When Wahlberlinerin Yoko Tawada first moved to Germany, she had trouble distinguishing between ‘R’ sounds and ‘L’ sounds. As a consequence, two words merged in her mouth: Brücke (bridge) and Lücke (gap). Tawada is often described as someone who moves between cultures – a cosmopolitan rule-breaker, an antinationalist, an intentionally unreliable importer-exporter of words.
Yet, as she realised after the Brücke-Lücke mixup, her mission is not building bridges but rather exploring gaps. Or, as she puts it in Exophony, her writing seeks less to cross borders and more to dwell inside them. This is classic Tawada, immediately recognisable to those who enjoy her seductively strange, interlingual, metamorphosis-driven fiction.
In her newly translated essay collection, first written in the 2000s in Japanese, Tawada roams from a literary conference in Dakar via Japanese Kleist translations, the afterlives of colonialism in Asia, Swiss minority languages and the radical potential of punning to a memorable sequence of riffs on German words. Tawada’s playfulness is constantly profound; instead of breaking the rules, she rewrites them entirely.
- Exophony by Yoko Tawada (trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda) is available from New Directions, details.
