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From the
January 2002 issue of
World Press Review
(VOL. 49, No. 1)
Books:
Yoko Tawada
Double Wordplay
Kimie
Itakura, Asahi Shimbun (liberal), Tokyo, Japan, Oct.
28, 2001
As a young girl,
Yoko Tawada made a discovery that would later mold her life.
“I found it fun to speak a jumble of words, sheer nonsense,
and make grown-ups laugh,” she says. Tawada has made a
career from such phrases—in both Japanese and German. And
instead of laughs, the unique poet-novelist has won literary
awards in the two countries. A resident of Hamburg, Germany,
for nearly 20 years, Tawada boldly experiments with the two
languages and challenges conventional storytelling. The results
are colorful threads of words that weave a tapestry of rich
imagery. The novelist believes it was important to plant herself
in a foreign culture, partly to hone her sensitivity toward
her native tongue. “It was purely by chance,” the
novelist said recently in Tokyo, explaining why she settled
down in Germany. “I happened to get a chance to work at
a local German book exporter in Hamburg as a trainee for two
years, and ended up staying there permanently,” said Tawada.
Tawada won Japan’s Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991
and the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1993. But her debut in
the German literary world preceded her recognition in Japan
by several years. Her first poems were published in Germany
in 1987, and her first novel two years later. In 1996 she won
the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award granted to foreign
writers who contribute to German culture.
Born in 1960 in Kunitachi, a western suburb of Tokyo, Tawada
began to write novels as a junior high-school student. “I
was feeling frustrated about school life. I often found myself
disagreeing in my mind with what teachers said, but didn’t
know how to protest effectively,” she says. “So I
just wrote stories at home, as my own style of resistance.”
In high school, Tawada produced a small literary magazine. Eventually,
she became interested in European literature and studied German,
out of respect for master writers like Thomas Mann. Shortly
after graduating from Waseda University in 1982, she flew to
Hamburg. “While feeling liberated and excited,” Tawada
recalls, “I felt kind of sad at the same time, feeling
as if I was cut off forever from everything that had tied me
to home.”
Tawada earned a master’s degree in German literature at
the University of Hamburg in 1990. During her postgraduate studies,
she found a collection of volumes on Japanese folktales at the
university’s library and discovered the subject of human-animal
marriages, which inspired her to write the award-winning The
Bridegroom Was a Dog. Set in the Tokyo suburbs, this surrealistic
novel portrays the bizarre relationship between a cram-school
teacher and a strange “dog-man”—human in shape
but a dog in mentality and behavior—who settles in her
house.
Tawada has since written several other novellas in Japanese,
incorporating elements of German folk tales. Those stories are
a maze of words and imagery that make characters, scenes, and
time elements irrelevant. “I believe folk tales or legends
tell us some aspects of popular histories....For my part, I’ve
blended contemporary elements (into old legendary motifs). Those
heterogeneous elements lead my stories to interesting turns
and twists.”
Many of her other novels, varied in style, also do not have
clear beginnings and endings, and “evolve into most unexpected
directions.” She is committed to exploring the potential
to weave out of the two languages something truly original.
When writing in German, Tawada enjoys struggling with a language
that is not her native tongue. “German is now my daily
language, and I can convey my feelings precisely. But when it
comes to writing, I still feel restrained. That challenge is
interesting.” On the other hand, “when I come back
to Japan to speak in Japanese, I feel as if I am speaking some
translated language. While writing in Japanese I would go through
the process of rediscovering and rebuilding feelings and memories
attached to each word as a Japanese. “Whether to write
in German or in Japanese depends on which language lets me play
or experiment more freely with images and motifs at the time,”
the novelist says.
After all these years in Hamburg, Tawada still finds herself
serving as a Japanese cultural spokeswoman, answering questions
ranging from Zen or calligraphy to Japanese pop stars. “At
least once every day, somebody asks me, ‘What about…in
Japan?’ ” she says. She also discovers what she calls
myths about Japan. One concerns Japan’s dwindling economic
power; another involves the notion that Japan is full of computer
games and manga [comics], while the image of samurai/geisha
persists.
“On the other hand, there are trifling, amusing reports,
such as in Japan there is a toilet device designed to make sounds
inaudible, or that many Japanese pay for surgery to give their
eyelids a fold. Patching all those pieces of information together
would make Japan a country more bizarre and funnier than one
you’d find in Gulliver’s Travels,” she
says with a chuckle. 
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