A Discussion with Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada’s work straddles two continents, two languages and cultures. Born in Tokyo in 1960, she moved to Hamburg at the age of 22 and became, simultaneously, a German and a Japanese writer. She has since published a good ten volumes in each language, won numerous literary awards (including Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1993 and, in 1996, Germany’s Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the highest honor bestowed upon a foreign-born author), and established herself, in both countries, as one of the most important writers of her generation.

Tawada’s poetry, fiction, essays and plays return again and again to questions of language and culture, the link between national and personal identity. If the languages we speak help define us, what happens to the identity of persons displaced between cultures? “The interesting,” she once said in an interview, “lies in the in-between.” And so her characters are constantly in motion, journeying between countries, language and modes of being—providing us with “travel narratives” full of glimpses into the interstices of the world in which the structure of all experience is revealed.