A short life of the author
Yōko Tawada (b. 23 March 1960, Tokyo) is a Japanese-German novelist, poet, and essayist who occupies a unique position in world literature: she is genuinely bilingual, composing original works in both Japanese and German — not translating from one language to the other but thinking and creating in each language separately, producing distinct bodies of work that share themes and obsessions but are not translations of each other. This bilingualism is not merely a biographical fact but the central subject of her fiction: she writes about what it means to exist between languages, between cultures, between the human and the animal, between the self and its translation.
Life and Career
Tawada was born in Tokyo and studied Russian literature at Waseda University. In 1982, she moved to Hamburg, Germany, travelling by train across Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Railway — a journey of displacement that has become a foundational myth in her work. She studied German literature at the University of Hamburg and earned a doctorate from the University of Zürich on the subject of literary translation.
She has lived in Germany ever since — first in Hamburg, later in Berlin — and has published over thirty books in both Japanese and German. Her German-language debut, Das Bad (The Bath, 1989), is a surreal novella about a Japanese woman in Hamburg whose body begins to dissolve, losing its physical boundaries. Her Japanese-language debut, Inu mukoiri (The Bridegroom Was a Dog, 1993), about a schoolteacher who may or may not be married to a dog, won the Akutagawa Prize — Japan’s most prestigious literary award for new writers.
Major Works
The Naked Eye (2004) — originally written in German — follows a young Vietnamese woman who is stranded in Germany after being accidentally taken from East Berlin to West Berlin during a student exchange. Unable to speak the language, she constructs her identity through the films of Catherine Deneuve, watching them obsessively in cinemas and reimagining her life through the lens of Deneuve’s roles. The novel is a meditation on how we construct the self from foreign materials — from languages we don’t speak, images we don’t control, and cultures that refuse to accommodate us.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2011) is perhaps her most formally daring work — a novel narrated by three generations of polar bears, each of whom writes an autobiography. The grandmother bear is a circus performer in the Soviet Union; the mother is a celebrity in West Germany; the grandchild is born in a Canadian zoo. The novel is simultaneously absurd, philosophically serious, and deeply moving, using the perspective of animals to defamiliarise human assumptions about language, freedom, and the body.
Kentōshi (The Emissary, 2014) — originally written in Japanese — imagines a near-future Japan that has sealed itself off from the world after an environmental catastrophe. The children born after the disaster are so physically fragile they cannot walk, while the elderly are unnaturally vigorous and healthy. The novel follows Yoshiro, a great-grandfather, as he cares for his great-grandson Mumei, whose frailty embodies the consequences of the disaster. It won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2018 (translated by Margaret Mitsutani).
Scattered All Over the Earth (2022, first volume of a trilogy) follows Hiruko, a young woman from a vanished country (a version of Japan that has been submerged by climate change), as she wanders through a future Europe searching for someone who speaks her language. Each chapter is narrated by a different character Hiruko encounters, and each character speaks (and thinks) in a different language. The novel is Tawada’s most explicit engagement with the question of what happens when a language — and the world it describes — disappears.
Themes and Critical Standing
Tawada’s central preoccupations are language, translation, and the body. She is fascinated by what happens at the boundary between languages — the puns that emerge, the meanings that shift, the self that is transformed when it crosses from one linguistic system to another. Her characters are perpetually displaced — immigrants, refugees, animals, speakers of dying languages — and her fiction investigates what remains of the self when its familiar linguistic and cultural scaffolding is removed.
Her work draws on the European traditions of Kafka, Beckett, and the Surrealists, and on the Japanese traditions of Kōbō Abe and Yumiko Kurahashi. She has won the Akutagawa Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the National Book Award, the Kleist Prize (one of Germany’s most prestigious literary awards), and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
Key Works
- The Emissary (2014) — National Book Award
- Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2011)
- The Naked Eye (2004)
- Scattered All Over the Earth (2022)
Collecting Tawada
Tawada presents a bibliographically complex case: her works exist in Japanese originals (various Tokyo publishers), German originals (Konkursbuch Verlag, Tübingen; Claudia Gehrke), and English translations (New Directions, Portobello). English translations bring $10–$25. Japanese and German originals are collected separately. Tawada signs at European and Japanese literary events. The complexity and quality of her oeuvre — and the challenge of assembling it across three languages — make her a rewarding author for the dedicated collector.