories share a concern with the politics and the disasters of the 20th century, it is Tawada's astute, observational asides that will remain with readers: city life is "an amusement park of the senses ... full of people you might have met." Brief and surprising, these stories reinvent familiar landmarks and artworks, giving readers an imaginative and hopeful way to grapple with the history that's written into the urban landscape. (June)

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"Three Streets." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 16, 20 Apr. 2020, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A623444640/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=644b5872. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Byline: Ryan Ruby

SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTHBy Yoko TawadaTranslated by Margaret Mitsutani

In the future imagined by Yoko Tawada, rising sea levels have swallowed Japan. The "land of sushi," as it is now known, survives only in the kitschified traces its culture has left on the exoticizing imagination of Westerners, and in the memories of Hiruko, who was studying abroad in Sweden when disaster struck, and may be the last Japanese person on the planet. Now a stateless refugee, Hiruko migrates first to Norway, then to Denmark, where she finds a job teaching Panska (that is, Pan-Scandinavian), the "homemade language" she invented, to immigrant children from the Middle East.

The first volume of a trilogy, the mordantly funny "Scattered All Over the Earth" reunites Tawada with Margaret Mitsutani, the translator with whom she shared a National Book Award for "The Emissary" in 2018. Tawada, who has lived in Germany for 40 years, writes in both Japanese and German. More than simply international, her writing is translingual; she leaves the borders between languages open and allows them to cross-pollinate. To translate her into English is to excavate linguistic strata: Panska reads like a Japonic parody of Nordic syntax translated into a West Germanic language.

Wouldn't it be easier to communicate in English? Hiruko is asked during a reluctant appearance on a Danish TV show about people from countries that no longer exist. But in the future, Mexico's booming economy is attracting Spanish-speaking workers from California, China no longer exports products and no one in the United States remembers how to make anything. Europe's welfare states are looking to cut costs, so "english speaking migrants sometimes by force to america sent," Hiruko tells the interviewer, in Panska. "Frightening. illness have, so in country with undeveloped healthcare system cannot live."

Through the TV show, Hiruko meets Knut, an amateur linguist. Together they crisscross Europe on a picaresque quest to find one of Hiruko's compatriots. They travel to an umami festival in Germany, where they meet Akash, a transgender student from India, and Nora, a German with a highly developed sense of liberal guilt. Then they're off to see Nora's lover, Tenzo, at a cooking competition in Norway, before departing again for the south of France to meet with the enigmatic Susanoo, who is rumored to be from Japan, but may in fact be a robot.

Each character in Tawada's "band of zigzag travelers" is given chapters to narrate in the first person. These limited perspectives give rise to a comedy of intercultural misunderstandings that both move the plot forward and provide targets for Tawada's sharp satire. Tenzo, for example, turns out to be Nanook, a Greenlander who moves to study medicine in Copenhagen, where he is mistaken as a citizen of the "land of sushi." "Being singled out as an exotic was a lot more fun than being neutral," he concludes, so he decides to give himself a "second identity." He adopts a Japanese name, learns the language and apprentices at a restaurant called Samurai. Nanook is shocked to discover that the head chef is from China, not Japan, and that he learned how to make dashi at a hotel in Paris, not Tokyo. "When the original no longer exists," the chef tells him, "there's nothing you can do except look for the best copy."

Wise words. Far from being offended by Nanook's imposture, Hiruko recognizes a kindred spirit. His "Tenzo" may be a lie but it is nevertheless a form of creative expression, not unlike her Panska. When she calls it her homemade language, she herself is the home she means. "Panska was me," Hiruko says. "A work of art I'd poured my whole self into." What is true of Hiruko, Tawada suggests, is true of everyone from the harmless Nanook to an ultranationalist called Breivik: Our national identities are at bottom simulacra, copies of originals that no longer exist, if they ever did.

The apocalypse that's shrewdly forecast by "Scattered All Over the Earth" will be combined and uneven. How the global north handles the resulting refugee crisis will depend in part on the speed with which it gives up the view that nationalities are anything but virtualities. Judging by the recent migrant crises that informed Tawada's novel, it is a long-overdue lesson. By the time we are reading the trilogy's final volume, the climate-fiction scenario Tawada drapes in the trappings of picaresque comedy will no longer seem speculative.

Ryan Ruby is the author of the novel "The Zero and the One." His criticism has appeared most recently in The Nation and New Left Review. SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH By Yoko Tawada Translated by Margaret Mitsutani 253 pp. New Directions. Paper, $16.95.

PHOTO: Yoko Tawada (PHOTOGRAPH BY Nina Subin FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 International Herald Tribune
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Ruby, Ryan. "When Nations Disappear, What Happens to Nationalities?" International New York Times, 7 Mar. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A695902607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3340fb0f. Accessed 12 July 2024.

SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH

YOKO TAWADA

Translated by Margaret Mitsutani

224pp. Granta. Paperback, 12.99 [pounds sterling].

Yoko Tawada's latest novel, Scattered All Over the Earth, begins with a shift in perspective. When Knut, a graduate of linguistics at Copenhagen University, awakens one afternoon, he finds himself watching a television show starring panellists from "countries [that] no longer exist": the former GDR, the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union. We are then introduced to a guest from "an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia", a country that has simply vanished from the map: Japan.

The likeliest cause for this seems to be ecological disaster. The details are kept deliberately hazy, but rising sea levels apparently combined with the levelling of mountains to cause the country's various islands to sink, like Atlantis, beneath the Pacific. In the gently dystopian world of Tawada's novel, few seem to have noticed the disappearance--a measure of the country's isolationism in the years preceding its demise. Of the few vestiges of culture that remain visible abroad (everything stereotypically kawaii and kitsch), none is recognized as Japanese. Even sushi is now taken for a style of "Finnish home cooking".

For Hiruko, who was studying abroad when the calamity struck, the change is life-defining. Having peregrinated from one Nordic country to another, this "climate refugee" now spends her days recounting half-remembered fairy tales to immigrant children in Denmark. But after Knut hears her speak on television, all that changes. Enchanted by her "Panska"--that is, "pan-Scandinavian", a homespun pidgin of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian--he decides they must meet. After they do, Knut agrees to follow her as she embarks on a quest to find others who share her mother tongue. Beginning with a trip to an "Umami Festival" held at the Karl Marx House in Trier, they pick up eccentric friends and fellow travellers along the way, including a transgender Indian, an "Eskimo" from Greenland and a man who may in fact be a robot.

As its title suggests, diaspora--from the ancient Greek "I scatter"--lies at the heart of this novel. But this is no jeremiad or lament for a long-lost land.

For one thing, the nostalgia Hiruko feels is centred on language itself, not any time, place or former identity. After all, the Japan of her past was deeply insular, its people afraid of the outside world. When she remembers her erstwhile homeland now, we are told: "She couldn't care less about the nation. She just can't forgive the politicians who'd had no respect for the mountains".

This kind of stark anti-nationalist sentiment pervades Tawada's characteristically speculative novel in subtle and less subtle ways. Bald statements range from the facile and saccharine ("When you think about it, since we're all earthlings, no one can be an illegal resident of earth") to the dismissive and damnatory: "Only right-wingers see the disappearance of their fatherland as a crisis". This could almost be satirical, but scarcely in this novel's carefully woven fabric is a detail provided without its serving to reinforce the same, all too predictable, set of ideological assumptions. Sympathetic characters are introduced explicitly by their leftist political credentials; figures of authority and law enforcement (always men) are to be feared; and the blame for environmental catastrophe is laid squarely and with a troubling sense of absolution on the political class. Even language does not escape this treatment: Hiruko's briefly charming Panska is revealed to be born of a fear that speaking English will lead to her being sent to America, where the broken healthcare system will, she is certain, fail her.

Tawada has certainly achieved the goal of highlighting the arbitrariness or even meaninglessness of borders, nations and fixed identities, and of holding up the inequalities of western immigration policies to scrutiny. The craftmanship of Scattered All Over the Earth is impeccable and the language, so skilfully translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is every bit as inventive as fans of Yoko Tawada's work have come to expect. Still, the lethal charm and cute politics of this fantasy belie thornier, harsher realities that would surely have been better served by a more dialectic response.

Bryan Karetnyk is a translator and a lecturer at the University of Cambridge

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 NI Syndication Limited
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Karetnyk, Bryan. "Crisis? What crisis? A speculative novel of a disappeared Japan." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6223, 8 July 2022, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A710911250/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a4de9a4. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Tawada, Yoko SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH New Directions (Fiction None) $16.95 3, 1 ISBN: 978-0-8112-2928-9

It could be the end of the world as we know it, but Tawada's vision of the future is intriguing.

Hiruko, a refugee from a Japan that no longer exists--Tawada hints at sinister environmental reasons--spends her days in Denmark teaching young immigrant children to speak Panska (from Pan-Scandinavian), a seemingly simplistic language she's invented. When she appears on television, Hiruko draws the attention of linguist Knut, and the two embark on an increasingly madcap quest through northern Europe in search of another speaker of Hiruko's native language. A varied cast of characters--each in search of something--joins the quest along the way, and, as the band of seekers grows, Tawada expands upon the themes of language, immigration, globalization, and authenticity which underpin this slyly humorous first installment of a planned trilogy. As the pilgrims travel around in the shadows of the Roman Empire and its legacy of domination and assimilation, questions of contemporary mutations of culture arise: If pizza is served at an Indian restaurant in Germany, is it Indian food? Similar observations about the effects of global warming on Greenland--where the fish have disappeared but vegetables can now be grown--highlight the evolution of culture and existence. As dire as the quasi-dystopian future could be, with reminders of menacing climate change and Japan's nuclear history, Tawada's intrepid travelers seek community and consensus, and, when confronted with the loss of something "original," they seek out the best copy. Tawada, who won the National Book Award for Translated Literature for The Emissary (2018), also translated by Mitsutani, lives in Berlin and writes in both German and Japanese.

Who decides what's authentic? Tawada will tell you that's in flux and always has been.

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"Tawada, Yoko: SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A689340038/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3e8e3863. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Yoko Tawada, trans, from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani. New Directions, $27 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8112-2928-9

Vernacular noir, etymological postapocalypse, a romance in syntax--it's hard to nail down which genre National Book Award winner Tawada's brilliant and beguiling latest belongs to, except to say it's deeply rooted in the power of language. At the center is Huriko, a refugee from a Japan that has vanished both from maps and cultural memory, who works as a children's illustrator in Denmark, where she befriends the diffident Knut, a computer game programmer with a connoisseur's interest in language and who is fascinated by Huriko's homegrown dialect, which she calls "Panska." Soon a group of amateur linguists forms, including Akash, a trans Indian woman, and Nanook, a Greenland Inuit sushi chef masquerading as an authority on Asian cooking. After they visit an umami festival in Trier, they continue to a culinary competition in Oslo, only to be derailed by a racist terror attack and an investigation into the killing of whales for their meat. Eventually, Huriko considers leaving the group for Aries, to meet the precocious son of a robot programmer in love with language and ships of all sizes, who may hold the secrets to Huriko's pasr and country of origin. Ar every turn, at least two narratives coexist: the central story line and another hidden just under the surface, emerging through inflections of speech and the vagaries of translation, making the text as thrillingly complex as its characters. This pulls readers deep into the author's polyphonic convergence of cultures. Once again, Tawada doesn't cease to amaze. (Mar.)

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"Scattered All Over the Earth." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 3, 17 Jan. 2022, p. 43. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A691684607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d60eaca7. Accessed 12 July 2024.

SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTHBy Yoko TawadaTranslated by Margaret Mitsutani

In the future imagined by Yoko Tawada, rising sea levels have swallowed Japan. The ''land of sushi,'' as it is now known, survives only in the kitschified traces its culture has left on the exoticizing imagination of Westerners, and in the memories of Hiruko, who was studying abroad in Sweden when disaster struck, and may be the last Japanese person on the planet. Now a stateless refugee, Hiruko migrates first to Norway, then to Denmark, where she finds a job teaching Panska (that is, Pan-Scandinavian), the ''homemade language'' she invented, to immigrant children from the Middle East.

The first volume of a trilogy, the mordantly funny ''Scattered All Over the Earth'' reunites Tawada with Margaret Mitsutani, the translator with whom she shared a National Book Award for ''The Emissary'' in 2018. Tawada, who has lived in Germany for 40 years, writes in both Japanese and German. More than simply international, her writing is translingual; she leaves the borders between languages open and allows them to cross-pollinate. To translate her into English is to excavate linguistic strata: Panska reads like a Japonic parody of Nordic syntax translated into a West Germanic language.

Wouldn't it be easier to communicate in English? Hiruko is asked during a reluctant appearance on a Danish TV show about people from countries that no longer exist. But in the future, Mexico's booming economy is attracting Spanish-speaking workers from California, China no longer exports products and no one in the United States remembers how to make anything. Europe's welfare states are looking to cut costs, so ''english speaking migrants sometimes by force to america sent,'' Hiruko tells the interviewer, in Panska. ''Frightening. illness have, so in country with undeveloped healthcare system cannot live.''

Through the TV show, Hiruko meets Knut, an amateur linguist. Together they crisscross Europe on a picaresque quest to find one of Hiruko's compatriots. They travel to an umami festival in Germany, where they meet Akash, a transgender student from India, and Nora, a German with a highly developed sense of liberal guilt. Then they're off to see Nora's lover, Tenzo, at a cooking competition in Norway, before departing again for the south of France to meet with the enigmatic Susanoo, who is rumored to be from Japan, but may in fact be a robot.

Each character in Tawada's ''band of zigzag travelers'' is given chapters to narrate in the first person. These limited perspectives give rise to a comedy of intercultural misunderstandings that both move the plot forward and provide targets for Tawada's sharp satire. Tenzo, for example, turns out to be Nanook, a Greenlander who moves to study medicine in Copenhagen, where he is mistaken as a citizen of the ''land of sushi.'' ''Being singled out as an exotic was a lot more fun than being neutral,'' he concludes, so he decides to give himself a ''second identity.'' He adopts a Japanese name, learns the language and apprentices at a restaurant called Samurai. Nanook is shocked to discover that the head chef is from China, not Japan, and that he learned how to make dashi at a hotel in Paris, not Tokyo. ''When the original no longer exists,'' the chef tells him, ''there's nothing you can do except look for the best copy.''

Wise words. Far from being offended by Nanook's imposture, Hiruko recognizes a kindred spirit. His ''Tenzo'' may be a lie but it is nevertheless a form of creative expression, not unlike her Panska. When she calls it her homemade language, she herself is the home she means. ''Panska was me,'' Hiruko says. ''A work of art I'd poured my whole self into.'' What is true of Hiruko, Tawada suggests, is true of everyone from the harmless Nanook to an ultranationalist called Breivik: Our national identities are at bottom simulacra, copies of originals that no longer exist, if they ever did.

The apocalypse that's shrewdly forecast by ''Scattered All Over the Earth'' will be combined and uneven. How the global north handles the resulting refugee crisis will depend in part on the speed with which it gives up the view that nationalities are anything but virtualities. Judging by the recent migrant crises that informed Tawada's novel, it is a long-overdue lesson. By the time we are reading the trilogy's final volume, the climate-fiction scenario Tawada drapes in the trappings of picaresque comedy will no longer seem speculative.

Ryan Ruby is the author of the novel ''The Zero and the One.'' His criticism has appeared most recently in The Nation and New Left Review. SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH By Yoko Tawada Translated by Margaret Mitsutani 253 pp. New Directions. Paper, $16.95.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO: Yoko Tawada (PHOTOGRAPH BY NINA SUBIN)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The New York Times Company
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Ruby, Ryan. "Small World." The New York Times Book Review, 13 Mar. 2022, p. 14(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A696504816/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b3c99fd. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Tawada, Yoko PAUL CELAN AND THE TRANS-TIBETAN ANGEL New Directions (Fiction None) $14.95 7, 9 ISBN: 9780811234870

Japanese novelist Tawada, who lives in Berlin, observes a scholar's obsession with a poet.

When does an interest become an obsession? A pathology? For the central character of Tawada's Covid-19-era novella, problems come to light after his interest becomes a job. Patrik--more often referred to as "the patient"--is a literature scholar in the midst of a mental breakdown. The object of Patrik's work, and of his obsession, is the 20th-century Romania-born Jewish poet Paul Celan (1920-1970). In his thoughts and conversations, Patrik references endless minutiae of the poet's work, including his preoccupations with Zen and Kabbalah. For Patrik, Celan takes on a similar mystical significance--no detail small enough to escape notice, nothing in life too mundane to connect back to his work. Patrik aspires to "give a lecture in which he revealed the significance of every single letter Celan used in his poetry," but he's hobbled by his mental illness, which largely prevents him from leaving home. When he does, the patient suffers absurd compulsions, such as an inability to turn right at intersections or to order at a café. After a server offers a drink, he complains: "Why grapefruit juice? The grapefruit available in Berlin is mostly imported from Israel. Celan didn't go to Israel until 1969." Although he insists that "Patrik is different from the patient," the line between them is undefined. The narrative embodies his alienation by fluctuating between first and third person and traversing fragmented timelines. What results is an inventive homage to modernist literature, wrapped up in an unexpectedly personal depiction of illness. Although the patient's problems appear to be psychological, they manifest in his physicality: "I ought to leave my body to its own devices, it can lead a healthier life without me," he says. " I'll stop trying to read my partial, physical pain. Instead, I'll read Celan."

A dark but charming portrait of a man unmoored by his love of an artist.

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"Tawada, Yoko: PAUL CELAN AND THE TRANS-TIBETAN ANGEL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463119/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=763a65da. Accessed 12 July 2024.

Sehgal, Parul. "Disaster Leaves Japan In Desolate Quarantine." New York Times, 18 Apr. 2018, p. C4(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A535074752/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cd920d37. Accessed 12 July 2024. "The Emissary." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 5, 29 Jan. 2018, pp. 164+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A526116502/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c5fd1c7d. Accessed 12 July 2024. "Tawada, Yoko: THE EMISSARY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A527248074/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=518bc65a. Accessed 12 July 2024. Tideman, Jacky. "Yoko Tawada: The Emissary." World Literature Today, vol. 92, no. 2, Mar.-Apr. 2018, pp. 68+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A529356896/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fe4380cc. Accessed 12 July 2024. Canfield, Kevin. "Yoko Tawada: Three Streets." World Literature Today, vol. 96, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 2022, pp. 60+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A723644340/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=93075092. Accessed 12 July 2024. "Three Streets." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 16, 20 Apr. 2020, p. 42. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A623444640/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=644b5872. Accessed 12 July 2024. Ruby, Ryan. "When Nations Disappear, What Happens to Nationalities?" International New York Times, 7 Mar. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A695902607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3340fb0f. Accessed 12 July 2024. Karetnyk, Bryan. "Crisis? What crisis? A speculative novel of a disappeared Japan." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6223, 8 July 2022, p. 16. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A710911250/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8a4de9a4. Accessed 12 July 2024. "Tawada, Yoko: SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A689340038/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3e8e3863. Accessed 12 July 2024. "Scattered All Over the Earth." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 3, 17 Jan. 2022, p. 43. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A691684607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d60eaca7. Accessed 12 July 2024. Ruby, Ryan. "Small World." The New York Times Book Review, 13 Mar. 2022, p. 14(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A696504816/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3b3c99fd. Accessed 12 July 2024. "Tawada, Yoko: PAUL CELAN AND THE TRANS-TIBETAN ANGEL." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A797463119/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=763a65da. Accessed 12 July 2024.

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