Not many people think of Yoko Tawada as a Berlin author. She is a German author, a Japanese author, a global author; she is a member of the alternative literary canon curated by those crafty devils at New Directions.
Anglophone critics have praised her profound erudition, her linguistic innovation, her humane experiments in (climate) dystopia, and her principled opposition to xenophobia and xenophobic language politics, especially in the charming trilogy of identity-bending road novels that began with Scattered All Over the Earth (2022) and continues this autumn with Suggested in the Stars. And these people are right. But she is also one of ours – a literary Berlinerin through and through. Indeed, one might even argue that she is the great author of international Berlin today.
What she conjures is a place simmering with literary potential energy.
Our city is admittedly not her main theme. Over the years, though, she has gradually assembled an oeuvre of Berlin texts – from the Zoo Berlin novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear via essays like ‘An der Spree’ and the story collection Three Streets through to her new novella Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel – which is utterly original and effortlessly pluralistic, perfectly suited to the contemporary Hauptstadt. One reason for this is her multilingualism: Tawada – who moved from Tokyo to Hamburg in the 1980s and to Berlin in 2006 – writes her books in either Japanese and German. (They are then translated into English by Margaret Mitsutani or Susan Bernofsky, respectively.)
Tawada is herself an accomplished translator. In her own work, too, multilingualism is absolutely essential: her stories, poems and essays are driven by the various ways in which words can change within and between languages. A Tawada book always seems set in an absorbing in-between state, a shimmering multiplicity of meaning. Her Celan novella, ostensibly a Covid-era tale about a lonesome scholar, is filled with linguistic lurches and slips. In her essays, meanwhile, both language and life are often presented in botanic-biological terms: fertile seeds that float across borders, cross-fertilise, and mutate.
One might even argue that she is the great author of international Berlin today.
Sometimes expat writing about Berlin insists that the city isn’t Germany – but then doesn’t actually posit what it is, besides perhaps an empty playground for self-rebranding or cheap ketamine. Tawada’s Berlin is also not quite Germany. Rather than being a non-place, however, her negated city appears as a multi-place, one constantly on the verge of metamorphosis, where new angles and new phenomena spring from the cracks in the pavement. There is a politics to this – and Tawada is occasionally explicit about everyday xenophobia and the threat of rightwing populism, which morphs into ‘poplarism’ in the Celan book. Yet it also runs deeper than politics: making hay across boundaries is just what she does.
In Three Streets, Tawada brings her interest in metamorphosis – and her darkly playful blurring of representation and reality – to bear on Berlin’s own geography. Here, a trio of stories breathe new supernatural life into Kollwitzstraße, Majakowskiring and Pushkinallee. Statues become men; poets become ghosts; words become prophecies, but then again, maybe not. What she conjures is a place simmering with literary potential energy. “The city is just like the inside of my brain,” says the narrator. And then: “The city is an amusement park of the senses, a rehearsal for revolution, a restaurant where loneliness is devoured, a workshop for words.” Now that sounds like the Berlin we know and love.
