Yoko Tawada Conjures a World Between Languages

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

Illustration by Pei-Hsin Cho

The Novelist Yoko Tawada Conjures a World Between Languages

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

By Julian Lucas
February 21, 2022

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

How America Remembers— and Distorts — Its Slavery Past

How America Remembers— and Distorts — Its Slavery Past

The 10 Best Books of 2021

'How The Word Is Passed' Teaches The Importance Of Reckoning With History

How the Word is Passed review / After Tulsa, other forgotten atrocities

HOW THE WORD IS PASSED
A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America
By Clint Smith

By Julian Lucas
Published June 1, 2021Updated Nov. 30, 2021

Where are we, exactly, in the great American slavery reckoning? Like a poorly written series watched only on random weeknights, it’s beginning to lose coherence, even — or maybe even especially — when you pay attention. In one episode, protesters are tearing down Confederate statues and the nation is on the cusp of reparations; by the next, the federal government has condemned basic education about slavery as a form of totalitarian brainwashing. The Harriet Tubman 20 flutters from season to season like an unresolved subplot. Are we in the backlash, the whitelash, or the backlash to the whitelash, and when will white liberals lose interest? It’s enough to give anybody whiplash, especially those of us who, as descendants of the enslaved, can’t safely stop watching the interminable show.