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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Yōko Tawada

Yoko Tawada.jpg
Yōko Tawada, 2022 (Photo: Jindřich Nosek [NoJin] via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

Yōko Tawada was born in Nakano, Tokyo, on 23 March 1960. She began writing at an early age, attempting to distribute her first novel while still in school. Tawada started to learn German in high school and first travelled to Germany at the age of 19, taking the Trans-Siberian railway via Moscow. This journey (which secondary literature frequently evokes as a foundational moment for the writer) was fictionalized in Wo Europa anfängt (Where Europe Begins, 1991). In this short story, a Japanese woman recounts her journey on the Trans-Siberian railway to Europe and reflects on alterity, otherness and travel.

After returning to Japan and studying Russian Literature at Waseda University in Tokyo, Tawada intended to continue her studies in Poland. When she was denied a visa, however, she took up the chance to work for an acquaintance of her father in the publishing industry in Hamburg. This allowed her to experience the German language in a non-academic context. In 1982, she started to pursue a degree in German literature at Hamburg University where she read Benjamin, Derrida, Barthes, Celan and Bachmann – authors who would influence her later works. Tawada received her doctorate in German literature from Zurich University in 1998 with a thesis on magical language and toys in European literature from E.T.A. Hoffmann to Kafka, which was supervised by eminent Germanist Sigrid Weigel. She has cited Paul Celan and Kafka as some of her literary influences.

Tawada lived in Hamburg from 1982 until 2006 before moving to Berlin, where she currently resides.

Tawada publishes in German and Japanese. Initially she wrote exclusively in Japanese. Her first publications in German, Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts (Only There Where You Are There Is Nothing, 1987) and Wo Europa anfängt (Where Europe Begins, 1991), were translated into German by Peter Pörtner, who continues to translate some of Tawada’s works. Some of her novels – such as Opium für Ovid (Opium for David, 2000) and Schwager in Bordeaux (Brother-in-Law in Bordeaux, 2008) – were originally produced in German and re-written in Japanese by Tawada herself. In comparison, Das nackte Auge (The Naked Eye, 2004) was written simultaneously in Japanese and German, effectively creating two distinct but related books. Tawada prefers to write different genres in each language. Her German works tend to be plays, literary essays and short prose texts. In contrast, Tawada often writes poetry and novels in Japanese.

Tawada juxtaposes critical reflections on the power and dangers of language with light-hearted word games. The focus on the materiality of language in her works serves to highlight the importance of language for mediating issues of gender, migration and alterity. One of the central themes in Tawada’s writings is transformation, or rather forms of metamorphosis that transcend traditional divisions between genders, cultures and the human/non-human divide. Complementing her preference for fluidity and non-stable identities, Tawada’s metamorphoses therefore question concepts such as national and gender identity and monolingualism. In Tawada’s German-language works, plot often takes a backseat to poetological reflections on the fluidity of language, gender and the self. Several of her texts focus explicitly on the female body and body parts. In Ein Gast (A Guest, 1991), one of Tawada’s earliest German-language short novels, the ear and its connection to alterity and femininity are foregrounded. In Das nackte Auge, the eye and the cinematic seeing act bring issues of identity, capitalism and Cold War Europe into focus. In her works published after 2000, such as Schwager in Bordeaux (2008) and Etüden im Schnee (Études in Snow, 2014), Tawada has been preoccupied with questions of colonialism and communism in the European context. More recent publications include the Japanese poetry collection Shutaine (2017), the German-language novel Paul Celan und der Chinesische Engel (2020), and the novel Scattered All Over the Earth (2022), translated by Margaret Mitsutani which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature. 

The protagonists in Tawada’s short novels are often travellers, migrants or refugees, characters shifting between different spaces and identities. The importance of travel to her work also extends to Tawada as a writer. Although she is based in Berlin, Tawada has given more than 900 readings in multiple countries and has also been a writer-in-residence at several universities across the USA., including, MIT Boston (1999), the German House of New York University (2004), Washington University (2007), Stanford University (2008) and Cornell University (2008). She has given more than 1,000 lectures and readings worldwide. 

In addition,Tawada has held several academic lectureships. In 1998 she was a lecturer in poetics in Tübingen; her talks, subsequently published as Verwandlungen: Tübinger Poetikvorlesungen (Metamorphoses: Tübingen Poetics Lectures, 1998), contain poetological reflections on the issues of metamorphosis, language and alterity that reappear in her later works. Tawada was also the inaugural holder of the Guest Professorship in Intercultural Poetics at Hamburg University in 2011. Her lectures were published in the essay collection Fremde Wasser (Foreign Water, 2012) with accompanying secondary literature and an interview with the author. In 2015 she was Visiting Professor and Distinguished DAAD Chair for Contemporary Poetics in the Department of German at New York University.

Tawada has received numerous prestigious prizes in Germany and Japan, notably the Akutagawa Literature Prize (1993), the Adelbert-von- Chamisso-Preis (1996), the Junichiro Tanizaki Literature Prize (2003) and the Goethe Medal (2005), the Kleist-Preis (2016), the National Book Award (2018), and the Asahi Prize (2019). In 2022, she received an honorary doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. 

Compiled by Christin Bohnke (Toronto)