Tawada Yoko

The prolific and peripatetic TawadaYōko, who tells us in these pages that the word “national” meant nothing to her as a child other than as a brand name for kitchen appliances, continues to attract critical attention in a world equally innocent of older geopolitical borders. This, Doug Slaymaker’s second anthology of essays on Tawada, focuses on the linguistic and rhetorical in-betweenness of language in her works and their affront to the norms of narrative closure, be they originally written in Japanese, German, or English. Contributors, who include not only Tawada but also an international array of senior and junior scholars, mine Tawada for what she has to say about species not our own, a planet in ecological disarray, temporalities other than the linear, and as Slaymaker puts it in his critical introduction, those places where our once ordinary reality now encounters “dream space, the surreal, perhaps madness.” -- John Whittier Treat, Yale University
TawadaYōko is one of the most significant writers of our time, and the contributors to Doug Slaymaker’s outstanding collection of essays show us just how and why her writing—novels, plays, poems, essays—has such resonance today. Tawada, who writes both in Japanese and in German, the language of her adopted country, regularly poses the question that animates her own lead essay here: What does it mean to be human? What is language? Identity? Gender? Nation? How do we negotiate the borders between these troubling terms? Given the experimental nature of Tawada’s writing—her almost visceral response to words and their etymologies—the incisive readings found here will be helpful, not just to Japanese scholars but also to anyone who wants to understand our own literary moment. A truly exciting book! -- Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University
This riveting analysis by an impressive constellation of international scholars combines with post-Fukushima essays by TawadaYōko to yield fresh and even indispensable perspectives on this magnificent writer and her many contributions to thinking language and world literature today. This collection is a must-read for anyone interested in twenty-first century concepts and practices of translation, kinship, temporality, media, and eco-critical thresholds. -- Leslie A. Adelson, Cornell University