Yōko Tawada (多和田葉子Tawada Yōko, born March 23, 1960) is a Japanese writer currently living inBerlin, Germany. She writes in both Japanese and German. She is a former writer-in-residence atMIT andStanford University.
Tawada was born inNakano, Tokyo.[1] Her father was a translator andbookseller.[2] She attended Tokyo Metropolitan Tachikawa High School.[3] In 1979, at the age of 19, Tawada took theTrans-Siberian Railway to visit Germany.[4] She received her undergraduate education atWaseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, and upon graduation moved toHamburg, 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 atHamburg University, and in 1990 she received a master's degree incontemporary German literature.[6] In 2000 she received her doctorate in German literature from theUniversity of Zurich, whereSigrid Weigel, her thesis advisor, had been appointed to the faculty.[7][8] In 2006 Tawada moved toBerlin, where she currently resides.[9]
Tawada's writing career began in 1987 with the publication ofNur 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 Japanesebilingual edition. Her first novella, titledKakato o nakushite (Missing Heels), received theGunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991.[7]
In 1993 Tawada won theAkutagawa Prize for her novellaInu muko iri, which was published later that year withKakato o nakushite and another story in the single volumeInu 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 collectionInu muko iri, translated byMargaret Mitsutani, was published in 1998 but was not commercially successful.[5]New Directions Publishing reissued the Mitsutani translation of the singleAkutagawa Prize-winning novella in 2012 under the titleThe Bridegroom Was a Dog.[12]
Several other books followed, includingSeijo densetsu (Legend of a Saint) in 1996 andFutakuchi 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 titledFacing the Bridge.[13] Tawada won the 1996Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German literary award for non-native speakers of German.[14] In 1997 she was writer in residence atVilla Aurora, and in 1999 she spent four months as the Max Kade Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology.[15][16] She won theIzumi Kyōka Prize for Literature for her 2000 bookHinagiku no ocha no baai,[17] and both the Sei Ito Literature Prize[18] and theTanizaki Prize in 2003 forYogisha no yako ressha (Suspects on the Night Train).[19][20]
Tawada took a bilingual approach to her 2004 novelDas 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 bySusan Bernofsky, was published byNew Directions Publishing in 2009 under the titleThe Naked Eye.[22] In 2005, Tawada won the prestigiousGoethe Medal from theGoethe-Institut for meritorious contributions to German culture by a non-German.[23] From January to February 2009, she was the Writer-in-Residence at theStanford University Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.[24]
In 2011, inspired by the story of the orphaned polar bearKnut, Tawada wrote three interlocking short stories exploring the relationship between humans and animals from the perspective of three generations of captivepolar bears. As with previous work, she wrote separate manuscripts in Japanese and German.[25] In 2011 the Japanese version, titledYuki no renshūsei, was published in Japan. It won the 2011Noma Literary Prize[26] and the 2012Yomiuri Prize.[27] In 2014 the German version, titledEtüden im Schnee, was published in Germany.[2] An English edition ofEtüden im Schnee, translated bySusan Bernofsky, was published byNew Directions Publishing in 2016 under the titleMemoirs of a Polar Bear.[28] It won the inauguralWarwick 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 novelKentoshi, 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 byNew Directions Publishing in 2018 under the titleThe Emissary.[32] and asThe Last Children of Tokyo byPortobello Books/Granta Books in the UK.
In 2016 she received theKleist Prize,[33][34] and in 2018 she was awarded theCarl Zuckmayer Medal for services to the German language.[35] Also in 2018, she received theNational Book Award for Translated Literature (the inaugural year of that award) for her novelThe Emissary, translated by Margaret Mitsutani. In 2022, her novelScattered All Over the Earth, also translated by Mitsutani, was a National Book Award for Translated Literature finalist.
Tawada writes in Japanese and German. Scholars of her work have adopted her use of the termexophony 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 asshort stories and essays in German.[39] She also tends to create moreneologisms 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 andnationalism, particularly thekokugo/kokutai relationship inJapanese 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 ofmagical realism, such as the animal and plantanthropomorphism inMemoirs 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 inThe 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]
The Bridegroom Was a Dog (Inu muko iri, 犬婿入り), translated by Margaret Mitsutani,Kodansha, 2003,ISBN978-4-7700-2940-9. This edition includesMissing Heels (Kakato o nakushite).
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.
^Pirozhenko, Ekaterina (2008). ""Flâneuses", Bodies, and the City: Magic in Yoko Tawada's "Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen"".Colloquia Germanica.41 (4):329–356.JSTOR23981687.
^abcBrandt, Bettina (2006). "Ein Wort, ein Ort, or How Words Create Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada". In Gelus, Marjorie; Kraft, Helga (eds.).Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature and Culture. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. pp. 1–15.ISBN978-0-8032-9859-0.
^Tawada, Yōko (1998).Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur : eine ethnologische Poetologie (PhD) (in German). University of Zurich.
^Manthripragada, Ashwin."The Naked Eye, by Yōko Tawada".TRANSIT: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking World. RetrievedJune 20, 2018.
^Kaindl, Klaus (January 28, 2014). "Of Dragons and Translators: Foreignness as a principle of life". In Kaindl, Klaus; Spitzl, Karlheinz (eds.).Transfiction: Research into the realities of translation fiction. John Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 87–101.ISBN978-90-272-7073-3.
^Yildiz, Yasemin (2012). "Chapter Three: Detaching from the Mother Tongue: Bilingualism and Liberation in Yoko Tawada".Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. Fordham University Press. pp. 109–142.ISBN978-0-8232-5576-4.
^abMaurer, Kathrin (2016). "Translating Catastrophes: Yoko Tawada's Poetic Responses to the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake, the Tsunami, and Fukushima".New German Critique.43:171–194.doi:10.1215/0094033X-3329247.
^Totten, Monika (1999). "Writing in Two Languages: A Conversation with Yoko Tawada".Harvard Review.17 (17):93–100.JSTOR27561312.
^Fachinger, Petra (July 1, 2006). "Chapter 6: Cultural and Culinary Ambivalence in Sara Chin, Evelina Galang, and Yoko Tawada". In Ng, Maria; Holden, Philip (eds.).Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society, Literature, Film. Hong Kong University Press. pp. 89–201.ISBN978-962-209-796-4.
^Natiw, Paul (2010). "Experiencing the "Other" through language in Yoko Tawada'sTalisman". In Lehman, Wil; Grieb, Margrit (eds.).Cultural Perspectives on Film, Literature, and Language: Selected Proceedings of the 19th Southeast Conference on Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Film. Universal-Publishers. pp. 99–105.ISBN978-1-59942-548-1.
^Tachibana, Reiko (September 30, 2007). "Chapter 12: Tawada Yōko's Quest for Exophony: Japan and Germany". In Slaymaker, Douglas (ed.).Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere. Lexington Books. pp. 153–168.ISBN978-0-7391-2272-3.
^Kraenzle, Christina (2008). "The Limits of Travel: Yoko Tawada's Fictional Travelogues".German Life and Letters.61 (2):244–260.doi:10.1111/j.1468-0483.2008.00422.x.
^abRedlich, Jeremy (2017). "Representations of Public Spaces and the Construction of Race in Yoko Tawada's "Bioskoop der Nacht"".The German Quarterly.90 (2):196–211.doi:10.1111/gequ.12032.
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