Tawada Yoko: On Writing and Rewriting (New Studies in Modern Japan) 1498590047, 9781498590044

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Tawada Yoko

New Studies in Modern Japan Series Editor: Doug Slaymaker and William M. Tsutsui Editorial Board: Michael Bourdaghs, University of Chicago Rebecca Copeland, Washington University in St. Louis Aaron Gerow, Yale University Yoshikuni Igarashi, Vanderbilt University Koichi Iwabuchi, Monash University T. J. Pempel, University of California, Berkeley Julia Adeney Thomas, University of Notre Dame Dennis Washburn, Dartmouth College Merry White, Boston University New Studies in Modern Japan is a multidisciplinary series that consists primarily of original studies on a broad spectrum of topics dealing with Japan since the mid-nineteenth century. Additionally, the series aims to bring back into print classic works that shed new light on contemporary Japan. The series speaks to cultural studies (literature, translations, film), history, and social sciences audiences. We publish compelling works of scholarship, by both established and rising scholars in the field, on a broad arena of topics, in order to nuance our understandings of Japan and the Japanese. Recent titles in the series: Tawada Yōko: On Writing and Rewriting, edited by Doug Slaymaker Imagining Prostitution in Modern Japan, 1850–1913, by Ann Marie Davis Japan Viewed from Interdisciplinary Perspectives: History and Prospects, edited by Yoneyuki Sugita Single Mothers in Contemporary Japan: Motherhood, Class, and Reproductive Practice, by Aya Ezawa Creating Japan's Ground Self-Defense Force, 1945–2015: A Sword Well Made, by David Hunter-Chester Rethinking Japan: The Politics of Contested Nationalism, by Arthur Stockwin and Kweku Ampiah The Politics and Literature Debate in Postwar Japanese Criticism: 1945–52, edited by Atsuko Ueda, Michael K. Bourdaghs, Richi Sakakibara, and Hi-rokazu Toeda Yokohama and the Silk Trade: How Eastern Japan Became the Primary Economic Region of Japan, 1843–1893, by Yasuhiro Makimura The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections, edited by David Lowe, Cassandra Atherton, and Alyson Miller Literature among the Ruins, 1945–1955: Postwar Japanese Literary Criticism, edited by Atsuko Ueda, Richi Sakakibara, Michael K. Bourdaghs, and Hi-rokazu Toeda

Tawada Yoko On Writing and Rewriting Edited by Doug Slaymaker

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Contents

Introduction Doug Slaymaker

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Choosing between Life and Human: Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture in Japanese Studies, University of Chicago, March 7, 2016 Tawada Yōko (trans. Michael K. Bourdaghs) 2 Theory, Fiction, and the Lightness of Translation: Tawada Yōko’s Schwager in Bordeaux/Borudō no gikei (ボルドーの義 兄) Brett de Bary 3 Image and the Unity of a Language: Translation and the Indeterminacy of National Language Naoki Sakai 4 Yōko Tawada’s Poetics on the Threshold of Different Writing Systems Sigrid Weigel 5 Translationalism as Poetic Principle: Tawada’s Translational Rewriting of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis Christine Ivanovic 6 Yoko Tawada Writes Ernst Jandl: Movements of Alphabetic and Sino-Japanese Writing Across Time and Media Gizem Arslan 7 Sprachmutter: The Death of the Mother Tongue Paul McQuade 8 Yoko Tawada’s Überseezungen: Feminist Self-Translation and Creative Resistance Madalina Meirosu 9 Laudatio for Uljana Wolf: Erlangener Literary Prize for Poetry as Translation, 2015 Yoko Tawada (Translated by Bettina Brandt) 10 Spherical Narrative Temporality in Tawada Yōko’s Fiction Dan Fujiwara

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11 From the Linguistic Mother to the Salt Water Mother: Poetics of Catastrophe in Tawada Yōko’s Ecocritical Writing Annegret Märten 12 The Destruction and Recreation of Japanese Mythology through Yoko Tawada’s Literature Sachiyo Taniguchi 13 Words That I Swallowed Whole: The Linguistic Edibility of Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Writings Tingting Hui 14 Transmigration and Cultural Memory in Yoko Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee Suzuko Mousel Knott 15 Staging of Self, Performance of Life: Formation of a Subject in Yuki no renshūsei Tomoko Takeuchi Slutsky 16 The Hands of Bears, the Hands of Men: Animal Writing in Tawada Yōko’s Yuki no renshūsei Doug Slaymaker 17 The Fictional-Reality of Actual-Virtuality: Yōko Tawada’s Kentōshi (The Emissary) Seungyeon Kim Index About the Editor About the Contributors

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Introduction Doug Slaymaker

Tawada Yōko—born in Japan (b.1960), based in Germany, prolifically writing and presenting in both languages—is one of the world’s most important contemporary writers (not simply one of the most important Japanese or German writers). Tawada is prolific. Her published books alone number more than fifty volumes, with roughly the same number in German and Japanese. She has won every major literary prize in Germany and Japan, including the von-Chamisso Prize, the Goethe Medal, the Kleist Prize, and the Akutagawa, Tanizaki, Noma, and Yomiuri Prizes. After graduating from Waseda University in 1982 with a degree in Russian, she moved to Hamburg, Germany, and took a job in the publishing industry. She earned a Master’s degree from the University of Hamburg (1987) and a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich (2000). Tawada’s writing unfolds at the intersections of borders, whether of language, identity, nationality, or gender (to name only the most prominent). Her characters are all travelers of some sort, very often foreigners and outsiders, often caught in surreal spaces between; they are caught between language and culture, or between species, subjectivities, and identities. Sometimes they exist in the spaces between gendered and national identities; sometimes we find them caught between reality and whatever the opposite term would be—dreamspace perhaps, the surreal, perhaps madness. Carried by trains, packed into planes, or belted into the passenger seats of cars, Tawada’s characters travel in ways that seem to remove volition. She has been one of the most prescient and provocative thinkers on the complexities of traveling and living in the contemporary world, and thus has always been obsessed with passports and trouble at borders. Tawada’s more recent work explores the borders of human and nonhuman, between youth and age, between male and female, between health and sickness, as well as continuing earlier obsessions. Some of these have become more acute following the triple disasters—the earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown—of March 11, 2011, in Northeast Japan. One can almost mark the change in real time: Tawada’s Kumo wo tsukamu hanashi (Grasping at Clouds) began serialization prior to the triple disasters and was completed afterwards. We know which chapter was vii

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written in February, which in March, for example, and this reveals important anxieties. Namely, and to be more specific, while characters in Tawada’s fiction have always been plagued by anxieties about identity, the Asian woman traveling in those earlier works of fiction could feel comfortable that an EU passport would ensure and facilitate safe, easy travel. Customs would be a breeze. Borders would be annoying, but just a minor annoyance. Yet all that changes on March 11, 2011 (and is recorded in Kumo wo tsukamu hanashi): when the official at passport control realizes that the place of origin for the bearer of the EU passport is Tokyo, the story turns sinister. No longer a document of safety and secure passage, it becomes proof of suspicion. No longer a certificate of safety, it certifies contamination. This fictional portrayal mirrors a new reality for Japanese residents traveling in a new Europe. A dystopian anger permeates many of her more recent stories. A number of the essays here analyze these recent works—Kentōshi (The Emissary, trans. Margaret Mitsutani), for example—which imagines a nuclear Japan in a sort of new sakoku, like the eighteenth-century Japan cut off from other nations, largely isolated in the world. Or worse: the premise of Chikyū ni chiribamerarete (Scattered Across the Earth) is that “Japan” no longer even exists, and “Japanese” are refugees without a country to return to. This current volume was conceived to augment the first edited volume of Tawada’s work, Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, which appeared from Lexington Books in 2007. That volume represented the first extensive English language coverage of Tawada’s writing. In the meantime, there is increased scholarly and readerly interest in Tawada’s artistic activity, and it is time for more sustained critical examinations of her output. This current collection gathers essays that approach the themes found in many of Tawada’s works. Tawada Yōko: On Writing and Rewriting brings together close readings across Tawada’s oeuvre and pays particular attention paid to translation across languages and media. In Voices from Everywhere, I wrote about four modalities that inform Tawada’s writing: “1) the constitution of subjectivity, 2) the relationship of individual identity to national identity, 3) the nature of the body, and 4) the shape of space and place.” 1 These are still true, and easily identifiable, but there are more animals now and, following the triple disasters of March 11, 2011, a darker feel in Tawada’s fiction. There are fewer passports but more significant travels. Identity papers are no longer lost with the same frequency, but homelands and languages are (again, Chikyū ni chiribamerarete and Kentōshi being most notable in this regard). Borders are more than national; they are more likely to be gender borders, species borders, or borders of time—of past and present, and of youth and age. Tawada’s essay included here questions the border of “National,” but also wants to know where the border of life is and its Other. My essay on a memoir-writing bears gets at some of these issues as well. Seungyeon Kim is piercing in his analysis on this front; it also

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reflects a hard-edged and probing style of criticism among critics writing in Japanese. Essays in this volume consider the varieties of genre and medium, the relationships among performance and reading, the writing styles and poetics, the experiments and narrative voices, and the implied and explicit political positions in Tawada’s writing. (So many phrases: fecundity of imagination and imagery is another hallmark of her work.) The essays reflect the work of scholars in numerous traditions—German, Japanese, and English most prominently, but not exclusively. As these essays track Tawada’s writing and public performance they explore the extensive narrative experiments of her writing. Much of this turns on verbal and linguistic play. Tingting Hui and Paul Macquade, for example, emphasize the physicality in Tawada’s writing. Much of that physicality is concerned with lineages, with mothers and siblings, in particular. “Mother tongue” has long been a contested concept in Tawada’s writing. One way that she deals with the physicality of words is to turn them into things; tongues stretch across seas, in the German wordplay on “Foreign Tongues” (Überseezungen), in but one example. As Taniguchi Sachiyo explores, where mythical characters threw actual combs and peaches, in a Tawada rewrite, the words for “comb” and “peach” are thrown, apparently with the same intent: to strike an object and impede progress. The words seem every bit as concrete as the items they signify. Taniguchi then goes on to engage this problematic “Mother Tongue” concept. The building blocks of language become the bricks with which roads are built (and the epithets that strike people down). Everything dealing with Tawada Yōko is complicated (except for Tawada herself, who is a delightful partner in projects such as this): complicated themes within the work, as noted above, but also the complications—the cacophony? The Rabelasian delight?—of languages and cultures. Summarizing a Tawada work can be like trying to explain a joke: those who got it are already delighted; those who didn’t simply groan at the flat-footed explanation. Questions of translation is also a major theme in her work; writing across languages focuses questions and practices of translation. As a number of essayists—de Bary, Ivanovic, Sakai, and Wiegel, in particular—stress, much of Tawada’s writing comprises, in fact, a very sophisticated theory of translation. As Suga Keijirō wrote in the earlier Tawada volume, “Translation without an original is creation.” 2 Christine Ivanovic provocatively asks, after categorizing the styles of translating that are represented in Tawada’s works, where does this process of translating begin and end? “Tawada scholarship still does not consider her early texts published in German [to be] . . . translations.” 3 Brett de Bary tethers the conversation to “ambidexterity” and “multi-directionality.” Naoki Sakai roots his discussion with Tawada’s important essay on translation of Paul Celan’s work and goes on to discuss the “national,” the “mater-

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nal,” the “unity”—and related putative terms—to explicate Tawada’s trenchant, and sometimes sly, theorization of translation and language. Sigrid Weigel also explicates the translation theories and language practices in Tawada’s work. Tawada has written an essay entitled “Tawada Yōko does not exist” which weaves a tale of stories that can be attributed to an author named Tawada, but all of them are translations; no originals are to be found. Translation, apparently, occurs not only in the exchanges across language boundaries. Is the thing on the page also a translation of the thing in the author’s mind? Dan Fujiwara and Gizem Arslan come at these questions by analyzing the complicated experiments of narration. In the texts that Fujiwara examines, these are worked out with intertwined chronologies in narration. As Arslan develops, we see the experiments in poetry, following the possibilities of writing systems as explored by Ernst Jandl. Wiegel’s essay, while in part dealing with translation poetics, also cogently explicates the concrete experiments with writing systems and also points us to the borders between languages, given how her “poetics originate[s] from the threshold between Japanese and German languages.” 4 And then we read this: “The age when women were mothers is over”? 5 The astonishing proclamation with which Paul Macquade anchors his discussion of Tawada poetics and, especially, the concept of the “mother tongue,” describes how many things will be playfully dismembered. Sachiyo Taniguchi and Suzuko Knott focus on the interplay in Tawada’s work with traditional tales and various story lines. This interplay, this border, is also one of time, but one that crosses from ancient tales into contemporary iterations. At other times it is the border separating the animal and human, as in Knott’s reading of the polar bear Knut, who also appears in my essay in this volume. Tawada’s contribution, delivered as the Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture in Japanese Studies at the University of Chicago in 2016, brings to the forefront her recent thinking on these issues. An ecocritical vision that extends beyond the animal-human is the focus of Annegret Märten’s essay. Tawada’s philosophical exploration in the Najita lecture is deceptive in its playfulness; the performativity of Tawada’s writerly life is a rich area finally getting the attention it deserves. Tomoko Takeuchi Slutsky comes at this through the “circus acts and autobiographical writing” of a work like Yuki no renshūsei/Etüden im Schnee/Memoirs of a Polar Bear. The performativity of translation, the performativity of the subject-self, and the performativity of the stage, are all themes circulating through many of these essays and, it is worth noting, among the younger scholars gathered here. Tawada’s performances are getting the scholarly attention they deserve. This interaction suggests other borders as well, between narrator and audience, and between the human and the non (or partial) human cyborg. There is more of this richness to come. 6

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There seems no end to this richness. The layered excitement that suffused the symposium from which these essays began was but one measure of that. That symposium consisted of nineteen presenters, as well as Tawada herself, hosted under the umbrella of the American Comparative Literature Conference (www.ACLA.org) with support from by the Yanai Initiative at UCLA and the UCLA Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, March 28-April 1, 2018. We thank them, particularly Professor Michael Emmerich, for their support. UCLA also hosted an amazing reading/performance by Tawada, interviewing herself via an Artificial Intelligence program trained on thousands of works by Tawada (of which no digital record seems to exist: a sad fact, but one in keeping with the fleeting suggestions that populates Tawada’s writing and performance). As Jordan Smith has described the event, The Performative reading event featuring Yōko Tawada, both in the flesh and via a new Tawada Yōko AI program, courtesy of programmer Matthew Fargo and UCLA professor and translator Michael Emmerich. The results were performed in multiple languages by Tawada, Emmerich, and multilingual poet Suga Keijirō along with a visual pastiche of poetry, playfully humorous abstractions, and more. The source of the poetry (the real Tawada or the AI Tawada/Fargo/Emmerich or Suga or other?) was left strategically ambiguous, so the identities of creators blurred in text and performance. In fact, the performers never identified themselves by their own names, taking on each other’s names even during introductions. As part of UCLA/Waseda University/Yanai Initiative’s “Technologies of East Asian Performance,” the event showcased new directions for blending AI with performance poetry and art. 7

It’s these many new directions that this volume explores. Again, as editor, I thank the hard work and creative thinking of the contributors to the volume. NOTES 1. Slaymaker, Doug. Voices from Everywhere, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. 2. Voices, 6 3. See pg. 62 of this volume. 4. See pg. 49 of this volume. 5. Yōko Tawada, Yuki No Renshūsei (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2011). 54. Unless otherwise noted, translations of Tawada’s work are my own. 6. For example, Son HyeJeong, a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, presented at the ACLA conference but her essay was unable to be included here. Son travels most everywhere with Tawada, camera in hand. She has made important discovers about the wellsprings of performance from which Tawada draws. 7. https://www.topojo.com/blog.

ONE Choosing between Life and Human Tetsuo Najita Distinguished Lecture in Japanese Studies, University of Chicago, March 7, 2016 Tawada Yōko (trans. Michael K. Bourdaghs)

It was a few years ago now when I was invited to Amman, Jordan. At the reception following my lecture, I chatted with a variety of people. A Japanese man who was living there came up to speak with me. He was about sixty years old. I assumed we would have the usual superficial conversation, and so I asked him about the climate and the food in Jordan. But it seemed that this Japanese man wanted to talk about something else. After we had been speaking for a while, he put to me the following: “Nowadays in Japanese schools, it seems like they only teach that life is precious (inochi wo taisetsu ni shiro), but I think that’s a mistake. It’s not life that is so important, but rather being a person, a human (taisetsu na no wa inochi de wa naku ningen desu). Am I wrong?” I had no idea why he suddenly raised this issue, nor any idea where he was headed with this topic. Feeling at a loss, I held my tongue. He continued: “If we’re talking about bare life, even weeds and rats have life. But a person can deliberately choose to sacrifice their life for some higher purpose. That’s what makes being a person so precious. They all died as persons.” It became clear while he was talking that by “they” he meant the kamikaze suicide attack squadrons from the war. 1

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Like everyone else, I have been hearing “life is to be cherished” (taisetsu ni shiyou) ever since I was in grade school. I had never found any particular reason to question it. And I had always assumed the concept of “human dignity” (ningen no songen) meant pretty much the same thing, just put into more abstract and abstruse language. But this was the first time I had ever encountered someone who compared the value of life to the value of personhood. It was also the first time I had spoken directly with someone who tried to justify the kamikaze suicide squadrons, and I was surprised: I thought those kind of people only existed in documentary films or on the Internet. I never expected one to appear before my eyes. If life itself possesses absolute value, then that means that things like kamikaze squadrons and the death penalty are unconditionally mistaken. But this man who appeared in front of me suddenly, like Mephistopheles, was asserting that “life itself was not so important,” all in an effort to justify the kamikaze squadrons. At the time, I wanted to argue against him and say something like, “No, life itself is of absolute importance,” but I remained silent. This was because at lunch that day, I had eaten a dish made from chicken. If life (inochi) really was of absolute importance, then I should become a vegetarian. But even a vegetarian lives by taking the life of spinach, by murdering potatoes. My grandfather was a Buddhist priest, and supposedly even when mosquitoes were buzzing around his face, he would never kill them. That is because Buddhism’s teachings prohibit the taking of life, and say it is wrong to kill any living thing. On the other hand, I’ve also heard that my grandfather wasn’t above eating sashimi from time to time. So this is how I answered that Mephistopheles. “Were the young men in the kamikaze squadrons really in a situation where it was possible to choose death freely of their own will? Isn’t it possible that they were brainwashed? Just like the followers of the Aum Shinrikyō cult? Or again, isn’t it possible that they were afraid to defy their commanders and were just following orders? I don’t think they had any real choice in what they did as persons. I don’t think you can call that treating people as precious.” Mephistopheles glared back at me with a face like an Asura demon. “That is an insult to the dead. They chose to die of their own free will,” he argued back. It was such a little conversation, grappling with such a big problem, yet it stuck in my memory for a long time. I couldn’t understand why that man suddenly brought up the topic of the kamikaze squadrons when he spoke with me. Maybe he was drunk. After all, my Mephistopheles was living in the Islamic world where alcohol is usually hard to come by and maybe that day at the reception, enjoying beer for the first time in a long time, he got drunk and decided to come after me.

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It was much later that I came up with another possibility. Maybe Mephistopheles got upset at the contents of my lecture, and that’s why he brought up the kamikaze squadrons. The lecture I gave that day didn’t directly mention the war or the kamikaze squadrons, but it did include some joking references to the Japanese national flag, as well as some rather ironic reflections on the word “nationalism.” When I was a child, I first learned the word “National” from our home rice cooker. The word was written on the side of that convenient little white appliance that cooked our rice every day. Back when I was a child, the Matsushita Electronics Corporation used the brand name “National” for appliances it sold on the Japanese domestic market; for products sent overseas, it used the brand name Panasonic. They distinguished between those two names all the way up until 2008, when they were finally unified under the Panasonic name. I was fascinated by this name “National” that couldn’t be accepted abroad, but that was happily received at home—by this difference between foreign and domestic, outside and inside. It seemed to me that if they were going to get rid of the name “National,” wouldn’t it be better to go with a brand name that at least sounded like it, for example “Naseba naru”? Naseba naru means something like, “where there’s a will, there’s a way,” and it seemed to me a perfect fit for the philosophy of the founder of that company. Naseba naru, where there’s a will there’s a way, you can do it if you try, give it your best shot! During the period of high economic growth in Japan, there was a notion that if you just worked hard and gave your best effort for your company, that’s all that was needed to make the nation strong and wealthy. This was widely believed, like a new religion. Nationalism as a kind of sentiment didn’t simply vanish after the war: it moved to a different location and intensified, in tandem with high economic growth. You can see this in the belief that “the rice in Japan is the most delicious rice in the world, and the Japanese people who get to cook that rice in the world’s best rice cookers must be the happiest people on earth.” This “rice nationalism” might seem at first glance a cute little bad habit, in just the same way as Germans become nationalists only in relation to soccer and automobiles, but I wonder if it really is so harmless. Perhaps as we cook our democratic rice every day in our electric rice cookers, aren’t we perhaps also every day swallowing the old ways of thinking about life? According to one theory, the etymological root of ine, the Japanese word for rice plant, is inochi no ne, meaning “the root of life.” Rice is the only food staple that gets bound up in such a fundamental way with life itself. Of course, soybeans and fish and the like also enter into human bodies as sources of food and nutrition, but it seems that only rice gets burdened with this kind of special meaning. For example, in my parents’ generation, it was acceptable to throw away leftover uneaten tempura or

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grilled meat, but there was a pervasive belief that rice was somehow divine and that you must never ever leave even a single grain of rice uneaten. And in fact, I too have never once thrown away leftover rice: other things are fine, but not rice. It’s a little unnerving: somehow, without meaning to, I seem to have become a rice nationalist myself. (And that’s why, here and now, I’m going to try throwing away a little rice that I’ve brought. Who knows, maybe I will feel a sense of liberation.) There is also a theory that the i in inochi, the Japanese word for “life,” comes from the word ibuku: to breathe. In the ancient Japanese language, they would write out the phonetic characters ibuki and these were given the meaning of respiration, which implied that humans received life when the gods breathed it into them. Unlike its counterparts in English, German, and other languages, the Japanese word for life, inochi, does not include such meanings as “the life of a person” or “daily life.” Unlike the life of a person, which is jinsei in Japanese, the word inochi has no specific content. The meaning of inochi does not include such things as one’s love life, family life, or working life. Inochi means life only in the sense of respiration, breathing. I think it’s a little like zazen meditation. According to another theory, the etymological root of the chi in inochi lies in the character we read as rei, meaning soul or spirit. Inochi brings together breathing and soul, so that inochi means something like the soul of breathing. When we look at it in terms of its etymological roots, this word inochi moves farther and farther away from our modern notion of “person” or “human.” This may all seem like a pleasant little side-trip back to ancient times, but for those of us who have to live in the present, it suggests a number of difficulties. For example, does the soul of breathing possess human rights? The word inochi can be written in hiragana, the Japanese phonetic script, but it can also be written with kanji, a Chinese character. The Chinese character for inochi is used in such compound words as meirei, meaning to issue an order, something that a person of higher status imposes on a person of lower status. This is a completely different meaning from that of inochi written in the hiragana phonetic script. But when I speak about it like this, it might invite misunderstandings. I might sound like a nativist scholar from the late Edo period who criticizes karagoroko Chinese learning as a foreign invader and who sings the praises of yamatogokoro, a purely native Japanese spirit. I might even end up being used by today’s anti-China politics in Japan. But I am not praising Japan’s native hiragana script nor deriding borrowed words that came from China. If anything, what I think is that words in hiragana phonetic script are equipped with a certain charm that puts them at risk of having their own rationality eviscerated. If we eat only hiragana, our nutritional balance is thrown off and we may damage our health. Hiragana are protein, Chi-

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nese characters are vitamins, and I suppose katakana, our other phonetic writing system, are minerals. I became curious about how right wingers who glorify the kamikaze suicide squadrons understand the word inochi, life, so I checked the Internet. In Germany, it is forbidden by law to justify Nazi Germany or deny the Holocaust in any public venue, and there are actually people whose job it is to spend every day seeking out and deleting websites that carry that kind of content. There is no such law in Japan, and so when you surf the web in Japan, you feel less like you are gliding over a clear blue sea and more like you are wading through a swamp. I found a video clip titled Kamikaze tokkōtai inochi no tsukaikata: “The Kamikaze Special Attack Squadrons: A Way of Life.” In this title, inochi was written with the Chinese character. It had a subtitle, too: “What every Japanese should know.” Over background music that featured a kitschy, over-the-top pop song, the video displayed a series of black-andwhite photographs of the young boys from the kamikaze squadrons. The choice of background music makes me think that young people are the target audience for this video. The boys who appear in the photographs are in their mid-teens, their faces painfully sweet. There is no voiceover narration: all text and spoken dialogue are given in writing. First, we are given an explanation that in 1945, the war situation of Japan had become desperate. Then the squadron commander says “The only hope is to turn our bodies into weapons and hurl ourselves directly at the enemy.” The members of the squadron immediately respond, “Let me do it!” The soldiers who appear in the pictures in this part are older than those who appeared earlier in the video. They are in their thirties or older. I think the video was produced this way in order to give the mistaken impression that members of the kamikaze squadrons were not impressionable youths and that they chose to die of their own free will. The squadron commander’s speech continues for quite a while after this. “Defeat in the war may be unavoidable, but so long as we leave behind a historical legacy of young men who used their own bodies to hold off the collapse of the Japanese people, the Japanese people will rise again one day—maybe 500 years from now, maybe a thousand years from now.” When he says they “used their own bodies,” he means they sacrificed their lives. If the national people, the minzoku, are unable to survive or revive without this sacrifice of life, and if the sacrificed lives have to be young lives in particular, then it seems that this people, this minzoku, is like a dragon that lives on by drinking the fresh blood of the young. If this were simply a case of saying that “for the sake of defending the country, sometimes individual lives are lost,” then this would be just another instance of a kind of thinking that can been seen across world history in many different eras and countries. And if it were simply a matter of martyrdom, we could find many similar examples elsewhere—

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for example in the histories of Christianity or Communism. But what I am calling into question here is something different. What we find here is a way of thinking that insists that life only obtains meaning when it is sacrificed for the nation, that otherwise life itself has no meaning. In other words, it is a way of thinking that declares that “the nation will die unless it is allowed from time to time to drink the juice that is the life of young people.” For this reason, I think we need to always observe carefully how this attractive but dangerous Japanese word inochi is used. Inochi is a very old word; it already appears in the eighth century poetry collection the Man’yōshū. In Book 11 of the Man’yōshū there is a poem by Kakinomoto Hitomaro that goes: Chihayaburu kami no mataseru inochi o ta ga tame ni ka mo nagaku horisemu. It means something like, “Life is something granted by the gods, it’s not something whose length can be determined according to your own will, and yet I desire to live for a long time, because there is somebody I love.” The message here of wanting to live long because the poet is in love might strike some as being all too healthy, and therefore ill-suited for literature. We have all been infected with the disease of romanticism, so that as with Romeo and Juliet or The Sorrows of Young Werther, we don’t feel satisfied unless the characters in a story die for the sake of love. And yet the love depicted in the Man’yōshū doesn’t seem to require death. According to its way of thinking, love does not require anyone to sacrifice their life. The notion that one should offer up one’s life for the sake of the nation would probably have struck the poets of the Man’yōshū as being a kind of warped sexual desire. Whenever I read this poem, I get goosebumps when I get to the word chihayaburu. There is an energy born out of the sound of this word that seems to move on its own; it’s a beautiful, dangerous word. Chihayaburu means something like “mighty,” and it is a “pillow word,” a classical poetic trope that is conventionally linked to the word kami or “god.” According to some scholars, the chi in chihayaburu shares an etymological root with the chi in orochi, a giant serpent, while haya comes from the word hayai, to be fast or speedy. It gives the image of a spiritual power that moves swiftly through the sky like a strong wind. The gods who bestow life, inochi, are of course many in number. We have a saying yaoyorozu kami, meaning there are something like eight million gods, and if we imagine the gods move through the sky like a strong wind, the very notion that we might count them becomes absurd. If we think of life as a wind, it gives us a sense of strength—but also of instability. It’s not something that you could lock away in a bank vault. Recently, I saw the Japanese movie An. The an of the title refers to the sweet bean paste that we put inside dorayaki, a popular Japanese snack. The film was directed by Kawase Naomi and it was released in Japan in 2015. I don’t know if it was released here in America, 1 but in Germany, where I live, it was widely distributed. In Germany, it was given a new, much longer title: Cherry Blossoms and Red Beans. The red beans from the

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title are Azuki beans. I had no idea what the story was about when I went to see it. At first, I thought it was going to be a film about finding excellent gourmet versions of cheap everyday foods, something like Itami Jūzō’s 1985 film, Tanpopo. So I sat back and expected simply to be entertained—but the movie took an unexpected change of direction: it turned out to be a serious film dealing with social problems. In the film, a woman in her seventies named Tokue suddenly appears one day at a small stand that sells dorayaki and asks for a job. The owner of the stand at first turns her down, but once he tastes the an sweet bean paste that Tokue has made, it is so delicious that he decides to hire her. It turns out that Tokue has since her youth been afflicted with Hansen’s disease, what was called raibyō or leprosy at the time, and for more than fifty years she was involuntarily confined in a sanatorium. In Japan, the law requiring quarantine for Hansen’s disease patients was not abolished until 1996. Through their interactions with Tokue, the owner of the dorayaki stand and a junior high school student who is one of its regular customers come to learn about the tragic fate of Japan’s Hansen’s disease patients. The junior high school student looks up books about Hansen’s disease in her school library, and in one scene she takes up the novel Life’s First Night (Inochi no shoya) by Hōjō Tamio. When I saw that scene, I recalled when I was a middle school student and my chemistry teacher recommended this book to me. It had an enormous impact on me. I decided to read it again after all these years. When I did so, I was surprised to find that the novel sets up an opposition between human being (ningen) and life (inochi). The author Hōjō Tamio was born in 1914 in Seoul, Korea, which was then a Japanese colony. In 1933 he was diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease, and the following year he was admitted to the Tama Zensho-en national sanatorium, where his all-too-short life would come to an end in 1937 after he contracted tuberculosis. His novel Life’s First Night, based on his own experiences, was awarded the 1936 Bungakukai Literary Prize. Oda, the protagonist of the novel, has just been admitted to the sanatorium, and still can’t get over the shock of it. Another character named Saeki, a patient who has been in the sanatorium for decades and who helps look after other patients, gives him a tour of the facility, introducing him to various patients and explaining to him their physical and mental conditions. The bodies of some of those patients are badly deformed. Some have been completely robbed of any hope of ever being freed from their physical and mental pain. Until the day they finally die, they will simply live, with no career or family. Oda is frozen with shock and fear. This is what Saeki says to him.

8

Chapter 1 “Oda-san, do you think these people are human?” Saeki said in a voice that was quiet but implied great gravity. Oda didn’t understand what Saeki meant, and sat mutely thinking. “You see, Oda-san. These people, they’re not human anymore.” Oda understood less and less of Saeki’s meaning, and stared at his face. “They’re not human. Oda-san, they are truly not human.” As this was getting to the heart of Saeki’s thoughts, he spoke with some excitement. “They’re not human. It’s life. Only life, life just as that. Can you understand what I’m saying, Oda-san? The ‘human’ in these people has already died. All it is, is life, flickering life. What persistence! The moment a person gets leprosy, their humanness perishes. It dies. It’s not just that his humanness as a social being dies. It’s certainly not such a shallow death. It’s not a crippled soldier, it’s a crippled person. But, Oda-san, we’re phoenixes. When we have new thoughts, when we have new eyes, when we completely accept the life of lepers, then we are revived as human. Revival, that’s what it is, revival. A flickering, living life has attained a physical body. A new human lifestyle starts there. Oda-san, now you’re dead. And being dead, you’re not human. Think about where your agony and despair come from. Isn’t it because you’re seeking the person you were in the past who is now dead?” 2

As I re-read the novel, I came to realize that the word ningen or human being, which I normally use without much thought, is a word loaded with both traps and possibilities. When we look up ningen (human being) in the authoritative Japanese dictionary Kōjien, we find listed both the archaic meaning, “the place where people live, the world” and today’s meaning, “a person, primarily in terms of their status as a social being.” If we accept that humans are social beings, this means that if a person deviates from the definition of human being held by their era’s society, that person will no longer be considered human. What can a person who is no longer human do? One strategy for survival would be to declare, “I give up being human; from now on, I will simply live, not as a human but as life.” It often happens that the conditions that determine what will be accepted as human by a given society in a given era come to seem ridiculous a hundred years later. For example, an authoritarian military dictatorship might declare that to sacrifice your life for the nation-state is what makes one human. A nation-state that rejects social welfare policies might declare that only those who are healthy and contribute to economic development are truly human. At such times, abandoning the status of human and returning instead to a state of life itself can be a way to relativize the existing definition of human and to open a path toward constructing a new definition. I think this is what Hōjō Tamio was doing in his writing. In fact, I think a current of radical skepticism toward the concept of “human” runs throughout the base of Japanese culture. Exhausted by the

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effort to keep up the right facial expressions, the right way of talking, the right way of dressing, and the right attitudes required just to be recognized as human, there are many people who feel as if every day a little bit of their life has been stripped away. There are many children who try to cope with stress by bullying weaker children. In most cases, the act of bullying or ijime carries with it the message that you are not human. Many young people also become hikikomori, withdrawing from all forms of social existence. I think this is another method for refusing to be human. It is quite common to be disqualified by failing an exam, but it was the novelist Dazai Osamu who came up with the apt phrase of being disqualified as a human and used it as the title for a novel. His title Ningen shikkaku has been translated into English as No Longer Human and A Shameful Life, but it literally means “disqualified as a human.” The book has enjoyed great popularity since it was first published in 1948. It was still very popular in the 1970s, when I first read it, and it is still widely read today. The pocket edition put out by Shinchōsha in Japan has sold more than six million copies, which is about the same number of copies sold as for Natsume Sōseki’s Kokoro. The protagonist of Dazai’s novel finds it a perpetual struggle to understand what other people are thinking or feeling, and he is constantly unsure of what sort of expression he should wear or what he should say. Many young people when they read this novel feel as if it were a story about themselves. In other words, Ningen shikkaku is not the story of some exceptional person; virtually all Japanese during their adolescence feel the same way, that becoming human is too much for them. In order to escape this anxiety, they usually take one of two paths: they either throw themselves into sports where they can move together in organized teams according to predetermined rules, or they wallow in the shame of failing to become human and then flip this on its head by becoming literary enthusiasts with their own sense of superiority. In a manner quite different from Life’s First Night, Dazai’s Ningen shikkaku is the literature of an adolescence filled with sentimental self-pity and infantile narcissism. By all rights, one should work to change the existing definition of “human” and by doing so help transform society into the sort of place where one can live without fear. But if someone is in a situation where they lack the strength or any real prospect for achieving this, the only solution that seems possible is to give up being human. The problem with this, though, is that the split that thereby emerges between one’s life (inochi) or one’s true self, on the one hand, and one’s existence as a human, as a self shaped by social pressures, on the other hand, will persist even after you grow up and join the adult world. Dazai Osamu was born into Japan’s upper class and so, from early childhood, was always treated as human (ningen). For precisely that reason he was struck with anxiety over the distortion between the image of

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the human that everyone else seemed to imagine and his own sensibility. Members of the working class that lived in the same era as Dazai were treated like beasts, like cattle and horses, and so naturally they harbored a strong desire to be treated as human. The following passage comes from a 1929 novel that is still widely read today: The Crab Cannery Ship by Kobayashi Takiji, the representative author of Japan’s Proletarian Literature movement. “What the hell does he think human lives [ningen no inochi] are, anyhow?” […] “Human lives?” “Yes, human lives.” “But Asakawa doesn’t think of you fellows as human beings.” 3

Asakawa is the manager of the crab cannery ship. Many of the laborers who worked on the cannery ship were former farmers from the northeastern Tōhoku region of Japan. They were swindled out of the land they had worked so hard to cultivate and were left with no choice but to migrate elsewhere in search of jobs. The cannery ships were floating factories that exploited cheap labor to generate enormous profits, and the people who worked on them were treated brutally, sometimes killed simply for slacking off on the job. This novel takes up the position of those who are cut off from being human and who are unable even to preserve life, inochi. In January 2010, Prime Minister Hatoyama gave a speech to the Diet, Japan’s national parliament, in which he used the word inochi twentyfour times. The speech started with words that sounded almost like the refrain of a pop song: “We need to defend life, we need to defend life that is born, life as it grows up.” After that, each new paragraph of the speech began with the word life: we need to defend the life of those who work, we need to defend the life of the world, we need to defend the life of the earth, and so forth. The speech concluded with him naming the 2010 national budget as a “Budget for Life.” Then the following year came the Fukushima nuclear disaster. That nuclear accident might well have become an impetus for reconsidering seriously what it means to protect life, but instead what we’ve seen since is a resurgence of assertions of the need to defend the nation, and nowadays nobody in the political world speaks about life, inochi. The current Prime Minister Abe criticized Hatoyama’s speech, saying “I’m not a medical doctor; my job isn’t to defend life but rather to defend the nation.” What I’d like to point out here is the way that this kind of thinking sets up nation and life in opposition to one another, as if we had to choose one or the other. It seems that some voters were deeply moved when Prime Minister Hatoyama used the word inochi, life, so rare for a politician those days. But as for myself, I have no desire to see my own life administered by politicians. I have no interest in signing up for the life insurance policy

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being offered by the nation that says that in peacetime the nation will defend life, but in wartime we will enlist life to defend the nation. What I want from politics and government is not the defense of life, but the defense of human rights. When we talk about human and life, probably many of you will immediately think about the question of death with dignity. Many countries have established a right for persons with terminal illnesses to reject artificial measures for prolonging life. In Japan, there is no basic presumption that suicide is wrong. Accordingly, you might expect that Japan too would quickly recognize the right to death with dignity, but in fact there has been considerable opposition to it. For example, there is the terminal disease ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, in which motor nerve cells break down and stop transmitting the brain’s commands to the rest of the body. The Japan ALS Society opposes the establishment of a right to death with dignity. Their reason is that if a right to refuse measures to prolong life is created, it will make it harder for those patients who don’t want to die to request such measures. We can imagine voices saying, “Look, you have the legal right to die; what grounds are there for wanting to live?,” making it harder to choose to prolong life. In Japan, the pressure generated by the fear of being a burden on others is much greater than anything the force of law can produce. There is a particular novel I can never figure out if I like or hate. Fukazawa Shichirō’s The Ballad of Narayama was published in 1956. It’s set in a village where food is scarce and where there is a traditional custom of abandoning old people on a mountain to die once they have lost their teeth. This is because if they feed the elderly, there won’t be enough food left for the village children. An old woman named Orin is no longer able to work, but she still has a full set of teeth and a healthy appetite. Feeling ashamed about this, she smashes her teeth against a rock. She then tells her son that the time has come to abandon her on the mountain. The word inochi never appears in this novel. Orin has no sense that she must sacrifice her life for the good of the village. She uses instead the expression, “I’m going to the mountain.” The time has come for her to go to the mountain, so she will go to the mountain. In sum, there are two worlds here, the village and the mountain, and when death approaches you move from one to the other. In the village, there is an old saying that it’s a blessing if it is snowing when your time comes to go to the mountain. Probably this is because it means you can die without extended suffering. The verb they use to say “go to the mountain” in Japanese is yuku, which is conjugated as yuki—which is the same sound as the Japanese word for snow. I suppose we could say that Ballad of Narayama is really a tale about snow, yuki. There is, of course, an enormous distance between Orin from Ballad of Narayama and the kamikaze squadrons. But each of these forms one knot in the enormous fishing net that is Japanese culture. And as for the little

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fish that tries to defend itself by constantly paying close attention to how the word “life” or inochi is being used—that little fish is me. In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault writes that until the late eighteenth century, life itself (seimei) did not exist, that all that existed were living beings. Recently, we often hear the phrase “life sciences,” and the popular image of life seems to be undergoing a transformation. This “life” is a pure, spotless mechanism that lies above and beyond any connection to human history. This “life” is generated by some combination of genetic matter, protein, and neurons. And it feels as if this life has become something that humans can freely manipulate, manage, produce, and extinguish. At the same time, we see a growing movement that transcends cultural boundaries to defend human rights. What we don’t see much of are advances in scholarship on how various cultures understand the concept of the human. Alongside medicine, chemistry, agriculture, and psychology, I think that the life sciences should also include the study of literature. After all, life is a cultural phenomenon, a product of history. Its figure, filled with contradictions, has been carved into poems and stories for more than a thousand years. NOTES 1. It was, with the title Sweet Bean. [ed.] 2. Hōjō Tamio, “Life’s First Night” (trans. Kathryn Tanaka), The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 13:4:1 (26 January 2015) (https://apjjf.org/2015/13/4/Hojo-Tamio/4256. html). [trans.] 3. Takiji Kobayashi, The Crab Cannery Ship, trans. Zeljko Cipris (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013), 22.

TWO Theory, Fiction, and the Lightness of Translation Tawada Yōko’s Schwager in Bordeaux/Borudō no gikei (ボルドーの義兄) Brett de Bary

THE TROPE OF AMBIDEXTERITY AND MULTI-DIRECTIONAL TRANSLATION It is said one uses two chopsticks, but only a single writing brush. This is why writers only earn half of what they need to eat. But what would happen if a person used two pencils, and wrote with both of them at the same time? The left hand would move from left to right, and the right hand from right to left. The two hands would meet in the middle and then go back again.” 1

Thus begins the ninth section of Tawada Yōko’s novella Borudō no gikei (Brother-in-law in Bordeaux, 2009), headed under a single character 箸 (“chopstick” or “chopsticks”) inserted into the typography in reverse mirror image. In the preceding section, the protagonist Yūna has recalled memorizing foreign words by eating pages of her dictionary, a gustatory experience that endows her with exceptional sensitivity to the fibers of paper used in books. For those with such an “appetite” for words, “the desk is a dining table,” Yūna reflects, “and the pencil becomes a chopstick. 2 In a fiction where translation functions on the entangled registers of trope (reminding us of its etymological links to the ancient Greek meta13

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phorein), plot, and compositional method, this image of the ambidextrously writing body might be taken as one figure for the textual project in question, this because the Japanese text of Brother-in-law in Bordeaux has a companion, or twin, the German novella Schwager in Bordeaux, also authored by Tawada Yōko and published in Tübingen one year earlier. 3 While the German text must be read from left to right, the reader of the Japanese text will start from the opposite direction. For the twin novellas, many of whose episodes devolve around matters of translation and mistranslation, these mirroring, yet reversible typographical layouts, also raise questions of translation. As the rather “literal” translation of the German title into Japanese also suggests, both novellas present a narrative about translation and travel in different lands. The narrative’s protagonist, a young woman named Yūna who has been living in Hamburg as an international student and part-time office worker, travels to Bordeaux intending to study French. It is hinted that Yūna’s journey is meant to serve as time away from her relationship with the older woman, Renée, former director of the Institute for Francophone Studies in Hamburg. The two women conduct their relationship in German, which, it is suggested, is a second language for both of them. Despite the irony of Yūna’s decision to put distance between herself and Renée, a professor of French literature, in order to study French, Renée arranges for Yūna to house sit at the home of Maurice, a man she identifies as her “brother-in-law.” Maurice will be traveling to Vietnam for the summer to learn more about a grandfather who lived there in the colonial era. The nature of Renée’s relationship to Maurice remains somewhat mysterious throughout the narrative. Yūna, always curious about the derivations of words, discovers midway through that the German word schwager historically “had three meanings.” We are told that, in addition to its present use to refer to a brother-in-law, schwager was once used to refer to a “postman” who delivered letters in a horse-drawn carriage. However, the “third” meaning of the word is slyly left unclear by the narrator. 4 Moreover, a similar flexibility, or ambiguity, also haunts the Japanese title, since gikei (義兄) in Japanese can refer to a stepbrother, as well as a “brother-in-law.” 5 Interestingly, as would be noted by a reader familiar with French, the very same ambiguity about a sibling related through marriage or adoption characterizes the French word, beau-frère, which can also mean brother-in-law or stepbrother. Confusion and wordplay thus proliferate in the narrative whenever kinship relations are discussed by the two women, and it is not clear if this is because Renée is mentally translating from French to German and Yūna from Japanese. This ambiguity that obtains between relations in language and social relations of kinship (which came first? which is a metaphor for the other?) produces an indeterminacy at the core of the social that is left, by

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Tawada, as a site of untranslatability, offering resources for play and possibility throughout the story. For the two companion novellas, the chronology of publication of Schwager in Bordeaux/Borudō no gikei undermines both notions of a “first” or “original” language and its “ownership” by an ethnically identifiable “author.” While it may be true that the character Yūna spent her childhood in Osaka where she wrote fancifully, even “artistically,” misshapen characters and sentences at school, the character’s relation to the ethnic and gendered “identity” of the author is left a tantalizing “riddle of referentiality,” to use Leslie Adelson’s term. 6 Indeed, through the relationship of companion novellas, the identities of author and translator and their relation to narrator and protagonist in German-language and Japanese-language texts are caught up in a series of reversible reflections and reversible directions that flows between the two. Is the blank space in the middle, left by the writer of the two never-ending lines of script we see in the ninth section, a yawning abyss or an opening to limitless possibilities? We can at least suggest that through both this trope of ambidexterity and the disconcerting, mirroring relationship between the two texts, Tawada figures the processes of both writing and translation as involving a form of catachresis, a “disjunctive deixis,” pointing in two directions at once. 7 Direction, that is, is again at play in Tawada’s text. Insofar as deixis is considered by some linguists as instantiating an inherently metalinguistic dimension of language, the body writing in two directions at once amplifies the process of mirroring, doubling, and reflexivity set up by the companion texts. If Tawada’s works have long been known for a meticulous interest in typography and the materiality of writing, Schwager in Bordeaux/Borudō no gikei represents a distinctive experiment in this vein that doubles the effects of mirroring and reversibility. Chinese characters (known in Japanese as kanji or 漢字) occupy parallel, or mirroring, positions in the layout of both German and Japanese texts. Standing alone (thus referred to metatextually by the narrator as “orphans, some with roofs over their heads, and some without”), these characters mark the subdivisions, or borders, that separate the 227 short sections of each novella. 8 While the characters “face” each other, however, their directions are reversed in the German and Japanese texts, so that they not only “cut” the narrative into pieces or sections, but also produce a moment of disruption for the reader. In the German text, where reading takes place from left to right, the kanji face from right to left, as they would in standard East Asian script. What would be the “right” direction in Japanese script is the “wrong” direction for the reader of German, however, who will most likely be unfamiliar with the grapheme itself. In the Japanese text, the kanji’s orientation is from right to left. Facing us with backs turned, they, too, appear in the “wrong direction” for the reader.

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We have noted above that the figure of ambidextrous writing occurs in the Japanese text in a short “section,” headed, not by a subtitle, but by a reverse mirror image of the Chinese character for “hashi” or “chopstick:” 箸 While this is a familiar character referring to the everyday eating implement in modern Japanese, some consideration of its history reveals 箸 to be a character that fell out of use after the era of Medieval Chinese (from the third to tenth centuries), when 箸 could be used interchangeably with the visually similar character 著, the latter meaning both to “express, make evident,” (zhù) as in writing, and “to attach to” (zhuó). 9 The latter character is still commonly used in contemporary Japanese and retains the same meanings of both “to express” and “to attach” (as food to chopsticks). In Japanese writing today, it may be combined with a variety of other characters to produce a range of related terms meaning “writer” or “author” (著者, chosha ), “book”（著作物, chosakubutsu), and the like. An association between “eating” and “writing” is produced by both graphic and aural similarities between these two ubiquitous characters. For both 箸 and 著 are identical visually except for their “roof” or “crown” radicals (⺮, a radical derived from the character for “bamboo” and thus associated with chopsticks, and 艹, a radical derived from the character for “grass” and frequently associated with brush writing and calligraphy). The two characters are also acoustically identical, as homonyms whose on or sinicized readings in Japanese can both be pronounced cho. 10 We should also note that, since the image of the ambidextrous writer immediately follows the words ending the preceding section, “When Yūna studied languages, her desk became a dining table and her pencil a chopstick,” the two neighboring passages constitute a humorous chiasmus in which the metaphors of writing as eating and eating as writing, pencils and chopsticks and chopsticks as pencils are reversed, turned upside down. Furthermore, the writing of figures and the figuring of writing become interchangeable in this passage, creating an endless oscillation between the two. Writing as code, on the infinitely rich but abstract semiotic register, is inextricably entangled with its materiality as a process and performance of inscription, indeed, of incision. The process we see in Tawada’s prose here might be seen as one of “synaesthetic translation,” whereby “linguistic functions are recoded by their materiality as sight and sound,” as John Kim has proposed. 11 If so, we should note that the translations above have taken place entirely as “intra-linguistic” translations with the Japanese text. They are not easily amenable to the “inter-lingual” translation between German and Japanese Roman Jakobson has called “translation proper,” and thus may not

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be easily available to readers of the German language text. 12 Nevertheless, the polysemous nature of “stäbchen” used in the German text for “chopsticks” but with over ten other meanings in German, including “rod” and “pole,” amplify the phallic visuality of the Japanese character 箸, with its slashing line. Some readers may also make a homophonic connection with the meaning of the similar sounding English “stab,” which would provide an alternate route back to the header character for “chopstick” itself. Other readers may find in the Classical Chinese character that forms the lower components of 箸, that is, the character 者 or zhĕ, a reference to very early practice of protecting villages by erecting fences made of stakes within which pieces of writing (曰) were buried in the earth (土) as talismans. 13 Finally, that the French translation for “chopsticks” is “baguettes” reinforces (if it did not, in fact, instigate) the chiasmic circuit of reversals between writing and eating here. From this perspective, the figure of a young woman using pencils as chopsticks produces a critical spoof of the depiction of East Asian writing as “chopstick writing” in Euroamerican popular culture, as well as the Orientalist fetishization of the Chinese character as pictograph (or form of pure visuality) in the high cultural circles of modernist writing and art. An illuminating study of the use of Chinese characters in Schwager in Bordeaux/Borudō no Gikei may be found in Saitō Yumiko’s essay, “Une tentative de double traduction: Analyze du Voyage à Bordeaux (Schwager in Bordeaux) de Yōko Tawada.” 14 Saitō coins the term “double translation” to describe the relation between the companion novellas. This is apt, capturing as it does the project’s intense interest in reversible directions and mirrorings (albeit with distortions). Even more helpful, in my view, is Saito’s insistence on the significance of the numerous detours that characterize Yūna’s journeys to and within Bordeaux as constituting a certain translational “detour” through the French language that characterizes the movements between the German and Japanese texts. Even though, in the kind of bathetic twist we find in many of Tawada’s narratives, Yūna pronounces toward the end of the novella that her attempts to learn French in Bordeaux were a “failure,” Saitō emphasizes that this “passage through another language was necessary to arrive at the goal” of both the narrative and the textual experiment. 15 To demonstrate this Saitō analyzes a scene in the novella where the hand of a young postman delivering mail in the pouring rain is violently grasped and “trapped” by a mysterious, vengeful figure behind the slats in the door of an aging house: she parses it as a narrative “translation” of visual and aural components of the section’s header character 霊 (rei or “spirit” or “ghost” in Japanese). Depicting the revenge of one of Yūna’s woman friends who is herself trapped by the obligation to care for an inherited house (one motif in the novella), this scene plays on the homophonic associations between the romanized spelling ame ( as a pronunciation for “rain,” or the charac-

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ter 雨, an element that forms part of the character rei 霊, or “spirit,” above) and the French âme, or “soul.” It is perhaps to emphasize this indispensable role of France and French as detour that the French translator of Schwager in Bordeaux renamed it Le Voyage à Bordeaux. 16 As Saitō astutely points out, the homophone for Racine, the name of one of Renée’s favorite authors, is la Chine, both of which are pronounced “rashiinu” in Japanese. 17 In English, we might add, Racine may be translated into the common nouns “root” and “radical,” but also “race,” for which East Asian writing is often stereotypically taken as a sign. TRANSLATION AS FICTION AND THEORY Much scholarship has been done on the thematic of travel, motion, and mapping in Tawada’s texts. However, this essay, building on my own experience of translating Brother-in-law in Bordeaux from Japanese to English, will situate its exploration of her writing at a topical disciplinary crossroads—that between Area Studies, Comparative Literature, and Translation Studies. In 2003 and 2006, Gayatri Spivak and Emily Apter, respectively, prescribed translation as a remedy for the “dying” discipline of Comparative Literature. 18 Spivak’s call was specifically to translators in Area Studies, presumably because Area Studies is the institutional base for the study of “lesser known” languages spoken in sites more “distant” from Euro America. Lawrence Venuti sought to reverse the hierarchy that relegated translation to secondary status in relation to the original, while David Damrosch championed the role of translation in expanding the growing corpus of texts classified as World Literature. 19 How might Tawada’s work be situated in relation to questions raised in these debates on translation or placed into dialogue with them? Might the deployment of multiple modes of translation in her work be seen, not only as a way of writing fiction, but also as a certain practice of theory? The “theoretical” experiment of my own essay will be, not so much to draw on Tawada’s lectures or her book on “exophony” (as is frequently done), as theoretical writings, but rather, to see how her fiction itself might be seen as a theoretical practice. 20 My own experimental approach will be, admittedly, necessarily rather formalist, as an effort to see how the textual maneuvers literally performed in Tawada’s writing practice address several questions: “What is translation?” “If translation is practiced in the encounter of languages with one another, what is its role in our world?” “How and why should we ‘live in translation’?” In answer we shall suggest that by adopting the role of writer as translator, Tawada’s position and her politics involve demonstrating how productive answers to these questions cannot seek to be transparent, direct, “proper,” “proprietary,” or offered from a place of mastery.

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To understand how translation, in Tawada’s texts, might be understood as a practice of both fiction writing and writing-as-theory requires that we first situate them in the context of experiments in the late twentieth century arts, broadly speaking. This means not only correlating their compositional techniques with post-1968 developments in the arts, as has been done, for example, in Christine Ritter’s and Marjorie Perloff’s discussions of Tawada and new poetics, or in Christina Kraenzle’s considerations of Tawada’s citations of the work of Joseph Beuys. 21 It is also to understand the distinctive sense in which Tawada’s work addresses the historical condition that, however tritely, we currently refer to as the “global dimension.” In the first sense, we might say Tawada’s texts exhibit a reflexivity we have come to associate with postmodern arts, texts that appear to comment on their own form, thus relativizing both the form and the stance or perspectives it embodies. Such reflexivity is, no doubt, inherent to the temporality of the “post.” In this sense, we may say Tawada’s is literature that attempts to come to terms with proclamations of the “end” of literature, and perhaps more saliently for this argument, attempts to come to terms with the collapse of the distinction between “critical theoretical reflection” and “creative practice,” as Gregory Ullmer has described it. 22 Tawada’s “post” has also been persuasively construed as a temporality of the “post”-colonial and the “post”-human. This temporality of the “post” is simultaneously melancholic and playful in Tawada’s texts. In the second sense, in relation to what I emphasize is an ongoing “transition” to the “global dimension” (a transition because it is an agenda taken to be as yet unfulfilled, thus underwritten by the violence of neoliberal capital), we may identify the theoretical dimension of translation as indispensable to Tawada’s stance. In one sense, “translation” might be seen as a philosophical response to the existential condition of multilingualism alluded to in the Benjaminian tropes of the “kinship of languages” or “pure language.” 23 With more historical specificity, it responds to the “living in translation” that characterizes the lives of migrant, nomadic, diasporic, refugee, or exilic populations today. In Death of a Discipline, Spivak elaborates the technique of teleopoiesis necessary for reading non-European texts, especially those written by or about subaltern groups. The Derridean neologism emphasizes the aspect of patience, and especially sympathetic imagination, required for reading texts produced in distant sites (and is, needless to say, a technique quite different from Franco Moretti’s “distant reading”). 24 Yet this is not the situation of writing and reading Tawada’s texts envision. For it is the nearness and proximity of languages to each other that provides the material for her work. As Michiko Mae reminds us, global dislocation and circulation of people, languages, and commodities is the characteristic landscape for the “transcultural journeys” emplotted in Tawada’s narratives. 25 And an era of global labor flows, as Sandro

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Mezzadra and Brett Neilsen note, has inevitably produced multilingual sites of labor congregation and organization, along with “awareness of the continuous need for translation, of the laborious effort, the negotiations, and states even misunderstandings that characterize these situations.” 26 Yet perhaps the most compelling reason for understanding translation as Tawada’s writing practice and as being ineluctably and inherently theoretical, is that translation constitutes a way of looking, through language, at language itself. In his essay, “Des Tours de Babel,” Derrida seems to suggest that translation is, in a sense, more “theoretical” than “theory” itself. “Nothing can top the Babelian performance,” he states in his discussion of Benjamin’s Task of the Translator, introduced through an allusion to the Biblical tale of Babel. Yet no theorization, inasmuch as it is produced in a language, will be able to dominate the Babelian performance. This is one of the reasons why I prefer here, instead of treating it in a theoretical way, to attempt to translate in my own way the translation of another text on translation. 27

Translation is described in this essay as at once the fundamental condition for any attempt to produce a “theory” of language, and at the same time, an unsurpassable limit to such a theoretical project. In what may be both an injunction and a warning, Derrida asks the reader to heed the fact that any reflection on language will take place in a language that can always be translated into another language: “One should never pass over in silence the question of the tongue into which the question of the tongue is raised, and into which a discourse of translation is translated.” 28 Theory, language, and translation here appear to mirror each other (there is a “question of the tongue in which the question of the tongue is raised,” as there must always be a “tongue into which the discourse on translation is translated.”) Insofar as theory is articulated in language, theory, language, and translation appear to be inextricably entangled for Derrida—a theory of language is a translation which is also a translation of a translation—in a manner that can only constitute a kind of mis en abyme. Derrida’s proposal that a theory of language that “raises the question of the tongue” is necessarily produced as translation can offer salient insights into the dynamics of translation in Tawada’s writing. For, I would propose, it is through translation, in the “metaphorical” and literal sense, that it addresses the twin conditions of accelerating globalization (with its pervasive translational encounters) and the “end of art.” It is through the myriad deployments of, and reflections on, translation that Tawada’s writing participates in an art premised on a certain acceptance (often a highly self-reflexive one) of its “limit,” and the plurality, partiality, and fragmentation of perspectives. At once playful and melancholic, it is

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premised on a knowing embrace of the demise of the sovereign subject. If the plot of Brother-in-law in Bordeaux, with its mysterious brother-in-law, its puns, riddles, and mistranslations, constantly poses a “question of the tongue,” a theoretical question about language, it also suggests that for the speaking subject, there is no language that does not open into other languages--that any and every language is a “language that is not my own.” 29 Since Yūna travels to Bordeaux to learn a language, but admits, near the end of the novella, that she has “failed to learn French for the third time,” “mastery” of language is not the “end” of her journey. 30 THE TINY WORD “UM” AND THE MOVEMENT OF TRANSLATION I have suggested above that insofar as Tawada’s fictional writings perform translation, “as “relations of language to language,” they demonstrate a reflexivity we associate with theory, a reflexivity foregrounded by the recursive loops, reversible directions, and mirroring that occur in the texts. The dynamics of mirroring produce an irresolvable oscillation in the texts, a motion that cannot be arrested. Just as Yūna will never “master” French, the “targets” of translation are always elusive. Even during the plot’s retrospective reconstructions of time, Yūna keeps moving, as if to illustrate Sherry Simon’s assertion that translation “includes direction (always including the ‘from’ and the ‘to . . . ’). 31 In Bordō no Gikei, translation does seem to have a direction—not the directions of north, south, east, and west, that, in so much of Tawada’s writing, are shown to shift deictically—but movement forward. As Yūna reflects as she moves from the gender-coded dressing room to the more fluid space of the swimming pool at Bordeaux’s Piscine Judaique towards the end of the novella, There was no law against staying, but the great force of the tiny prefix um was pressing her to go ahead. Move (Umzug), overturn (Umbruch), rebuild (Umbau). It was um that pushed Yūna out of the dressing room. 32

In the German language text of this passage, the word “um” is described as a vorsilbe, which becomes in the Japanese text 前綴 (maetsuzuri), a word literally meaning “before-binding” or “before-connecting”—a word little used in terminology for Japanese grammar. In the Japanese text, however, the words seemingly used as translations of the German words—for Umzug, we find hikkoshi (引っ越し), for Umbruch we find kaikaku (改革), for Umbau we find tatenaoshi (立て直し)—do not contain any “prefix” meaning “to.” The very word “um” is left as a site of untranslatability in the Japanese text, the occasion for reflexive passage through a layered history of translations of translations that never “stay,” or stand still, in equivalence.

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A similar sense of translation as endless movement through relations of language to language is developed by Samuel Weber, in a reading of Benjamin that follows on Derrida’s. In his discussion of Benjamin’s “translatability” (which Weber prefers to use in lieu of “translation.”), Weber is at pains to elaborate on the knotty question of Benjamin’s use of the German “der Form” in his essays “Origins of the German Mourning Play” and “The Task of the Translator.” Instead of Harry Zohn’s wellknown translation of Benjamin’s phrase into “translation is a mode,” Weber chooses “translation is a way.” In his essay, “The Touch of Translation,” Weber emphasizes the fragility and ephemerality of this “way” by referring to Benjamin’s phrase, “Translation touches lightly on the original and only at the infinitely small point of the sense. . . . ” 33 It is this “glancing” quality that pertains to translation’s nature as “way” for Weber. He comments on Benjamin: Languages are distinguished, he argues, not by their referents but by the way they refer to them by their mode of signifying. It is a differential interplay of these diverse ways of signifying that constitutes the medium of translation, and the ‘task of the translator’ is to render this interplay legible by revealing how each self-contained unit of meaning is always exceeded by the way it is meant [emphases in the original]. 34

Needless to say, Weber here reaffirms the well-known idea that, for Benjamin, translation is not really about conveying meanings and messages. Rather, it is about the “way” languages touch each other, the relationship of languages to one another. By noting also that the possibility for translation is generated by how “each self-contained unit of meaning” produces an “excess” in the “way” it is meant (for Benjamin, we can assume this refers primarily to the single word as a “self-contained unit of meaning”), Weber also links his notion of translation as a “way” back to Benjamin’s assertion of the structural relationship between original and translation: the original will always be incomplete without the translation. In this view, the reflexivity of translation as a relation of language to language necessarily compels forward movement. Against the backdrop of Tawada’s um, it is hard to surpass Weber’s depiction here: But if it is a way, if it makes its way, where is it headed? Not simply back to the original or the origin, but rather away from it. In moving away from the original translation unfolds the ways of meaning by moving words away from the meanings habitually attached to them, and which are generally construed as points of arrival, rather than departure. 35

In a section of the novella headed by the character 翻, the first character in the compound 翻 訳 (honyaku), used in modern Japanese for “translation,” the young woman Yūna is shown using her own feet to propel her bicycle (the character 翻 can mean to flip, take turn, or rotate like a wheel) along the Keil Canal connecting the Baltic and North Seas, while a

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freighter glides over the canal next to her. 36 While multiple images of motion and fluidity resonate with each other in this passage, foregrounding the ceaseless circulation of words and goods under global capital (the firm where Yūna holds a part-time job has Flexibilität und Mobilität as its motto), the contrast of size and speed between the two figures, the freighter and the young woman’s bicycle, is striking. The two figures are linked in their forward movement. In another scene, writing is transported around the globe on the container ships that glide town the Elbe River. Through the windows of the office where she works, facing the Elbe, Yūna watches East Asian container ships move in and out of the port of Hamburg, translating the words on their hulks and musing on the writing implements that produced them. Mischievously, but perhaps with a bit of condescension, she quizzes her fellow office-workers. “Here comes Gegenwart!” “But didn’t you tell me the other day that Hyundai means ‘Three Stars?’” her friend responds. “No, that one was Samsung,” says Yūna. Yūna can translate the names of the Korean ships into German because she can read the Chinese characters that have recently been replaced by alphabetic writing on their hulks. In the past, Yūna would often see container ships going through the harbor with Chinese characters written in brush strokes on their steel flanks. How big were the brushes used by the calligraphers who wrote these gigantic characters, she wondered. Were they 5 meters long, or even longer? At some point, the number of Korean names on ships in the harbor increased. Samsung. Hyundai. Although these were written in the letters of the alphabet rather than in Chinese characters or hangul script, Yūna’s brain automatically converted them back to characters that she would then translate into German, not as names but as words with meanings. . . . Starting this year, however, even though Yūna saw many ships from China coming into the harbor, their names were all written in the alphabet. 37

As we have already noted, such translations of translations repeatedly move the plot forward, even through many detours, during Yūna’s “journey to Bordeaux.” Not only do the two central characters in the novella speak to each other in a language “second” for both of them, Maurice, Reneé’s “brother-in-law,” is a Frenchman who communicates with Yūna in English once she arrives. In interactions between characters where German, Japanese, French, and English are circulating, moments of mistranslation and untranslatability arise that can be as consequential as they are comedic or burlesque. “How do you say ‘Renaissance’ in German?” Yūna asks Renée. Renée, taken aback, shakes her head. “You can’t. ‘Renaissance’ is ‘Renaissance.’” 38 When Yūna cannot find Maurice, who was supposed to meet her train in the Bordeaux station, she recalls that he had written, translating literally from French to English in his last e-mail, “I search you at the station.” Thus the narrator firmly asserts that,

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“Words, no matter what the intention with which they were written, influence what is to come.” 39 Looking in the window of a small comic book store on a sweltering day in Bordeaux, Yūna spots, tucked just beside an issue of Tintin, a French language edition of the Osamu Tezuka’s series, featuring her beloved character, Black Jack. Mustering her courage, she reproduces a sentence from her French language textbook to address the eleven or twelve year-old boy next to her who is staring at the same comic book. “C’est un livre intéressant.” To her surprise, the boy responds in Japanese that he has read the whole series, and disappears. 40 BEYOND “SEMIOTIC” TRANSLATION We have seen how movement through translations of translations in Borudō no Gikei presents translation as a multilingual process, blurring the boundaries between Roman Jakobson’s oft-cited categories of “inter-lingual” and “intra-lingual translation.” 41 As is also evident from the examples, it is not only languages but writing, graphs, figures, and “images” that are the occasions for translations of translations in Borudō no Gikei. Their presence extends and expands the sense of “translation” in the novella. This is especially so in relation to the presence and placement of the Chinese character in the text. At one point Yūna offers a tantalizing hint, proposing the metaphor of “unraveling” to explain the relation between the lone kanji marking subdivisions of the novella, and the sections that follow. When asked by her co-worker Nancy about the strange marks “that look like code to us,” that Yūna scribbles in a little red notebook everyday (usually, characteristically, when riding in a moving conveyance like a tram), Yūna asserts that these lists of “lonely” characters in her journal could provide materials for “stories”: “I wish I could record everything that happens to me, but many events are always occurring at the same time. So I enter one character for each event, rather than writing in sentences. You can unravel a single kanji, and it makes a long story.” 42 As tempting as it might be to take this apparent clue as one offered by the author herself to explain the relation of the “orphan kanji” to the sections that follow them as one of translation from a “visual” to a “verbal” register, that is, as examples of Jakobson’s “inter-semiotic translation,” to do so would be to fall back on the referential circle, as well as the Orientalist myth of the character as “pure visuality,” which has been rejected by generations of East Asian scholarship on the Chinese character, not to mention more recent critics. 43 In relation to its focus on translation as a theoretical practice in Tawada’s writings, therefore, this essay takes a different direction, simply using the Chinese character as a springboard toward a different type of consideration of the question of “translating the image” in Tawada’s

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texts. With an eye to Tawada’s own interest in Russian poetry and poetics, I’ve taken the phrase “translating the image” from the Russian scholar Helen Petrovsky. 44 Let us take up a very short passage in Borudō no Gikei when Yūna, on a tram rumbling past the eighteenth-century limestone buildings of Bordeaux (she has finally arrived!), briefly calls to mind Odilon Redon’s drawing (also a lithograph) of a balloon eyeball floating upward in the sky. The drawing carries the caption, “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity.” Of course, Redon was born in Bordeaux and was living there when he produced this “drawing.” But the allusion to Redon is also embedded in a history of translations and creates associations with several intertextual references in Borudō no Gikei. In 1882, a lithograph version of “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts toward Infinity” was published as part of a series of prints by Redon entitled, “To Edgar Allan Poe,” whose works had recently been translated into French by both Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. In the twentieth century, Odilon’s print was featured, moreover, on the cover of the English translation of George Bataille’s erotic tale, Histoire de l’Oeil (Story of the Eye, 1928), suggesting Redon’s balloon is also an intertextual reference to the story by Bataille. Bataille’s text, in turn, is the subject of the essay, “The Metaphor of the Eye,” by Roland Barthes. The image of Redon’s eye-balloon, therefore, can be linked to a passage in Borudō no Gikei that shows Yūna, on the trolley, so caught up in reading the “Japanese translations of Breton, Barthes, Baudrillard, and Blanchot” that she “forgets to get off at her stop and rides to the end of the line.” 45 The allusion to Redon occurs in the passage translated into English below. Like all sections, it is headed by a Chinese character, here, the reversed character 飛 (read HI or tobu), most frequently taken to mean “to fly” or “to leap.” 飛 Maurice lost his footing but seemed to take no note of it. His heart danced up into the sky, searching for his grandfather. No, it was not Maurice’s heart that danced skyward with two wings flapping, but his eyeball. Peering into the blue sky, Yūna thought of a sketch by Odilon Redon. An air balloon that was an eyeball wafted high in the sky above a coastline. Riding in the basket under the balloon was a severed head. 46

In the preceding section Yūna and Maurice are riding in a tram where Maurice became unsettled because he could not find a city named “Saigon” on the airport departure board—the next day Maurice is scheduled to fly to Vietnam to learn about the grandfather who once lived there.

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Figure 2.1.

Maurice’s not knowing “Saigon” has become Ho Chi Minh City, even though his grandfather had lived there, represents a disavowal, a forgetfulness of French colonialism that Yūna has also observed in Reneé throughout the novella. Perhaps here Yūna sees what Maurice cannot see, the severed head of French colonialism in Vietnam. Or perhaps the air balloon, as an outmoded flying conveyance, is a sarcastic jab at Mau-

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rice’s obsolete view of the world. The phonetic reading as “Hi” of the header character 飛 is a homophone of the English word “he,” underscoring the patriarchal nature of the lineage pursued by Maurice. As we have seen, Yūna’s story about kanji (she is shown as still carrying the notebook when she is riding the tram with Maurice in Bordeaux) has also offered us the possibility that this section, like all the sections in the novella, may be read as a “story” created by “unraveling” a kanji. Following this route, we may begin with the fact that the header character, 飛, is usually read as meaning “to fly.” Indeed, when broken in two, the element on the right looks—if one is trained to see it that way—like “wings.” However, in the text’s second sentence, we find the character 飛 deployed in a “proper” syntactical unit, that is, in a sentence. Yet in this sentence “to fly” appears as a verb that has been dislocated from a conventional agent (the agent as human or animal) and attached instead to an isolated body part: Maurice’s “heart.” This appears to be a translation into narrative form of the expression “leaping heart” (kokoro ga tobu), a familiar cliché in Japanese as well as other languages. In the next sentence, a further decomposition produces a more jarring dislocation, when the same element is now used as the modifying adjective “winged,” producing the uncanny flying/floating eyeball of the Redon drawing. The section would appear to have moved from the character, as an ideophonograph, into a “narrative” or verbal translation of the character, which is translated, in turn, into the “visual” drawing by Redon. However, we must not overlook the fact that the Redon work being evoked here is itself not purely visual, but was produced with a verbal caption, “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts toward Infinity.” While Redon’s title uses the rhetorical construction of a simile (“ . . . the eye, like a balloon . . . ”), we should note that a drawing cannot articulate a simile. The media differ, and in Redon’s work, where the pronounced eyelashes seem to exceed the perimeter of the gaseous balloon, we neither have an explicit metaphor, nor can we assume a naturalistic causal logic, such as “the eye is painted on the balloon.” While the two share in common the shape of a sphere or globe, the relationship of eye to balloon is indeterminate. The question remains, then, of whether or not to understand Redon’s drawing as, in fact, aiming to produce an “inter-semiotic translation,” or “visual metaphor,” and whether the same kind of translation, between “a verbal and non-verbal sign system” accurately depicts Tawada’s fictional passage. As it happens, the question of “visual metaphor” was prominent in both discussions involving Symbolist artists in Redon’s era, in Paris, but is also taken up in Roland Barthes’ essay, “Metaphor of the Eye,” dealing with the Bataille text for whose translation Redon’s lithograph provided the cover. According to art historian Juliet Simpson, Redon’s work during this period sought to create an “ambiguity” suggested by the effects of the black and white medium of lithography itself, but also through his

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own use of captions to amplify the enigmatic quality of the images. “Redon rejected the term “illustration,” preferring “visual metaphors.” Yet Redon was later at pains to insist that the components of a visual metaphor were not complementary; text and image were “independent structures of signification.” 47 As Redon wrote in his journal: . . . the use of a caption is only justified when it is vague, indeterminate, and productive of a confusing ambiguity. My drawings . . . determine nothing. They are situated, like music, in an ambiguous, indeterminate world. 48

It seems then that, as Simpson suggests, Redon here turns away from the idea that the relation between words and image can be considered something like “inter-semiotic translation.” The caption “The Eye Like A Strange Balloon” and Redon’s print are not brought together in order to establish a relationship of equivalency between two different types of signs, but instead to produce a more vague, expansively suggestive relationship. Roland Barthes’ analysis of the “metaphor of the eye” in Bataille’s literary text touches even more closely on the processes we find in Borudō no Gikei, especially the transposition of “leaping heart” to “eyes with flapping wings.” In a discussion of what he calls Bataille’s “syntagmatic eroticism” that is rich in implications for Tawada’s works, Barthes proposes of Bataille’s fiction that “perhaps this type of fiction should be called a ‘poem.’” 49 This is because, “essentially then, ‘Story of the Eye’ is a metaphorical composition.” It is structured, in Barthes’ view, as two main metaphors—one of the “eye,” the other of “liquid”—that “migrate” through chains of substitute images. Because this is a movement of “migration,” however, Barthes points out that the chains also comprise syntagmatic relations, relations of contiguity, as they unfold side by side. Further, he notes that as a “fresh technique,” Bataille sometimes interchanges words between the chains to produce yet new types of metaphorical substitutions. Clichéd expressions like “the eye weeps” and “the egg runs out,” that occur in prominent metaphorical chains in “The Story of an Eye,” do have a metaphorical aspect, but for Barthes metaphors generated by such “ancient stereotypes” are only of modest interest. Barthes continues: But everything changes if we begin to tamper with the correspondence between the two chains, if instead of pairing objects and actions in accordance with the laws of traditional affinity (“break an egg,” “put out an eye”) we dislocate the association by taking each of its terms from different lines, if, in other words, we let ourselves “break an eye” and “put out an egg” . . . the syntagma now becomes crossed, because the liaison it suggests takes from the two chains terms that are not complementary but distinct. This is the law of the Surrealist image as formulated by Reverdy and echoed by Breton . . . 50

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Interestingly, if we return to the movement from “leaping heart” to “flying eyeball” that precedes the reference to Redon in Tawada’s text, we may note that at the core of Barthes’ analysis there is a reference to Breton’s Surrealist technique of trouvaille, or “encounter,” that also has been taken up in relation to Tawada’s work. 51 The product of this encounter between “crossed syntagma” is what Barthes refers to as constant “vibration,” something like “sound,” or a “wavy meaning.” We find, as he puts it, a “general contagion of qualities . . . the world becomes blurred; properties are no longer separate; spilling, sobbing, urinating, ejaculating form a wavy meaning. . . . ” 52 Barthes’ “blurred world” and “wavy meaning” here resonate with Redon’s insistence that verbal “caption” and “visual print” maintain their distinction while also, together, producing a “blurred” world. His use of the word “contagion,” moreover, allows us to develop a further resonance with the writings of Helen Petrovsky on the philosophies of aesthetics and poetics produced in modern Russia, whose literary practices Tawada studied as a young writer and often alludes to in her works. This because the word “epidemic” also appears in Petrovsky’s reflections on the status of the “translated mage” in light of the “symbolology” developed by Soviet scholars Merad Marmadashvili (1930–1990) and Alexander Piatigorsky (1929–2000). 53 Like Barthes’ “contagion,” the word “epidemic” is used by Petrovsky to gesture to a blurred state of relations between images that necessarily precedes the subject’s conscious recognition of an image as a coded sign. (Once one classifies what one sees as “visual,” according to Mamardashvili’s symbolology, one has already coded it as a sign.) On this basis, Mamardashvili preferred to refer to certain types of images as “symbols” rather than as “signs.” To be sure, Petrovsky states, the symbol is a kind of “image,” but it is understood in symbolology “in the spirit of the dream image.” For the dream image is seen as emerging in the dreamer’s state of “psychic passivity,” and thus neither derives “from a subject nor from the work of representation.” Underscoring this point that the dream image does not emerge from an agential subject, and most importantly, for this essay’s argument about Tawada’s writing and theory, Petrovksy states, “Dream images serve as a prompt: failing to constitute themselves in full, they remain merely schemas or outer contours of figures that appear while asleep.” 54 Moreover, this anonymous realm constitutes the “condition of figuration itself,” defined, according to Mamardashvili, as the “movement” of figuration. For Petrovsky’s “Translating the Image,” symbolology offers a persuasive proposal for how we might explore the “image” that appears in many contexts in contemporary arts and media as other than simply “visual.” The imagination of the reader or viewer should not be encumbered by such classificatory systems: as soon as it is defined as “visual,” writes Petrovksy, “an image is associated with a ‘sign’ in the traditional

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sense.” 55 Much like the punctum in Barthes’ photograph (a similarity Petrovsky also mentions), the image, as Mamardashvili’s symbol, is essentially uncoded. These words, together with the comments of Redon and Barthes, urge us to understand Yūna’s “unravellings” in Borudō no gikei as something other than an “inter-semiotic,” or “visual to verbal translation” that would only reinscribe the Chinese character on one side of the axis of East/West difference. Whether Redon’s blur, the Surrealist “trouvaille,” Barthes’ “fresh encounter,” or Petrovsky’s “epidemic,” these insights suggest an aspiration to move beyond the semiotic, to “move toward infinity,” a phrase that captures well the call to imaginative (and political) openness Tawada’s texts extend to us. In Schwager in Bordeaux/Bordō no gikei, as well as many other of Tawada’s works, the repeated allusions to dreams and to movement seem to resonate, even “vibrate,” with this call. The foregoing intertextual referents to Borudō no gikei can also be seen as strengthening the sense in which Tawada’s fiction itself, by presenting itself as a practice of translation, may be seen as a theoretical practice. To write as a translator, after all, may only be a fitting acknowledgement that we inhabit a world of non-classical epistemology, that the Cartesian confidence in the split between the subject and object has been left behind. “Consciousness is now defined to encompass some of the qualities of the observer and observed that were previously demarcated from one another,” as Petrovsky asserts. 56 To write as a translator is to forego the illusion of sovereignty as autonomy, envisioned in modern capitalism as “sole and despotic dominion over borders” over both property and, by analogy, the self as legal person, according to Mezzadra and Nielsen. 57 It is to renounce the illusion of control of both one’s text and one’s language, control of words which, in any event, as the narrator has asserted at the outset of Borudō no Gikei, “no matter what the intention, once written, will have an influence on the future.” To write as translator is to embrace both the incompleteness and the excess of one’s writing. But it can also, at least in Tawada’s hands, encourage the reader’s imagination to “mount towards infinity.” There are many words and phrases in the writings discussed above that also lead us back to Samuel Weber’s notion of translation as a “relation of language to language,” and to the light, ephemeral “way” languages touch each other in translation. Indeed, the Russian theorists’ choice of the word “symbol” strikingly coincides with Benjamin’s own language when, in the “Task,” he asserts that to free “pure language” from the charge of conveying “heavy and alien meaning” in the text or literary work . . . to make the symbolizing into the Symbolized itself, to reconquer pure language in structured form for the movement of language— this is the powerful and singular ability of translation.” 58 So, too, does their stress on the work of figuration as a movement, essentially the invis-

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ible groundwork for a later emergence of “visuality,” or the coded sign. “That is why translation . . . functions” in Benjamin’s writings, he says, “as a kind of paradigm indicating the necessity of defining a work . . . that would not be self-contained or lasting, but rather only the stopping place of an ongoing movement.” 59 It is the writing practice, as theory, of this fleeting, ephemeral movement of language to language that Tawada’s texts pursue. NOTES 1. Tawada Yōko, Borudō no gikei (Brother-in-Law in Bordeaux), Tokyo: Kodansha, 2009), 8. All translations from this text are mine. 2. Ibid. 7–8. 3. Tawada Yōko, Schwager in Bordeaux (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2008). 4. Borudō no gikei, 38. 5. For example, to the Japanese version of his essay published as “Ein Europa der Verfürung: Über Schwager in Bordeaux” in Études Germaniques 2010, Vol. 3, No. 259, Nakagawa Shigemi has given the English subtitle, “Step-Brother in Bordeaux.” I thank Professor Nakagawa for sharing the unpublished Japanese text of his essay with me. 6. Leslie Adelson develops the idea of “the riddle of referentiality” in her study The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar (New York: Palgrave, 2005). It has been used to discuss the first-person narrator in Tawada’s fiction in John Namjun Kim, “Ethnic Irony: The Poetic Parabasis of the Promiscuous Personal Pronoun in Yōko Tawada’s ‘Eine leere Flasche’ (A Vacuous Flask),” The German Quarterly 83.3 (Summer 2010), 349. 7. Kim, Ibid p. 349. See also, Brett de Bary, “Deixis, Dislocation, and Suspense in Translation: Tawada Yōko’s ‘Bath’,” in Politics of Culture: Around the Work of Naoki Sakai, ed. Richard Calichman and John Namjun Kim (London: Routledge, 2010), 40–51. 8. Tawada, Borudō no gikei, 26-27. 9. Paul Kroll, A Student’s Dictionary of Classical and Medieval Chinese (Boston: Brill, 2017), 619. 10. The play between characters and narrative is also brought out by the meanings associated with the “roof” radicals themselves (in Japanese such upper radicals are known as “crowns” (kammuri), a word and concept Tawada also plays with. The radical used in the character for “chopsticks” is known as the “take kammuri” or “bamboo crown” linking chopsticks to the bamboo of which they are often made, while it is a “grass crown” (kusa kammuri) that adorns the homophone, an image long used to denote flowing or “cursive” script (草書). The grass and bamboo “crowns,” as visual elements and semes, occur throughout the companion texts. 11. John Kim, op. cit, 348. 12. Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 114. 13. Shirakawa Shizuka, Jōyō Jikai (Glossary of Commonly Used Characters), (Tokyo, Heibonsha, 2003), 444. The term “Old Chinese” is used to designate characters in use from the Warring States period (481–221 BCE) through the Qin (221–206) and Han (206BCE–220 CE) dynasties. In Kroll, xi. 14. Yumiko Saito, “Une Tentative de Double Traduction Analyse Du Voyage À Bordeaux (Schwager in Bordeaux)) de Yōko Tawada,” in Études Germaniques 2010/3 (no. 259), 225–253. 15. Saito, 253. 16. I refer to the title of Bernard Banoun’s translation into French, Le Voyage à Bordeaux (Lagrassse: Verdier, 2009).

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17. Saito, 534. 18. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: University Press, 2006). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). 19. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). David Damrosch, What Is World Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 20. Tawada Yōko, Ekusophonii: bōgo no soto e deru tabi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003). 21. See Christine Ritter’s discussion of Tawada’s avant-garde poetry in “Yōko Tawada: les mots-déchets” in a contrario No. 19, 2013, p. 115. See also Marjorie Perloff, “Language in Migration: Multilingualism and Exophony in the New Poetics,” in Textual Practice, Volume 24, Issue 4. DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2010.499660. Accessed August 30, 2018. Christina Kraenzle discusses citations of Joseph Beuys in Tawada’s writing in “Traveling without Moving: Physical and Linguistic Mobility in Yōko Tawada’s Überseezungung,” in TRANSIT, Volume 2, Issue 1. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6382b28h on 9/8/18. 22. See the discussion of “Performance: Joseph Beuys,” in Gregory Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e) Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 225. 23. Walter Benjamin, “Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 253–263. 24. Spivak, 31 and passim. See also, Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2013). 25. Michiko Mae, “Yōko Tawada’s Work: A Transcultural Journey,” Lecture at Cornell University, October 16, 2017. 26. Sandra Mezzadra and Brett Nielsen, Border as Method Or, The Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 273. 27. J. Derrida, “Des Tours de Babel ,” trans. Joseph Graham, in Difference in Translation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 175. 28. J. Derrida, Des Tours de Babel, p. 166. 29. J. Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other OR The Prosthesis of Origin, translated by Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1. 30. Bordudō no gikei, p. 223. 31. Sherry Simon, Translating Montreal: Episodes in the Life of a Divided City (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s, 2006), 17. 32. Borudō no Gikei , 203, and Schwager in Bordeaux, 184. 33. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 261. 34. Samuel Weber, “A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator’,” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Berman and Michael Wood (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 74. 35. Weber, “A Touch of Translation,” 75. 36. Borudō no Gikei, 125. 37. Borudō no Gikei, 131. 38. Borudō no Gikei, 45. 39. Borudō no Gikei, 3–4. 40. Borudō no Gikei, 161–162. 41. Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 113. 42. Borudō no gikei, 76. 43. See, for example, Andrea Bachner’s critique of the “pictographic myth” in Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). The debates over the “ideographic” nature of the Chinese character

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are also carefully addressed in David Lurie, Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asia Monograph Series, 2011). 44. Helen V. Petrovsky, “Toward the Image: On One Possible Application of Symbolology,” tr. by Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 48, no. 2 (Fall 2009), p. 71. 45. Borudō no gikei, 53. 46. Borudō no gikei, 141. 47. Juliet Simpson, “Symbolist Illustration and Visual Metaphor: Remy de Gourmont’s and Alfred Jarry’s ‘L’Ymagier,’” Word and Image, Vol. 21, No. 2, April-June 2005. 48. Odilon Redon, A Soi-Même: journal 1867–1915, (Paris: corti, 1989), 26–27). My translation. Cited in Simpson, Ibid. 49. Roland Barthes, “The Metaphor of the Eye,” in Critical Essays, translated by Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 244. While I give page numbers from the widely available Howard translation, my citations follow an alternative wording whose images resonate more closely with my analysis. It is that of Rao Pallavi’s translation of Barthes on the blog “In a Brown Study, and other states of mind,” at https://uglywords.wordpress.com Accessed 3/20/18. 50. Barthes, 245. 51. See Bettina Brandt, “The Unkown Character: Traces of the Surreal in Yoko Tawada’s Writing,” Yōko Tawada: Voices From Everywhere, edited by Doug Slaymaker (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 111–125. 52. Barthes, 245. 53. Helen V. Petrovsky, “Toward the Image: On One Possible Application of Symbolology,” tr. by Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 48, no. 2 (Fall 2009). 54. Petrovsky, 71. (emphasis mine) 55. Ibid, 70. 56. Petrovsky, 65. 57. Mezzadra and Neilson, 293. They cite Vico’s (1744) observation of the “historical and logical parallel between the concept of private property and the tracing of territorial boundaries constitutive of sovereignty,” as well as Evgen Pashukanis’ assertion that this notion of sovereignty influenced the formulation of the “legal person” in civil law under capitalism. 58. Cited in Weber, 74–75. 59. Weber, 75.

THREE Image and the Unity of a Language Translation and the Indeterminacy of National Language Naoki Sakai

In one of Yōko Tawada’s essays on translation, “The Gate of a Translator—When Celan reads Japanese” (Honyakusha no mon—Sheran ga Nihongo wo yomu toki), 1 she imposes what I want to call “an optic” on a series of tropes that she introduces to discuss what takes place when some poems by Paul Celan are translated into Japanese. This optic is not easy to apprehend in the first place, partly because, even though the word “optic” refers to the regulated economy of luminous refraction and reflection, it is in effect about the way in which literary tropes are organized in her argument. Were it not for the adoption of this perplexing narrative tactic, it would be almost impossible to render so convincingly the unexpected combination of an ideographic grapheme and the translatability of Celan’s poetry into Japanese. For Tawada, a translator is somebody who looks into the other side from this side. Her position is preliminarily determined in the trajectory of this look, a look embodying a sense in the sense of direction and corporeal movement within the configuration of what Roman Jakobson called “shifters,” from “here” to over “there,” from “me” to “you.” 2 Yet what creates the primordial demarcation of this side from that side is best summarized by a gate, a construct that marks an opening rather than a divide or a border. What is decisive in Tawada’s discussion of translation is that the gate should be a figure operating as the leading trope in translation in general, but particularly in the translation of Paul Celan’s poetry into the Japanese. The gate is more of a perspective or a passage of light 35

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than an entrance or a divide. It suggests a transitory movement rather than indexing a stationary location. It symbolizes an optic, a system of refraction through which light traverses. Hence, at the outset, I want to indicate the working of a special optic in her essay. As a point of focus in her narrative, the gate is not a literary device in general; it is, first of all, a calligraphic figure, a grapheme that functions within the paradigmatic gamut of graphic potentialities. Here, we must be attentive to the fact that Tawada is reading Celan’s poems and Iiyoshi Mitsuo’s Japanese translation as texts. We are forcefully made aware of the visual and tactile aspects of textuality. This is to say that she collects— she mentions the German verb lesen to remind us of what she is in the process of doing—and assembles bits and pieces of graphic fragments to make a certain sense out of these two juxtaposed texts. Instead of evoking other sememes (which are recognized as the smallest units of meaning in semantics) or a seme (a paradigm among a set of sememes limiting the polysemy of sememe), this figure potentially invokes other graphemes, in contrast to which it is identified paradigmatically as a graphic figure, and is associated with other characters or kanji (hanzi). The gate is a graphic figure 門 which may be pronounced “mon.” It is a bit like the alphabetic letter V. It is a whole letter, but it is also a part of another letter: W. Thus, the graphic figure 門 is differentiated from, and contrasted to, other graphic units or characters such as 山, 仁, 非. But it is also a component of characters, a grapheme smaller than a character, often referred to as mongamae, so that it is possible to construct other characters containing this grapheme, 闇, 閃, 間, 閾, and so forth by combining different graphemes, 音, 人, 日, 或 to 門, respectively. In isolation—that is, not forming combinations with other characters and deprived of possible syntactical placement—the latter set of four characters might well mean “sound” (音), “man” or “people” (人), “the sun” or “day in contrast to night” (日), and “some” or “general indexing of this or that” (或). Neither in their phonetic values nor in their lexical meanings does the first set of the four characters correspond to the second set, 闇, 閃, 間, 閾, which mean, respectively: “darkness,” “lightning,” “in-betweenness,” and “threshold or limit.” It is in this abundance of gate characters and gate graphemes that Tawada sees the translatability or afterlife of Paul Celan’s poetry into Japanese. The Japanese translation of Celan’s poems in fact discloses what is latent in the original, precisely because translation facilitates what could not be figured out in German. By placing Celan’s poetry in the neighborhood of the ideographic economy, the translator shows that a potential surface of inscription actualizes itself when different fragments are pieced together. On the surface thus reconstructed, a figure that had hitherto been unrecognizable is now legible. It goes without saying that, as Tawada notes at the end of this essay, this is nothing but what Walter Benjamin called “the translatability of literary work.” What translation discloses, in repeating the original in difference, is the pure language that

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only exists as impure noise in the original. In reference to Benjamin, Morinaka Takaaki, a poet and another outstanding translator of Paul Celan, argues that translation takes place as “a repetition of that which has been already operative in potentiality within the original language, which shatters its putative coherence, as it were, folding back its border onto its inside.” 3 Here, the first task of the translator is not merely to discover sememes across languages; rather it is first of all a grammatological enterprise, in which the translator liberates poetry from the restricted economy of grammaticality. To follow Morinaka’s reading of Benjamin, the translator must discover what has already been operating in the original, which nevertheless cannot manifest itself because of the assumed unity of the language in which it is written. In this respect, the task of the translator is akin to that of the poet, in the very sense in which Yōko Tawada is one. Here, we have to confront the problem of what is marked as the domain of grammaticality, the assumed organicity of what constitutes a language as a countable item. Hence the question, What does Morinaka suggest by “folding back its border onto its inside”? Before going back to the trope of the gate, let me explore what is at issue in the putative unity of a language, in the very possibility that a language can be counted like oranges or nationalities, and unlike water or a vacuum; the problem of one, two, and many. I want to consider the way in which we represent a national or ethnic language as a countable noun, derive the unity of a community from the figure of a language, and thereby assume difference between one national community and another as a relationship of externality. Purportedly, a language exists outside another language, but it seems simply preposterous to believe that, without a certain mediation, languages can be mapped onto the cartographic plane of global geography, for language is an assemblage of activities of people who are not fixed to a location but are persistently dislocated. Therefore, what must be taken into consideration is this: the register in which we come to assume this relationship of inside/outside that separates one language from another, thereby establishing a language as something we can count. How do we imagine the unity of a language? How do we render the putative unity of language commensurate with the coordinates of cartographic representation? How we represent the figure of a language is interminably woven into the way we imagine a nation? A plurality of peoples inhabits the world; the world is frequently presented as a common space where differences among peoples are manifest. Each people is a group, so differences among peoples are not entirely reducible to differences among individuals. In order to differentiate the plurality of peoples from the plurality of human individuals, we often rely upon categories for collective identities, such as family, kin, race, nation, ethnos, and culture. The most commanding category for collective

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unity in the modern world is found in language, so that the language is represented as expressing the primordial union of a people. If one human body is somewhat a marker of human “individuality,” the image—or figure, trope, or schema—of a language gives the sense of an individual or indivisible collectivity. Yet, on what grounds is it possible to claim that the image of a language is autonomous and self-oriented? I want to claim that, primarily, what is given is not an image of a language but the image, figure, trope, or schema of languages; the locale where languages are identified is never contained in a language. The identification of a language is possible only in a heteronomous encounter. Differences among peoples precede the union of a people, just as translation comes before the identification of a language. After this brief detour, let me return to the optic in Tawada’s essay on translation. She explains that the series of characters containing the grapheme “mon” provide a perspective through which one can look into the Japanese language. This is not a trope whose function in literary figuration can be easily apprehended. “Looking into” suggests an onlooker standing outside and peeping inside, yet one tends to presume that these characters are already inside the language; they do not mark the exterior surface of the language unless the surface is somewhat folded into the inside. Are these characters part and parcel of the Japanese language? Or rather, do they constitute the language’s interior? This is the first instance of many to illustrate that words are indeterminate as to their “nationality.” At the level of the smallest units, for instance, a word is indeterminate with respect to what language unity it belongs. The construct gate captures this instability, uncertainty, and perhaps autonomy of the word in respect to nationality very well. But, we are now confronted with an apparent contradiction. How can I insist that there is no such thing as the interior of the language spatially enclosed from its outside, on the one hand, while, on the other, Tawada says that Celan looks into the Japanese language in the Japanese translation of his own poetry? The grapheme “mon” invokes an optic because the trope of “looking into” provides an opportunity for seeing beyond an optical illusion or the dominant optic of the national language, the optical illusion of a language forming a spatial enclosure. It allows us to see languages beyond the relationship of externality in which the plurality of languages is allocated. Generally speaking, it is said that the Japanese writing system consists of two principles. One is the principle of phonography, according to which the basic phonemes or minimum combinations of phonemes are expressed in terms of graphic signs. These signs are usually called kana and, in modern Japanese, there are basically two kana groups, each of which includes some fifty symbols. So all together some one hundred kana are used in modern Japanese. Another principle is ideography, ac-

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cording to which a one-to-one correspondence between phonetic components and graphemes is not assumed. The number of these ideographic signs is large, perhaps in the order of 10,000 or more, although less than 2,000 are used frequently today. Ideographic signs are usually referred to as kanji (hanzi). There are many problems about the ways in which Japanese writing has been analyzed and classified, but we will not spend time on these until later. Instead of addressing Japanese notation in general, let me pinpoint the duality inherent in the ideography of the Japanese language. The grapheme 門, which Tawada cites in her essay, falls into the class of kanji or ideographic signs. Therefore, it may well be pronounced “mon,” but it could be “kado.” In its phonetic value, it is multivalent. In one of Tawada’s Japanese poems, “Kakeru,” the interplay of polysemy and polygraphy that is inherent in the coexistence of phonography and ideography is deployed to maximum effect. The case in point is the homonyms of the verb “kaku” that can be written 書く, 欠く, 掻く, 描く, and so forth. The most common way to differentiate these homonyms kaku, kaku, kaku, and kaku—all exactly the same in pronunciation—is to compose these verbs as combinations of two characters, kanji and kana, that is, combinations of ideographic signs and phonographic signs, thereby destabilizing the phonocentrism of linguistic nationalism. Thus, she is successful in mobilizing the ambiguity of kanji and kana, which is best appropriated by the figure of the gate. Any poetic figure that works eloquently is a testimony to historicity. The figure of the gate casts a piercing light on the history of languages. In the eighteenth century, some grammarians discovered the organizing formula of the Japanese syntax precisely in this internal heteronomy. For instance, Motoori Norinaga, the leading grammarian and literary historian of the eighteenth century, established his own terminology, according to which the ideographic and the phonetic components were, respectively, called tama (玉), jewels in the necklace, and o (緒), a thread linking jewels in the necklace, differentiated from one another as syntactic categories. 4 While jewels were indeed rigid and inflexible, a thread linking isolated stones provided the unity and the flexibility of the necklace as a whole. At the most elementary level, tama is the stem, and o the conjugational suffix of a verb, adjectival or adverbial. In this respect, they correspond to nominal and non-nominal. But the differentiation could not be limited to morphological classification of words. The development of Japanese grammar in the eighteenth century is interesting precisely because some scholars discovered the Japanese language through the acknowledgment of the internal heteronomy of ideography and phonography. Seeking the pure origin of the indigenous language, they had to face the historical reality that the languages they were born into had been contaminated by foreign intruders from the outset. Furthermore, the foreign contamination had already constituted the Japa-

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nese language to such an extent that the Japaneseness could only be recognized as an addition to its foreign core. The study of the Japanese syntax of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brilliantly highlights this constitutive anxiety, which led these grammarians to the determination of what differentiates the Japanese language from its others. Since I offered my analysis on this elsewhere, 5 I will not go into details here on how Confucian studies, the study of language, the development of Kokugaku—or National Studies—and the transformation of speech genres contributed to this discovery of the Japanese language. But let me issue a disclaimer: the grammarians’ suspicion that the Japanese language was fundamentally contaminated did not arise until they began to insist upon the radical heteronomy of ideography and phonography, the uses of kanji (hanzi) and kana, in a systematic but entirely new manner. Only when they sought the pure origin of the Japanese did they come across the crushing fact that the native and the foreign could never be distinguished from each other. Accordingly, their search for the Japanese language was accompanied by the anxiety that it could never be discovered as such. Investment in the national language and the discovery of its irredeemable contamination were simultaneous. Perhaps, until the eighteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants of the Japanese archipelago had not been aware of the existence of the Japanese language as a unity, even though they would have come across many irregularities that could not be expressed in the medium of classical literary Chinese or kanji. For these early modern grammarians of the eighteenth century, what differentiated the Japanese language from Chinese was that, in order to read the text in Japanese, they had to add phonetic markers or kana that did not exist in the lexicon of classic literary Chinese. Such an ordinary verb “kaku” is a testament to this. Kaku can be “to write,” “to lack,” “to scratch,” or “to draw,” and its inherent polysemy is manifest when it is made to correspond to different ideographic signs. Ideography serves to classify and order the confusing field of sememes. The formula they came up with was the basic structure of Japanese syntax: a combination of the Chinese character(s) and phonetic units that cannot be expressed in Chinese characters. In other words, the coexistence of something foreign (kanji) and something native (kana) is the organizing principle of the Japanese language. But it was not a juxtaposition or conjunction. It was rather an inclusion of a foreign object into the native element. It was a frame or framing up process. To use Morinaka Takaaki’s expression, the border of the Japanese language was “folded back onto its inside,” a formula anticipated, as I suggested above, in Tawada’s optic of the gate. This formula introduced by the grammarians of the eighteenth century 6 illustrated that every conjugational form retains the border of the foreign grapheme and Japanese sememe, that every Japanese conjuga-

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tional word has a trace of foreign intrusion, so to say. In other words, just like the construct 門, it is an opening into some different realm, an opening that inserts dislocation or a temporal differential into the syntactical unity of predication. At the risk of oversimplifying, I argue that this internal dislocation, not entirely dissimilar to the empirico-transcendental doublet of modern subjectivity, 7 can be found, not in the periphery of some self-enclosed image of the Japanese language, but in its core, in its basic function. And they conceived of the conjugational ending as an overarching enclosure or framing of the object that was foreign. In the twentieth century, Tokieda Motoki, who taught linguistics at Keijō (Seoul) Imperial University and later the University of Tokyo, 8 adopted this insight in his Studies of the Japanese Language (Kokugogaku) and developed a sort of phenomenological linguistics in terms of the Tokugawa grammatical categories, shi (詞) and ji (辞) 9 Tokieda relied upon Suzuki Akira, an early nineteenth-century philosopher of language, and applied a morphological distinction between two groups of words. One group, shi, consists of nominals, the stems of the adjectival and adverbial that express the concepts objectively, whereas the other group, ji, includes morphemes and sememes indicating conjugation such as the endings of verbs, adjectivals, and adverbials or particles, which carry no syntactical function unless they are added to shi and thereby modify it. Shi expresses a concept signifying a thing, event, or state of affairs in the modality of objectification or conceptualization. In contrast, ji neither objectifies nor conceptualizes; it expresses the speaker’s involvement in its subjective immediacy, so that Suzuki called this group “voices of the heart” (kokoro no koe). Shi and ji are not merely morphological categories. Tokieda argued that the defining structure of the Japanese language can be found in the specific form in which shi is enveloped or framed by ji. Since the shi that is framed by ji can be further framed by ji, the phrase composed of shi and ji can be repeatedly enveloped by ji. This is what Tokieda called the box-in-box formula (irekogata kōzō) which, in theory, can be applied infinite times. In this regard, it is necessary to draw attention to two aspects: first, ji serves to fold the form of shi and ji in upon itself. Ji is perhaps defined approximately by comparing its syntactical function to predication in judgment. I do not have the space here to do justice to the complexity of this linguistic discussion on Japanese syntax, or to list a number of necessary reservations in offering such a comparison. Nevertheless, the following is an approximate and schematic comparison to the form of predicative judgment in English. Suppose there is a sentence 10 expressing a predicative judgment as follows: a. This rose is red.

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Since the enunciation of this sentence must necessarily be carried out by some agent, it should be possible to re-state the sentence by specifying the subject of enunciation, for example, as in the following: b. I say [this rose is red]. But, once this sentence has been enunciated, it should also be possible to re-state the sentence by repeating the same procedure as the specification of the subject of enunciation is also an enunciation: c. I say [I say [this rose is red]]. “I say” can be replaced by “I feel,” “I doubt,” or even “I think.” Or it can be replaced by “I hope you will say,” “I am sure he said,” and so on, since the types of shifters other than pronouns and certain verbal and adverbial constructions are available in Japanese syntax. 11 In example (A), the implicit positionality of the speaking subject is not elucidated or objectified, and the addition of “I say” in (B) discloses the locus of the synthesis of a judgment in (A) by bringing into presence the function of apperception. Now, one can see what Tokieda wanted to bring about by borrowing the terms shi and ji from Tokugawa linguistics. He sought to understand how Japanese syntax articulates the synthetic unity of apperception in subjectivity. Although he never dealt with Kant’s transcendental criticism directly, the problematic that guided Tokieda to the box-inbox formula can be traced back to the initial formulation of modern subjectivity in Kant. Let me refer to the very famous statement in Critique of Pure Reason: “It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations.” 12 While in Japanese, the apperceptive function is couched in the form of shi/ji, shi and ji take a reversed form of combination: ji/shi in English. If the form of Japanese syntax might be schematically expressed in the figure of the box-in-box in which a smaller box is ensconced within a larger one, the parallel in English would be an arcade within which a smaller gate is located. It goes without saying that Yōko Tawada’s graphic figure of the gate captures a fundamental feature of the Japanese language, the very heteronomy between the saying and the said, inherent in the enunciation of Japanese words. Secondly, it is necessary to not overlook the historical context in which the pair of terms shi and ji were developed. As best illustrated in the Japanese reading of literary Chinese (kanbun kundoku) that has developed over many centuries since the eighth century, shi and ji were initially associated with the Chinese characters and that which could not be expressed by them. Today we take for granted that Japanese notational symbols are summarily classified into the ideographic signs of kanji and the phonographic signs of kana. But, this classification used in the Japa-

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nese writing system is particular to modern Japanese. Until the eighteenth century, kana was not opposed to kanji; kana was a category indicating the ad hoc characters, paired to mana, the authentic characters. The paradigmatic principle of the seme, within which kana and mana were in opposition, had nothing to do with the phonetic value associated with notations. Kana and mana were essentially calligraphic categories; mana meant a Chinese character properly or authentically drawn—the passive saying of the verb kaku—whereas kana implied a Chinese character hastily drawn i.e., its short hand. What sustained this opposition of mana and kana was calligraphic generic difference between the square and the grass styles. It is only with the arrival of a certain phonocentrism—I called this rupture of discursive formation “the stillbirth of the Japanese as ethnos and language” 13 —that the mana and kana opposition shifted from a calligraphic register to another one marked by the absence and presence of phonetic values in notations, a register of paradigmatic differentiation between ideography and phonography. In this phonocentric discursive formation, it became possible to search for the mythic origin of the Japanese ethnos and language, respectively, as an uncivilized peoplehood without writing, and as a language of pure orality. 14 Yet, as soon as they confronted the reality of the languages in which they lived, they could find the essence of the Japanese language only in the very structure of heteronomy of ideography and phonography. Insofar as the mana and kana opposition was mapped onto the opposition of shi and ji, the apperceptive function in which Suzuki Akira saw “the voice of the heart” (kokoro no koe) had to remain parasitic, as a derivative of the foreign intrusion of the Chinese civilization. The Japanese grammarians of the eighteenth century may well have sought the original unity of the Japanese in the interior of the language at the level of the words and the nominal, but what they discovered in spite of themselves was an opening to the foreign; it was an open passage overarched by a gate; it was already open so that it was incapable of distinguishing the interior from its exterior. The passage to the foreign was already “folded onto its inside.” And in their search for the core of the Japanese language they only discovered the historical trace of contamination. It is impossible to find the unity of a language at the level of words. One has to go up to the higher syntactical level, and even higher, to semantics, in order to assert the unity of a language to which a word is supposed to belong. One has to move from the nominal to the overarching synthetic function. The belonging of a word to a language and its nationality is not a matter that is empirically determinable. The optic operating in Tawada’s essay brilliantly illustrates the indeterminacy of national language. For,

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the unity of language is like a regulative idea. It organizes knowledge, but it is not empirically verifiable. Immanuel Kant introduced the term “regulative idea” in his Critique of Pure Reason. A regulative idea does not concern itself with the possibility of experience; it is no more than a rule according to which a search in the series of empirical data is prescribed. What it guarantees is not the empirically verifiable truth but, on the contrary, “forbidding [search for truth] to bring it[self] to a close by treating anything at which it may arrive as absolutely unconditioned.” 15 Therefore, the regulative idea gives only an object in idea; it only means “a schema for which no object, not even a hypothetical one, is directly given.” 16 The unity of language cannot be found in experience because it is nothing but a regulative idea; it enables us to comprehend other related data about languages “in an indirect manner, in their systematic unity, by means of their relation to this idea.” 17 It is not possible to know whether a particular language as a unity exists or not. Rather it is the other way round: by prescribing to the idea of the unity of language, it becomes possible for us to systematically organize knowledge about languages in a modern, scientific manner. To the extent that the unity of national language ultimately serves as a schema for nationality 18 and offers the sense of national integration, the idea of the unity of language opens up a discourse to discuss not only the naturalized origin of an ethnic community but also the entire imaginary associated with “national” language and culture. A language may be pure, authentic, hybridized, polluted, or corrupted, yet regardless of a particular assessment of that language, the very possibility of praising, authenticating, criticizing, or deploring it is offered by the unity of that language as a regulative idea. However, we all know that the institution of the nation-state is a relatively recent invention. Consequently, we are led to suspect that the idea of the unity of language as the schema for ethnic and national communality must also be a recent invention. How should we understand historically the formula of “many in one,” the plurality of languages that are external to one another but coexist in one humanity, when the unity of language has to be understood as a regulative idea or schema for an object in idea? As I mentioned above, for Kant, a regulative idea is explicated with regard to the production of scientific knowledge; it ensures that the empirical inquiry of some scientific discipline would never reach any absolute truth, and is therefore endless. Every scientific truth changes as more empirical data is accumulated. Furthermore, let us note that Kant also qualifies the regulative idea as a schema—that is, image, design, outline, or figure, not exclusively in the order of idea but also in the order of the sensational. Thus far, this much is evident. From the postulate that the unity of national language is a regulative idea, it follows that we do not and cannot know whether a national language such as English and Japanese

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exists as an empirical object. I would never deny, however, that it can exist as what Michel Foucault termed “a historical a priori.” The unity of national language enables us to organize various empirical data in a systematic manner so that we can continue to seek knowledge on the language. Moreover, at the same time it offers not an object in experience but an objective in praxis toward which we aspire to regulate our uses of language, as the theories of translation in German Romanticism testify. It is not only an epistemic principle but also a strategic one. Hence, it works in a double register: on the one hand, determining epistemologically what is included or excluded in the very database of a language, what is linguistic or extra-linguistic, and what is proper to a particular language or not; on the other hand, indicating and projecting what we must seek as our proper language, what we must avoid as heterogeneous to our language and reject as improper to it—the unity of a national language as a schema guides us as to what is just or wrong for our language, what is in accord or discord with the propriety of the language. Thus, my argument seeks the consequences of the language’s pluralist origins in two directions: the first is a historical analysis of a schematism by which the image of languages was reorganized in modernity. The national language comes into being through an operation of imagination. The second is the question of culture, and of its subordination to the schematism of national languages, as culture is often modeled after the image of a national language. But, what would have happened to Tokieda’s attempt to define the character of the Japanese language if such a demand for its schema could never be answered? What happens to national literature if we knew the gate 門 were always open for us? NOTES 1. Tawada Yōko, “Honyakusha no mon—Sheran ga Nihongo wo yomu toki,” Katakoto no uwagoto (Tokyo: Seido-sha, 1999), 137–149. 2. Roman Jakobson, “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb,” Selected Writings (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971), 2:260–66. 3. Morinaka Takaaki, Sonzai to hai (Kyoto: Jinbun shoin, 2004), 154. 4. Motoori Norinaga, Kotoba no tama no o, in Motoori Norinaga zenshū, vol. 5 (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō,1990). 5. Naoki Sakai, Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). 6. In the early nineteenth century, Suzuki Akira elaborated upon this syntactic formula to develop the two concepts of tama and o into shi and ji, respectively. Then, in the twentieth century, Tokieda Motoki synthesized the Japanese grammarian’s insights with that of transcendental phenomenology to introduce the box-in-box formula. 7. The term “empirico-transcendental doublet” was introduced by Michel Foucault to elucidate the analytic of finitude in The Order of Things. New York: Random Books, 1970, 303–343.

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8. Let us not overlook the fact that, while Tokieda was definitely not an ethnic nationalist during the period of Japanese imperialism, he was a linguist with a strong nationalist tendency. He contributed much to the integrationist language policies of the Japanese Empire when he taught at the Keijō (Seoul) Imperial University. I will not touch upon this important issue in this paper since I will discuss his linguistics with respect to his imperial nationalism elsewhere. 9. Tokieda Motoki, Kokugogaku genron (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1941). 10. A cautionary disclaimer: in this article I allow myself to use some basic terms such as “sentence” and “judgment,” but this is a tentative compromise on my part. The theoretical exposition I present here will eventually destroy the validity of these philosophical and linguistic concepts. 11. Of course, this does not mean the relative positions of addresser, addressee, reporter, observer, and so on cannot be expressed in the Japanese language. Tokieda paid much attention to the system of the honorific for this reason. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929), 153 [B131]. 13. See my Voices of the Past. 14. An exemplary argument can be found in Kokui-kō (An inquiry into the meaning of the country) and Goi-kō (An inquiry into the meaning of the word) by Kamo Mabuchi (1697-1769). 15. Kant, 450 [A 509/B537]. 16. Ibid, 550 [A 670; /B 698]. 17. Ibid. 18. Fukuzawa Yukichi translated the English term “nationality” into “kokutai” in the early Meiji period, in the 1870s. Later “kokutai” was used to express the sovereignty of the Japanese Emperor System. By “kokutai,” Fukuzawa meant “a portion of mankind” that “are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others—which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language, and community of religion greatly contribute to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.” John Stuart Mill, in Utilitarianism: On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government, London & Rutland: Everyman’s Library, 1972 (originally 1861), 391. In his Outline of the Theory of Civilization, Fukuzawa includes the above almost verbatim in his exposition of “kokutai.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Random Books, 1970. Fukuzawa Yukichi. Bunmeiron no gairyaku. Vol. 4, Fukuzawa Yukichi zenshū. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1970. Jakobson, Roman. “Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb.” Vol. 2, Selected Writings. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971, 260–66. Kamo Mabuchi. Kokui-kō hoka. Vol. 19, Kamo Mabuchi zenshū. Tokyo: Zoku Gunsho Ruijū Kanseikai, 1980. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1929. Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism, On Liberty, Considerations on Representative Government. London & Rutland: Everyman’s Library, 1972. Morinaka Takaaki. Sonzai to hai. Kyoto: Jinbun shoin, 2004.

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Motoori Norinaga. Kotoba no tama no wo. Vol. 5, Motoori Norinaga zenshū. Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1990. Sakai, Naoki. Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Tawada Yōko. “Honyakusha no mon—Sheran ga Nihongo wo yomu toki.” Katakoto no uwagoto. Tokyo: Seido-sha, 1999. 137-49. Tokieda Motoki. Kokugogaku genron. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1941.

FOUR Yōko Tawada’s Poetics on the Threshold of Different Writing Systems 1

Sigrid Weigel

Yōko Tawada’s writing and her poetics originate from the threshold between Japanese and German languages and simultaneously from the transition between a pictographic script and an alphabetic system. It is this double strangeness, from where the enormous variety of her inventive “translation-related experimental writing techniques” arise. 2 Yet, it is not translation in general which is the driving force of her literature but writing in between and across these specific languages and scriptures. Therefore, her experimental mode of writing develops over the abyss of two languages which have nothing in common within the horizon of comparative linguistics, not any affinity and no hidden communicating tubes. Two languages that are, over and above, separated by entirely different writing systems. In this essay I will read her text Ein E-Mail für japanische Geister (An e-mail for Japanese ghosts) as an allegory of her poetics. Just as the computer often fails at its task of transforming certain alphabetical units into target words of the Japanese vocabulary, Tawada’s written German texts—creatively—misread words by a systematic disfigurement of their literality.

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BETWEEN PICTOGRAPHIC SCRIPT AND ALPHABET—LETTERS IN TRANSITION Ein E-Mail für japanische Geister was written as a contribution to a lecture series on the topic of Rituals, Today in winter semester 1997/98 at the University of Zurich 3 where Tawada completed her dissertation Spielzeug und Sprachmagie (Toy and the Magic of Language) in 1998. 4 An E-mail for Japanese Ghosts literally marks a threshold between the ethnological poetics discussed in her dissertation and her literary work. The text concerns writing slips that occur when writing in Japanese on a computer, in the transfer between the letters of the Japanese Hiragana syllabary when one types on the keyboard and the Chinese characters of the pictographic Kanji script. I read this site of writing as a primal scene of the genesis of Tawada’s literature. What appears to be a technical slip corresponds to the creative disfigurements of her writing. Using a formulation from Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900, one could say that her literature is “disfigured by similarity.” 5 The interplay between the letters and the ciphers of the pictographic script evokes unconventional meanings and hidden connections characteristic of Tawada’s poetics, producing at the same time insights into the order of language. With the help of a technically advanced medium (i.e., the computer) Tawada lets mediums, in the occult sense, rise again. Parts of this computer scene re-occur in several other texts, where they allude to this special writing ghost. For example, in Der Apfel und die Nase (The Apple and the Nose) from Überseezungen (2002, the title is a wordplay; it literally means Overseastongues and phonetically evokes Übersetzungen, translations), one scene starts with the sentence “How does one write Japanese with the computer?” and goes on to describe more precisely just how the computer starts to function independently from the writer’s intention, in the process of “alphabetical transcription,” as it is technically referred. In this is an explanation of the far-reaching media-historical peculiarity of the Japanese system of writing. 6 Due to the sheer number of characters it is impossible to find a place for all of them on a single keyboard. Hence the detour via letters, whereby a variety of ideograms are necessarily assigned to each letter. As Tawada writes: The computer tries to transform the words written alphabetically into Japanese characters. But it is not easy for it to do so. For there are over 8,000 characters in the box. There are many groups of words which look identical in alphabetical transcription but which have to be written differently as ideograms. The computer could only ever select the correct character if it understood the content of the text. It can do a lot, it can also understand and answer my question if it’s not too poetic. Sometimes it gives me the feeling that it understands me. But then I am disappointed over and over again. How, for example, can it select the character for “nose” (hana) when it is “flower” (hana) that I want to

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write? Both words look identical when romanized but are voiced with different intonations and are of course written with different ideograms. The computer is not interested in what I write; instead, it simply selects a character that I have previously selected. 7

“Method is detour,” as the oft-cited bon mot from Benjamin’s epistemological preface to Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Origin of the German Mourning Play) has it. 8 In the case of the computer writing Japanese, the detour gives rise to a system of involuntary lapses of the pen, which Tawada scoops up like a trouvaille: like a discovery that has another meaning attached to it, which is neither deliberate nor merely coincidental. Nor is it any coincidence that these scenes of writing initially arose in conjunction with observations on ritual. For, in the description of typing Japanese on the computer, Tawada’s writing itself takes on a ritual character, as expressed in the opening sentence of An E-mail for Japanese Ghosts: “I set letters while I write.” In contrast to the customary activity of writing, setting letters is, according to Tawada, a matter of “entering into the state of writing”: The alphabet is object-like for me and exists outside of my body. Hence, writing in German is to me like a tea ceremony with thirty little objects. There is a tea can “D,” a tea bowl “U,” a kettle “K,” tongs “Y,” a spoon “L” and so on. You have to take hold of them in a predetermined sequence. The point at which you can take a break is also predefined. 9

Yet this ritual character of writing is not an end in and of itself, nor does it have a purely aesthetic meaning. Rather, writing becomes a type of necromancy that enables an entirely different type of approach to the past and to prior generations than does the writing of history. According to Tawada, literature needs ritual as an appeal to the spirits: “For the ghosts of the dead often narrate from that dead corner of the past that is literature’s concern.” 10 In this regard, Tawada’s writing in the digital age appears as an echo of those rituals that she could still observe among her grandparents: the grandfather writing with a brush—“He wrote with brush and ink, so that writing automatically took on a ritual character”— and the grandmother lighting incense sticks at the altar in the house and “putting down a bowl of rice for the deceased ancestors.” 11 As a child, the author writes, she was never surprised that “some rituals attracted ghosts while others chased them away.” 12 Her own poetics of necromancy in the field of German language is addressed to the lost pictography of language: “It was only in German that I discovered letters as ghosts.” 13 When, for example, she sees in Brezel (pretzel) a B-Rätsel (b-riddle; a wordplay on the puzzle of the letter B contained in the word for pretzel), she is not only reading letters as ideograms but also conjuring the dead. For her gaze toward the shape

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and literality of individual words allows the dimension of similarity that has disappeared in the sign system to rise from the dead. In the text Sprachpolizei und Sprachpolyglotte (Language Police and Language Polyglot), which discerns in the rules of grammar an entire arsenal of implicit functions of political order that extend well beyond language, we encounter the following passage: But the adverbs are long dead. The adjectives are dead, too. They don’t have bodies anymore. It is forbidden to write the word “big” big. We are also not supposed to write the word ‘askew’ askew, nor the word ‘red’ with a red pen. The words are not allowed to be what they mean. The words have to remain letters so that we can overlook them. 14

Contrary to the mimetic dimension of language now disappeared, the exo-phone or, even better, exo-graphic gaze toward alphabetical script brings its physiognomic character to the foreground again—like a revenant. In this way, uncanny meanings come to light out of the language, which is all too familiar for native speakers: the more we look at a word pictorially, the more strangely does it look back at us. For example, the German word “nothing” that, when seen through this kind of lens, is the site from which the first-person pronoun arises: “One day I discovered the word ‘I’ [ich] in the middle of the word ‘nothing’ [Nichts], hence the nothing is the space in which the little word ‘I’ lives.” 15 If the ritualized character of her writing reminds Tawada of the rituals of her ancestors, it is not in the sense of an inherited traditional culture. Rather, it is in the light of a doubled interruption in the system of writing—between ideogram and alphabetic letters and between different languages—in which moments of the writing culture transform into “incomprehensible, ghostly, or dreamlike figures.” 16 Whereas Freud reads the pictographic writing of the dream for its character value, in Tawada’s writings the characters suddenly and involuntarily unleash forgotten dreams when they are read for their pictorial value. Benjamin referred to the ability, made possible by photography and film, to perceive the involuntary movements of one’s own body that are indiscernible to the human eye like “image worlds that dwell in the miniscule” and hide from the human eye, as the “optical unconscious.” 17 Drawing on this notion, one could say that Tawada discovers in the scene of the computer writing in Japanese an “alphabetical unconscious.” Insofar as the electronic writing apparatus induces symptoms of distorted similarity, memory symbols not of an individual but of a cultural script become perceptible in their own alterity.

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THE EXO-PHONIC RETURN OF THE LOST MIMETIC FACULTY OF LANGUAGE In the Tübinger Poetics Lecture Verwandlungen (Metamorphoses) from 1998, in which Tawada unfolds a polysensual poetics in three chapters— on the voice, on writing, and on the face—there is a two-page passage from E-mail for Japanese Ghosts that constitutes the end of the second lecture with the title Schrift einer Schildkröte oder das Problem der Übersetzung (Scripture of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation 18) and reflects on the basic pattern of every translation. In this context the scene of writing is situated within a larger horizon of cultural history. The first lecture, Stimme eines Vogels oder das Problem der Fremdheit (Voice of a Bird or the Problem of Strangeness), discusses the mimetic faculty in the world of voices, tones, and music. Taking as her starting point accent arising from the rhythm of one’s own language while speaking a foreign language, which Tawada characterizes as the “memory of the body (Leib) of the mother tongue,” she undertakes a passage through familiar motifs from literary texts, fairy tales, and operas of the Germanlanguage canon (such as Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Mozart, Wagner). Along with the leitmotif of the language of birds, she traces moments of imitation, linguistic magic, and secret language in order to discover hidden shamanistic meanings in them. In this way, she sees in the plumage of Mozart’s Pagageno the parody of a shaman and shows “that Wagner’s Siegfried unwittingly repeats a shamanistic tradition: The dragon slayed by Siegfried corresponds to the snake referred to by Eliade.” Here, Tawada is referring to Mircea Eiade’s book Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. 19 As she writes, “By imbibing the blood of the dragon, he acquires the language of birds. However, because he—in contrast, for instance, to the Siberian shamans—does not learn the animal language consciously in connection with a ritual, he lacks respect for the dragon whom he owes this knowledge.” 20 Like many modern heroes, Siegfried’s misfortune begins by forgetting the cultic origins of his actions—a forgetting that Benjamin identified as one of Kafka’s leitmotifs. 21 Contrary to the conventional interpretation of the Ring, which largely moves in the waters of Germanic mythology, Tawada’s shamanistic reading uncovers an entirely different subtext and thereby illuminates the “wild origins” 22 of even Nordic lore. The second lecture on writing and translation contains an autobiographical aside to the scene of writing of the computer writing in Japanese—in, as it were, a reversal of perspective. For it narrates the rehearsal of the pictographic gaze through reading: “For the first twenty-two years of my life, I only read Japanese books.” Although acquiring the cultural technique of reading in Japanese is not only a matter of typography but also of the inner voice. According to ancient anthropology, reading with a silent voice plays an important role in the history of Western thought.

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The reading scene reported upon in Tawada’s lectures is much different: “My gaze paused at every letter, as if they were paintings. As if in a museum, I drag myself from one image to the next. The words forget their meanings in an imagery, they transform into colors and forms.” 23 This pictorially structured mode of perception and knowledge has nothing to do with representation or a reflective reproduction in the sense of a visual image, nor with figures of speech. In order to distinguish unequivocally the role of the pictorial in writing and speech from mimetic representation, Tawada elaborates on hieroglyphs: Whenever I have the need to use words like bird, stone, fish, or tree in a text, these words are not to be taken as symbols or metaphors, but as written characters. A bird in a poem is comparable to an Egyptian hieroglyph that has the form of a bird. The written character has nothing whatsoever to do with a bird. The hieroglyphs are interesting because they make it clear that the imagery of writing does not have to be about a concrete image. 24

If the scene of reading in Japanese preceded the formation of Tawada’s mode of writing in German, the letters function as the main media of the transition from reading to writing, as puzzling images for the gaze trained by ideograms: “Every letter of the alphabet becomes a puzzle. What, for example, does an A want to say to me? The longer I look at a letter, the more puzzling and lively does it become.” 25 Just as Sigmund Freud described the representational mode of dreams as a rebus, or picture puzzle, one could also characterize Yōko Tawada’s literature as dream writing. But then, in a variation of her statement “The one who speaks with a foreign tongue is a bird and an ornithologist in one person,” 26 one would have to add that, in this writing, the dreamer and the interpreter of dreams appear as one. Thus the question often asked of Tawada, which she quotes here, is “In which language do you dream?” proves entirely misguided. At most, one could ask: In which writing do you dream? She would probably answer: in that of a computer that writes in Japanese. In this respect, the migration of Chinese characters into German-language texts are of special interest, as for example the pictograms that are placed in front of the individual sections in the novel Brother-in-Law in Bordeaux (Schwager in Bordeaux). Yumiko Saito has deciphered this pictogram as an abbreviation in which individual elements, the radicals out of which Chinese characters are composed, conceal the building blocks of what is narrated in the text. 27 They remind me of the extravagant chapter headings of Baroque novels that in modernity, however, have transformed into a type of dream-pictograph, giving rise to the subsequent narrative. Against the backdrop of her Tübinger Poetics Lectures, I see in Tawada’s poetics an exophonic continuation of Benjamin’s Lehre vom Ähnlichen

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(Doctrine of the Similar, 1933). In his early essay on language, Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen (On Language as Such and On the Language of Man, 1916), Benjamin transformed the irreconcilable opposition between the existing language theories—the tradition of the mystical theory of language, namely, the assumption of a similarity of the word and what it names, on the one hand, and the modern view of language as a system of arbitrary, conventional signs, on the other hand— into a historical dialectic. With the caesura of the entry into history, a pre-historical, and as it were paradisiacal, language of similarity is superseded and superimposed by a language that functions as a sign system and as a means of judging and communicating about things. In a later, cultural-historical, reformulation and continuation of this theory in the two short essays Über das mimetische Vermögen (On the Mimetic Faculty) and Doctrine of Similarity (both 1933), he concretizes this dialectic. The semiotic function of language in modernity is not only as a medium of communication but also gives rise to mimetic or magical elements, yet only in fleeting or ephemeral ways. This is the result of a cultural history, according to Benjamin, in the course of which magical correspondences and the human faculty of imitation, the former ability to make oneself similar to nature, have disappeared, while the mimetic faculty has wandered into both writing and speech. “In this way, language may be seen as the highest level of mimetic behavior and the most complete archive of nonsensuous similarity: a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point where they have liquidated those of magic.” 28 It is in precisely this archive that Tawada lets not only the liquidated magic of language come to light again; in it, she has also developed her writing as art, by using the threshold between different systems of writing as a scene where the mimetic can appear. “In the native language (Muttersprache) the words are affixed to each person in a way that only rarely lets someone have pleasure in language,” she writes in Von der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter (From the Mother Tongue to the Language Mother). 29 And in Sprachpolizei und Sprachpolyglotte (Language Police and Language Polyglot) we read: “In general, language has to act as if it had long since got rid of the gesture of imitation. The onomatopoetic in language is regarded as primitive.” 30 One can interpret Tawada’s writing as an attempt to do justice to this so-called primitive. In this sense, she is a writer of exophony, of writing the other or otherwise. It is not so much foreignness but alterity and difference that are at the center of her poetics. Her pictographic gaze is likewise directed at the special characters and umlauts of different alphabetical writing systems that fall prey to the transmission channels of globalized digital communication—like the segregated foreign words that Adorno so brilliantly referred to as Words from a Foreign Country or “foreign bodies” within the mother tongue. 31 In Sonderzeichen Europa (Special Character Europe), it is the special characters in

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the proper name of the pen pal László Márton that embody those linguistic features of Eastern European cultures that are polished away by their incorporation into “Western” culture. It is similar to the way that umlauts and ideograms get lost in the transmission channels of electronic mail over the Atlantic and Pacific. As Tawada writes: Can a language flow over an ocean? I sometimes received emails with empty spaces. A friend from Hamburg wrote to me that the German umlauts often fall into the Atlantic on the way to America and disappear. Japanese characters, on the other hand, fall into the Pacific and also do not arrive. The oceans are probably full of umlauts and ideograms. Do whales eat umlauts? 32

Whereas the culturally specific elements of foreign pictographs get lost in the Bermuda Triangle of electronic communication, Tawada’s writing in reverse elicits a persistent plethora, an inexhaustible increase in meaning, at the thresholds and boundaries of different languages and writing systems. In this way, Yōko Tawada’s poetics pursue a threshold knowledge (Schwellenkunde) 33 in the most proper and beautiful sense of the word. NOTES 1. This essay is based on different articles published in German, especially Sigrid Weigel, “‘Europa’ als Schauplatz der Geburt des Schreib-Ichs aus dem Nichts,” in Yōko Tawada. Text und Kritik, no. 191/192, VII/11 (July 2011): 19–29; and Sigrid Weigel, “Suche nach einem E-mail für japanische Geister. Yōko Tawadas Poetik am Übergang differenter Schriftsysteme,” in Yōko Tawada: Fremde Wasser. Vorlesungen und wissenschaftliche Beiträge, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2012), 127–43. 2. Bettina Brandt, “The Bones of Translation. Yōko Tawada’s Translational Poetics,” in Thamyris/ Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race. Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism, ed. Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck (Amsterdam-New York, NY: Rodopi B.V., 2014), 181–194, 181. 3. Yōko Tawada, “Ein E-mail für japanische Geister”, in Rituale heute. Theorien— Kontroversen—Entwürfe, ed. Corina Caduff/Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka (Berlin: Reimer, 1999), 219–225. 4. Yōko Tawada, Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur. Eine ethnologische Poetologie (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke 2000). 5. Walter Benjamin, “Berliner Kindheit um 1900”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1972), 261; engl. translation in: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2002), 374. 6. See Friedrich Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, (München: Fink, 1985). Id.: Grammophon Film Typewriter, (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986). 7. “Der Computer versucht, die im Alphabet geschriebenen Wörter in japanische Schriftzeichen umzuwandeln. Es fällt ihm aber schwer. Immerhin liegen über 8000 Schriftzeichen im Kasten. Es gibt viele Gruppen von Wörtern, die in der alphabetischen Umschrift identisch aussehen, aber im Ideogramm unterschiedlich geschrieben werden müssen. Der Computer könnte nur dann immer das richtige Zeichen aussuchen, wenn er den Text inhaltlich verstehen würde. Er kann eigentlich vieles, er kann auch meine Frage verstehen und sie beantworten, wenn sie nicht zu poetisch ist. Manchmal gibt er mir das Gefühl, daß er mich versteht. Aber dann bin ich immer wieder erneut von ihm enttäuscht. Wie kann er zum Beispiel das Zeichen für ›Nase‹

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(hana) aussuchen, wenn ich ›Blume‹ (hana) schreiben will? Die beiden Wörter sehen im Alphabet identisch aus, werden aber in einem unterschiedlichen Tonfall ausgesprochen und natürlich mit verschiedenen Ideogrammen geschrieben. Der Computer interessiert sich nicht dafür, was ich schreibe, sondern er wählt einfach ein Zeichen aus, das ich beim vorigen Mal ausgewählt habe.” Yōko Tawada, Überseezungen, (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2002), 16. 8. Walter Benjamin, “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I, ed. Ralf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 208. 9. “Das Alphabet ist für mich gegenständlich und befindet sich außerhalb meines Körpers. Daher kommt mir das Schreiben auf Deutsch oft vor wie eine Teezeremonie mit 30 kleinen Gegenständen. Es gibt eine Teedose ›D‹, eine Teeschale ›U‹, einen Kessel ›K‹, eine Feuerzange ›Y‹, einen Löffel ›L‹ usw. Man muß sie nach einer vorbestimmten Reihenfolge in die Hand nehmen. Es ist auch festgelegt, an welcher Stelle eine Pause gemacht werden muß.” Yōko Tawada, “Ein E-mail für japanische Geister”, 220. 10. “Denn die Geister der Toten erzählen oft vom toten Winkel der Vergangenheit, mit der sich die Literatur beschäftigt.” Ibid., 221. 11. Ibid., 220. 12. Ibid., 221. 13. Ich habe Buchstaben erst in Deutschland als Geister entdeckt.”Ibid., 223. 14. Aber die Adverbien sind doch schon längst tot. Auch die Adjektive sind tot. Sie haben keinen Körper mehr. Es ist verboten, das Wort ›groß‹ groß zu schreiben. Man soll auch nicht das Wort ›schief‹ schief schreiben, und das Wort ›rot‹ mit einem roten Stift. Die Wörter dürfen nicht das sein, was sie meinen. Die Wörter müssen Buchstaben bleiben, damit man sie übersehen kann.” Yōko Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Sprachpolyglotte (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2007), 32. 15. Eines Tages entdeckte ich das Wort “ich” mitten in dem Wort ‚Nichts’, also das Nichts ist der Raum, in dem das kleine Wort ‚ich’ wohnt.” Yōko Tawada, “Zukunft ohne Herkunft”, in Zukunft! Zukunft? Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung, ed. J. Wertheimer, (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2000), 72. 16. Yōko Tawada, “Ein E-mail für japanische Geister”, 220. 17. Walter Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II, ed. Ralf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, (Frankurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), 371. 18. Yōko Tawada, Verwandlungen. Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesungen, Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998); translated by Bettina Brandt as “The Script of a Turtle or the Problem of Translation,” in Thamyris/ Intersecting, 173–180. 19. Tawada refers here to Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 20. “Dadurch, daß Siegfried das Blut des Wurms zu sich nimmt, erlernt er die Vogelsprache. Weil er aber—im Unterschied etwa zu den sibirischen Schamanen—die Tiersprache nicht bewusst im Zusammenhang mit einem Ritual lernt, fehlt ihm der Respekt vor dem Wurm, dem er diese Kenntnis verdankt.” Yōko Tawada, Verwandlungen. Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesungen, Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998), 19. 21. Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1977), 409–438. 22. See Walter Burkert, Wilder Ursprung. Opferritual und Mythos bei den Griechen, (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1990). 23. “Mein Blick bleibt bei den einzelnen Buchstaben stehen, als wären sie Gemälde. Wie in einem Museum schleppe ich mich von einem Bild zum nächsten. Die Wörter vergessen ihre Bedeutungen in einer Bildlichkeit, sie verwandeln sich in Farben und Formen.” Yōko Tawada, Verwandlungen, 26. 24. Yōko Tawada, Verwandlungen, 29.

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25. “Dagegen wird jeder Buchstabe des Alphabets ein Rätsel. Was will zum Beispiel ein A mir sagen? Je länger ich einen Buchstaben anblicke, desto rätselhafter und lebendiger wird er.” Ibid. 26. Ibid., 22. 27. Yumiko Saito, Die Sprachbewegung in Übersetzungen am Beispiel von Yōko Tawadas Texten (Dissertation TU Berlin, 2017), 137ff. 28. Walter Benjamin, “Über das mimetische Vermögen”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1977), 213; emph. mine; engl. “On the Mimetic Faculty”, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999), 722. 29. “In der Muttersprache sind die Worte den Menschen angeheftet, so dass man selten spielerische Freude an der Sprache empfinden kann.” In Talisman, 15; translated by Rachel McNichol, “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother,” in Beyond Words, Mānoa, A Pacific Journal of International Writing, 2006, 139–143. 30. “Im Allgemeinen muss die Sprache so tun, als hätte sie schon längst die Geste der Nachahmung abgeschafft. Das Onomatopoetische in der Sprache wird als primitiv angesehen.” Yōko Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte, 31. 31. Theodor W. Adorno: “Wörter aus der Fremde”, in Noten zur Literatur, ed. Ralf Tiedemann (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981). 32. “Kann eine Sprache einen Ozean überfliegen? Ich bekam manchmal E-Mails mit Leerstellen. Eine Freundin aus Hamburg schrieb mir, dass die deutschen Umlaute auf dem Weg nach Amerika oft in den Atlantik fallen und darin verschwinden. Japanische Schriftzeichen hingegen fallen in den Pazifik und kommen auch nicht an. Die Ozeane sind wahrscheinlich schon mit Umlauten und Ideogrammen überfüllt. Ob Walfische Umlaute fressen?” Yōko Tawada, “Zukunft ohne Herkunft”, in Jürgen Wertheimer (Hg.): Zukunft! Zukunft? Tübinger Poetik Vorlesung (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke 2000, 55–72, 63. 33. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Ralf Tiedemann (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1982), 147.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. “Wörter aus der Fremde,” in Noten zur Literatur, ed. Ralf Tiedemann. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981. Brandt, Bettina. “The Bones of Translation. Yōko Tawada’s Translational Poetics,” in Thamyris/ Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race. Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism, ed. Liesbeth Minnaard/Till Dembeck, Amsterdam-New York, NY: Rodopi B.V., 2014. Benjamin, Walter. “Berliner Kindheit um 1900”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. IV, ed. Tillman Rexroth, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1972. ———. “Franz Kafka. Zur zehnten Wiederkehr seines Todestages,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp 1977. ———. “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. II, ed. Ralf Tiedemann/ Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1977. ———. “Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels”, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I, ed. Ralf Tiedemann/ Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974. Kittler, Friedrich, Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, München: Fink, 1985. Saito, Yumiko. Die Sprachbewegung in Übersetzungen am Beispiel von Yōko Tawadas Texten (Dissertation TU Berlin, 2017) Tawada, Yōko. “Ein E-mail für japanische Geister”, in Rituale heute. Theorien—Kontroversen—Entwürfe, ed. Corina Caduff/Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka. Berlin: Reimer, 1999. ———. Spielzeug und Sprachmagie in der europäischen Literatur. Eine ethnologische Poetologie. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke 2000. ———. Sprachpolizei und Sprachpolyglotte (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag Claudia Gehrke, 2007). ———. Überseezungen, Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2002.

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———. Verwandlungen. Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesungen, Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998. Weigel, Sigrid “‚Europa’ als Schauplatz der Geburt des Schreib-Ichs aus dem Nichts,” in Yōko Tawada. Text und Kritik, no. 191/192, VII/11 (July 2011). Weigel, Sigrid “Suche nach einem E-mail für japanische Geister. Yōko Tawadas Poetik am Übergang differenter Schriftsysteme,” in Yōko Tawada: Fremde Wasser. Vorlesungen und wissenschaftliche Beiträge, ed. Ortrud Gutjahr. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2012.

FIVE Translationalism as Poetic Principle Tawada’s Translational Rewriting of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis Christine Ivanovic

TRANSLATIONALISM AS A CHALLENGE IN TAWADA SCHOLARSHIP Ever since Miho Matsunaga’s first elaborations on Tawada’s poetics of translation, 1 translation has been considered the unequivocal basis of all of Tawada’s writing, and is now still one of the leading categories of scholarship on her work. 2 There remain few people, however, who could claim to possess a complete overview of the entire spectrum of translationality in Tawada’s works and its importance for her poetics; such a comprehensive description remains to be written. The task is a difficult one, in large part because extant scholarship on Tawada is largely rooted within either Japanese or German studies and, for the most part, only deals with that part of her works that is accessible to the respective discipline. Research into the translational practices in Tawada’s works has been spearheaded in recent years by, among others, Yumiko Saito, who has excellent knowledge of the author’s complete works and also possesses the necessary language skills. 3 However, her recent dissertation under the supervision of Sigrid Weigel 4 was written in German—which, much like Tawada’s own works, limits its reception within the international community. The discourse on Tawada’s poetics of translation is therefore based on a number of different basic assumptions regarding accessibility of both the primary and secondary sources. For a compre61

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hensive view, however, it would be essential to unite the observations and conclusions derived from both disciplines (Japanese and German studies) as well as both parts of Tawada’s works (in German and in Japanese). English now assumes a critical role as an interdisciplinary, as well as transnational, interface that can allow for the necessary exchange of scholarly knowledge and literary sources. Another side effect of this development is Tawada’s own increased presence in English (albeit mostly in translation, translationalism as a form of explicit reflection on the conditions and practices of exchange and although also in performance) which has contributed to an increased international readership. Transmission, and the gradual transition between the expressions and values of different languages and cultures, is thus not limited to the texts themselves, but increasingly important for the reception of Tawada’s works as a whole, and, we might say, of Tawada herself. There are at least seven different types of translationalism that can be distinguished in Tawada’s texts: • Secondary Original Texts: texts Tawada has written herself but which were first published in someone else’s translation (e.g., Das Bad 1989) • Partner Texts: texts Tawada has written in both languages, but with distinct differences between the two versions (e.g., “Gottoharuto testudo” 1996a; “Im Bauch des Gotthard” 1996b) • Parallel Texts: texts Tawada has written in one language, which she has then translated into another, from an existing/already published version (e.g., Opium für Ovid 2000/ Henshin no tame no opiumu 2001; Schwager in Bordeaux 2008/Borudō no gikei 2009; Yuki no renshūsei 2011a/ Etüden im Schnee 2014) • Simultaneous Texts: texts Tawada has written in two languages simultaneously, and using both languages within the same text (e.g., Tabi wo suru hadakano me, Tawada 2004a / Das nackte Auge, Tawada 2004b) • Translational Texts: texts that refer to translation in their form or content, or that deal directly with the translation of foreign texts (e.g., Arufabetto no kizuguchi 1993) 5 • Rewriting: texts by other authors that Tawada has adapted (e.g., “Der Faltenmann vom Sumida-Fluß” 1994/ “Sumidagawa no shiwaotoko” 1996a; Kafka kaikoku 2013) • Translations: texts by other authors that Tawada translated (e.g., Kafuka 2015a) Tawada scholarship still does not consider her early texts published in German (which I call “secondary original texts”) translations, or only marginally treats them as such. Furthermore, Tawada has been largely disregarded as a translator so far; her publications of texts by other authors have not yet received full documentation and analysis. What has

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been a focus, however, is the question of how much of a role translation plays in the texts she has written in both German and Japanese. The prime example of this being Matsunaga’s research on what she has called “partner texts.” 6 Based on that, there seems to be an accepted view that the poetics of Tawada’s texts originates in a specific poetics of translation (translational poetics)—a thesis that has become almost stereotypical for Tawada at this point and must be carefully differentiated. Bettina Brandt has recently sketched Tawada’s “translation-related experimental writing techniques.” 7 In order to get an overview of this field, it seems prudent to (1) distinguish between translation within Tawada’s works and her translation of other authors; as well as (2) examine how Tawada’s poetics of translation has changed during her development as an author across three decades of writing. “Secondary original texts” and “partner texts,” for example, are found almost exclusively in her early works; the author seems to be continuously developing translational techniques as well as experimenting with multilingual writing. Finally, it should also be recognized that (3) translation is by no means limited to the transfer between separate language systems. Translation not only affects bodies, more often it seems to be a rather bodily experience itself. It is not without reason that Tawada’s texts frequently feature a clash of languages and bodies in ways that hardly allows for them to be described as distinctive entities. Consequently, translation for Tawada is not just about transfer or transformation of what has already been said in other words. Translationality acutely affects the speakers themselves, whose somatic condition undergoes transformation in the process of translating/being translated—and with it the base conditions of their existence and identity as well. The paradigmatic text dedicated to this process of transformation is Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Kafka was among Tawada’s earliest personal reading experiences and is one of the authors she references time and again. 8 She is fascinated by Kafka’s global presence and the excitement with which his texts are received in so many parts of the world. She has written, for example, that they could “become key for a new World Literature.” 9 Tawada has also translated several Kafka texts into Japanese. 10 Quite a few of Tawada’s own texts are testament to her productive engagement with the German language writer from Prague. 11 An elaborate example of a literary adaption of Kafka’s Metamorphosis is to be found in her play Kafka kaikoku. 12 Here she translates the story not into another language but into another cultural space, as well as into the performative genre. In the same way, Tawada uses Kafka’s text as the basis for a reconsideration of “kaikoku,” i.e., the opening of Japan to the West at the end of the nineteenth century; the result is both a strange and somewhat winking way to comment on what we are used to calling “modernization.” In what follows I want to argue why it is insufficient to describe her play as “more than simple rewriting;” rather, it is an exemplary piece of contemporary translational literature. Before delving deeper into Tawada’s

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translation of Kafka, however, I will first take a short look at a lesserknown poetological text of the same period in which many of the important positions of her translational poetics are processed. FALSE FRIENDS, CO-SPEAKING, AND LINGUAL IMPURITY REQUIREMENTS In the summer of 2015, the Erlangen Literature Prize for Poetics as Translation was awarded to Uljana Wolf. Tawada, who had received the same award two years prior, delivered the award address (included in this collection as chapter 9). 13 Wolf was born in East Berlin in 1979, around the time that Tawada herself first came to Europe. Wolf is usually labeled as someone who crosses the border between East and West, navigating between the Polish and German languages. She grew up during the time of border openings, during a new spirit of free exchange across previously iron borders. Having studied German in Berlin and Krakow, Wolf translates from Polish to German. But more importantly, she brings both languages together in her texts, such as in her first volume of poetry Kochanie ich habe Brot gekauft [Kochanie I bought bread] (2005), for which she was the youngest ever recipient of the renowned German Peter Huchel Prize for Poetry one year later. The titular “Kochanie” is a Polish term of endearment, similar perhaps to the English “honey” or “baby”; the German equivalent “Schatz” relates to “treasure” and enables a pun (Wortschatz/Schatz-Wort). The volume is a love letter to both of the author’s languages, represented in the “bread” that sustains her. Further volumes by Uljana Wolf were entitled falsche freunde [false friends] (2009) and Meine schönste Lengevitch [My most beautiful Lengevitch] (2013). Wolf is now married to the American poet Christian Hawkey and lives partly in Berlin and partly in New York City, where she also teaches German and creative writing at New York University. This trans-Atlantic lifestyle may be the source of her different perspective; it seems to afford an intrusion of English into her texts, it is also the source of her increased interest in translation, often in cooperation with Christian Hawkey. In her award address, Tawada not only praised Wolf’s poetic strategies but also reformulated her own understanding of translation. The speech can thus be read as a concise depiction of her current thoughts on the possibility of writing as translation, as it is represented in the texts of both authors in similar yet distinctly different ways. Taking Wolf’s translingual poems as a starting point, Tawada argues with hitherto unseen radicalism in favor of the acceptance of similarity, rather than for a clear cut between languages and all the ensuing normative consequences. She explicitly formulates a plea in favor of mimetic ability and letteral affinities. In her address, Tawada thus delivered an outline of poetry as translation that goes far beyond a common-sensical poetics of translation.

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Rather, she extends her position to a plea for a new kind of “homopoetics,” as I would like to call it, in order to include a questioning of differences between nations, ethnicities, genders, and even human and nonhuman animals. Let me shortly point out just three of her key concepts related to Wolf’s writing as well as to Tawada’s understanding of “Poetics as Translation.” False friends In her address Yōko Tawada systematically employs opposites as she attempts to turn established perceptions on their heads, such as when she talks of similarities that are being “collectively suppressed” (as opposed to the more common concept of collective memory). During translation there is an implicit assumption that for any word or expression in the source language, one must find a similar expression in the target language. By implication, however, this presupposes dissimilarities between the two languages. It follows that any similarity occasionally found in the outward appearance of words in two difference languages—be they similar in terms of sound or visual appearance—must be ignored so as not to misrepresent the signified meaning. Such similarities can be deceptive in their respective meanings, as Tawada shows with examples such as the English “brief” and the German “Brief” [letter], or the German “Bad” [bath] and the English “bad [girl],” 14 or the surprising resonance between the words “eagle” and “Igel” [hedgehog] in a poem from Wolf’s second volume. 15 Such similarities between words that sound the same but have different semantic usage in two languages are often referred to as “false friends” in linguistics. These words must not “recognize each other” like Adam and Eve, but despite their similar appearance must be kept separate. Failing to do so runs the risk of “making embarrassing mistakes.” 16 Tawada plays with the common linguistic term of “false friends” in order to point out how poetic language is suitable (or prone) to taking “confusions” as a “chance to make new friends.” Uljana Wolf consciously demonstrates in many of her texts how these “illicit” similarities allow words to become poetically productive, such as in the title of her book falsche freunde (2009). In taking the linguistic metaphor literally in her award address, Tawada also adds an erotic undertone. Translation is the linguistic and bodily climax of the mimetic faculty for creating similarity. By recurring and retracing the rhythms and gestures in her own (language) body, the physicality of language/tongue is expanded through the experience of a bodily-spatial exploration and measurement of language(s). At this point of her address Tawada additionally introduces (or at least imagines) the problem of emigration or exile and the forced linguistic shifts that come with such an existential extreme. The paradigmatic image she employs for such a state is Ellis Island. Tawada anticipates it as a modern zone of transition, allowing us to cross from one space or one language

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respectively to another. This “threshold of translation” is not marked by Tawada as a discrete moment in which some sort of border is definitely crossed, but rather described as a climactic language movement that is to be experienced as a (precarious) state of language on the very threshold itself for as long as possible. It is an act as uncanny as the sexual act itself, “an almost threatening intimacy without any kind of security,” a transitory moment in which the entire bodily-linguistic existence is at risk. From false friends, Tawada moves on to a discussion of fatherland and mother tongue—two terms of particular interest to the theoretical discussions of translation in Germany around 1800. Like Hölderlin before him, Friedrich Schleiermacher speaks of translation in the context of a poetry of the “fatherland” and the “foreign land”—two terms twisted by Uljana Wolf in a 2014 speech into a productive misunderstanding of “falseland”: [ . . . ] Because my writing, my lengevitch, explores that which Schleiermacher in his otherwise wonderful treatise “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens” calls a Doppeltgehen (double walk)—that is, writing in a language other than the language of the fatherland. As it happens, I do write in German, but despite my degree in German studies it is not fatherlandish writing, but rather falselandish writing. It is a German coughed upon by other languages, by every distance, every mistake, that likes to fall over, fall apart, auseinander, always apart. It is a translator’s German, a multilingual, perhaps like what the Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant might have had in mind when he wrote: “Multilingualism is not a parallel existence or knowledge of several languages, but the presence of all the world’s languages in the practice of your own.” It is an Own that is more haunting than homely, a practice of opening oneself to the other [ . . . ] 17

In her very poignant reference to Glissant, Wolf once again points out just how strongly the origin of any poetic language is connected to translation and thus to the ability of “opening oneself to the other”—a sine qua non for both the erotic encounter and for cultural exchange, either of which are absolute necessities for the continued existence of humankind and its cultures. The adoption of false friends as productive moments of the poetic is favored by both Tawada and Wolf. In a way, the practice is quite in line with Hölderlin’s as well as with Schleiermacher’s line of argument that a true poetry of the “fatherland” can only come into being by transitioning through writings of a “foreign land.” Wolf’s mocking call for a “falselandish” writing can be read as an amalgamation of both approaches. The agents mediating these processes, meanwhile, are, interestingly enough, all gendered as male in the German original—false friends, false brothers, fatherland (rather than mother tongue), and, of course, every author quoted by Wolf. Wolf’s final confession quoted by Tawada, however, ultimately crosses out all such gendered connotations when she turns

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towards neither the mother tongue nor the fatherland and instead settles on her own amalgam of the “falseland”—a programmatic turn towards writing a homopoetics in line with what Tawada has conceptualized before. Co-speaking In her award address Tawada makes a plea for a “naïve” stance on words, stressing once again the transitions between language and the body. She imagines language as an object that can be literally apprehended or even consumed by the body: “A small child never considers any language unapproachable. She takes every word in her hand, looks at it, turns it around, takes it apart and eats it. A child will incessantly work with a language.” 18 Working with a language, of course, is the genuine task posed to poets and translators alike, who not only produce language but also must first aesthetically perceive it with their senses before they can participate in speaking. Tawada puts a special emphasis on the sound profile of a language: Even if you are unfamiliar with the Polish world “Kochanie,” you can immediately understand the title of the book “kochanie ich habe brot gekauft,” because the English word “honey” echoes in the sound of “kochanie.” “Honey ich habe brot gekauft.” There is a co-author and a co-translator. There should be co-lover or co-beloved, and therefore “co-honey.” 19

By hearing the word “honey” echo in “Kochanie,” the addressee, a “colover or co-beloved,” finds her own voice, and brings it to bear: as “coauthor and co-translator.” Wolf’s poems speak to her primarily through rhythm and rhyme, through the way that speaking is experienced by the body itself: instead of sentimental feelings, she is gripped by “lustfully varied rhythms”; instead of congealing into ultimate words of beginning, all speaking is dissolved in the steps of a dance, as Uljana Wolf puts it: “In the beginning was, or at the start, what kind of sound, or silence: listen when they begin the beguine [ . . . ]” 20 Tawada comments: The word “begin” becomes the dance “beguine,” and indeed the feet of the poem start showing new dance steps. I don’t know if in the beginning there was a word and if so, which. But how about if you started with the translation? Because it is multilingualism that already defines our present. Some still see it as God’s punishment, but in the process of radical translation any one of the many languages can become my most beautiful “lengevitch.” 21

Lingual impurity requirements Tawada’s strategy of reading established patterns of thought and language against the grain widely dominates her speech on Wolf. With this

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aim, she also breaks up ideologemes such as the “law of purity” of national languages (i.e., the ideal of monolingualism): “Impurity is the mirror image of cleansing national languages or of apartheid in the brain.” 22 Here, too, we hear an unmistakably sexual subtext. “Impurity” is a term only too often employed in racist or homophobic arguments against (sexual) unions of people not in line with established norms. The parallelism of bodily and language movements now becomes programmatic for a sovereign act of writing that does not understand translation as sealing a movement from one language to another, but that is itself an open process of a transition to poetry—and thus its substantial basis: I imagine a radical translation that knows no way other than transitioning towards poetry. There, not all the words of the original text have to be replaced by words of the target language. There, you do not have to serve a readership, but must present the process of translation as an artistic act. There, you do not have to make compromises to find an answer, but leave every open point open. 23

This radical translation is made manifest in that phase of transition she described in her imagery of Ellis Island. It congeals not into a replacement, but into a perforating act that “leaves every open point open.” At this point in time Tawada had already made her demand a reality. On the occasion of the centennial of its first publication, Tawada composed a new Japanese translation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis–a fact which remained unrecognized by her German audience. Kafka’s famous story is of course well known in Japan, having already been translated into Japanese over twenty times. Tawada herself had already dealt with it in her Tübingen poetics lectures. 24 The story is a very fitting example to illustrate the interconnectedness of bodily and linguistic metamorphoses. The very starting point of her translation is the concept of impurity accompanying Samsa’s metamorphosis. Four years earlier, in an interview related to the first staging of her play Kafka kaikoku, Tawada mentions that she “had always been impressed by the German word for vermin, ‘Ungeziefer’,” and that one day she “looked up the word ‘Ungeziefer’ in Kluge’s etymological dictionary and learned that it originally meant ‘an impure animal,’ probably ‘an animal unfit for sacrifice.’” 25 For her translation, she invents a word previously unknown in Japanese: ウンゲツィーファー [ungetsiifaa], thus literally transforming the German word “Ungeziefer” into a phonetic and visual monster. 26 Both its meaning and its form clash with established laws of purity for the language into which it is translated (or transformed). Yumiko Saito provides a meticulous analysis of some of the decisions Tawada made in her translation. Of relevance here is that, in Japan, insects that undergo metamorphosis are of great cultural-historical interest. 27 That is probably why they are not referred to with the usual term for “animal,” 動物 [dōbutsu] in Japanese—though Tawada does use the term in her translation until she generates the previously

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unknown combination “虫獣.” The first of the two Chinese characters used here means “insect,” while the second denotes any “four-legged, hairy mammal.” Gregor’s metamorphosed form is thus made visible as a process of alienation, a gradual transition to something both insect and mammal. Saito furthermore demonstrates that the word Tawada uses for “metamorphosis”—変身 [henshin], meaning an outward transformation—is assigned an alternative reading by Tawada through the use of furigana. This presents us with a different reading for the same characters that alludes to a similar word in old Japanese, 変わり身 [kawarimono]— now carrying the meaning of “quickly shifting body positions in sumo wrestling,” or “changing one’s opinion and behavior based on the situation or opportunity.” This reading suggests that Gregor was not transformed by some superhuman power, but that it was he himself who caused the metamorphosis, if only subconsciously. 28 Just as Gregor finds himself transformed into an incommensurably impure being but with his mind intact, the Japanese language is also monstrously transformed in the act of translating Kafka’s text. Tawada’s reading of vermin as being unfit for sacrifice, however, is understood by her in a positive sense (and quite in accordance with the developments in Kafka’s story). The metamorphosis interrupts the very mechanism that had previously coerced Gregor into sacrificing himself for his family—it sets Gregor free. In that sense—and following Tawada’s arguments in her speech on Uljana Wolf—it is the very “impurity” of a language that can liberate it from acts of appropriation by whatever claims of power and authority. TRANSLATIONALISM IN KAFKA KAIKOKU Kafka kaikoku premiered in Berlin in 2011; it was first published in Tawada’s 2013 anthology of plays titled Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort [My Little Toe Was a Word]. Tawada’s writing for the stage has been largely neglected by academics. This play, however, recently drew attention and was thoroughly investigated by scholars from three continents. 29 All of them focus extensively on her questioning of modernity and temporality (Roberts; Rotaru) as well as on her techniques of hybridization (Hermann). Illuminating as they are, all three approaches lack a perspective on the translational base of Tawada’s adaptation. The piece well documents Tawada’s attempt to paradigmatically unfold the cultural-critical potential of translational writing as she brings together “kaikoku” with one of the key texts of modern world literature, Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Already in the title Kafka kaikoku, we are confronted with Tawada’s credo of “leaving each open point open.” Just as in Wolf’s book Kochanie ich habe Brot gekauft, the “co-speaking” of words from different languages that are left untranslated allows Tawada to expand linguistic and perceptional space. The title of Tawada’s play—the play itself is written mostly

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in German—contains two elements that stand together: the name of the author (i.e., Kafka) and, transcribed from the Latin alphabet, the Japanese term “kaikoku” (開国). A German reader has access to its transcribed reading but not to its meaning, which literally translates as “opening of the country.” The term kaikoku is generally used to denote the enforced “opening” of Japan by Western powers during the late TokugawaKaikoku period (second half of the nineteenth century), which ultimately led to the fundamental transformation of Japanese society that marks a “transition from a relatively ‘closed form of society’ to a relatively ‘open form of society’.” The opening of Japan is considered an accelerated form of modernization. The meaning associated with kaikoku runs counter to the closed understanding that any reader would see themselves confronted with if they do not speak Japanese. Similarly, the grammatically seemingly unconnected but acoustically pleasing Kafka kaikoku is difficult to place in a concrete language at first glance—what language will the text be written in? Czech? Japanese? The sequence does not fit either the Japanese or any other grammar. The title of 海辺のカフカ , Umibe no Kafuka (2002), the famous book by Murakami Haruki, comes to mind. But it seems likewise difficult to locate Tawada’s play within the context of Japanese or German contemporary literature. It must also be noted that the word “kafka” is not part of the German language either. Its original meaning, “jackdaw,” is usually never translated but has become dear to Kafka readers across the globe. Ultimately, the title Kafka kaikoku cannot be translated at all—whatever meaning would there be in “jackdaw [country] opening”? The juxtaposition of two untranslatable terms from two different languages, however, is precisely how Tawada employs the potential of Kafka’s texts in her critical re-enactment of a forced “opening” and the resulting fundamental transformation—or perforation—of Japan. She utilizes “kaikoku” as a means of performing the very metamorphosis for which the name Kafka has become synonymous. One might read Tawada’s play like a German translation of a text in which Kafka’s The Metamorphosis is being translated into Japanese. The play thus recalls those “secondary original texts” that were part of Tawada’s first publications in German. In these early Tawada texts, the typical female Japanese protagonist is transferred/translated into a German environment. In Kafka kaikoku, the protagonist is the historical Japanese author and Kafka contemporary, Izumi [Kyōka] (1873–1939). The play starts with the narrator Izumi translating the first sentence of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis into a different cultural space: “When I awoke one morning from unruly dreams, I found myself, in my bed, transformed into a European.” 30 Kafka’s original text marks a twofold transformation here: the narrator becomes aware of his own self in the form of an impure animal (“Ungeziefer”—ウンゲツィーファー), and the form of the animal is extended into the monstrous (“a monstrous vermin”). Tawada, meanwhile, fuses both realizations into one alternative term: “a European.” For a

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Japanese from the Edo Period, of course, this is quite a telling description: the accusation of impurity as an act of refusal of the cultural other, and the monstrous appearance of human beings who were taller and bigger than the average, and whose bodily characteristics were often derogatorily likened to those of animals (e.g., “eyes like a beast”). Izumi therefore finds himself translated not just into the shape of a different space, but also into a different time (i.e., the premodern). It is only against this background that the abject horror inherent in Izumi’s realization can be truly fathomed. Kafka scholarship suggests that Kafka’s text is based in the literal use of a verbal insult. In contrast to Tawada’s fundamentally positive premise (“Words that we know, and that know us, are priceless treasures.” 31) the words “vermin” and “European” both articulate a destructive estimation. To find oneself represented in these words is the basis for a metamorphosis that, ultimately, culminates in the death of the protagonist. In her adaptation, Tawada shifts the regression from human to non-human animal that Kafka saw as representative of a conflict between generations and cultures to the horrors of a different metamorphosis: the forced transformation of the Japanese into Europeans in the process of transitioning to modernity. Unlike Kafka’s protagonist, however, Izumi’s metamorphosis does not end with his destruction. The performative action of Kafka kaikoku turns translation into poetry. As she articulated in her speech on Uljana Wolf, Tawada presents the concept as a process. The play roughly follows the main story line of Kafka’s text, which is repeatedly quoted or retold, or displayed as a reenactment in which Izumi experiences the plot through the metamorphosis of his own body. This follows the model of Tawada’s Arufabetto no kizuguchi (1993) 32 in which the translator finds herself affected by the translated events in a very real, bodily sense (while the translation, once finished, eventually gets lost). Izumi, however, actively resists this literal act of translation. As soon as he realizes his frightening transformation into a European, he fiercely demands that his Japanese environment be reinstated. 33 Already at the end of the first section, he undergoes a second metamorphosis, this time transforming into a rat. Unlike the negative image of the rat within Europe, where it is also considered a kind of “vermin,” the rat is classified here as a “smart, modest, industrious mammal.” This is in line with the characteristics ascribed to the rat in the Chinese zodiac, which was introduced to Japan from China around the middle of the sixth century CE. In both Chinese astrology and Tawada’s play, the rat is associated with the element of water; and the year 1912, in which Kafka’s original text was written, was a Year of the Rat. At the same time, the characteristics in question are precisely those put forward as a positive self-description by those Japanese of the Kaikoku Period that opposed Europeanization. 34 Izumi retains his intelligence and his emotional faculties in his new form, similar to how Gregor Samsa experienced his metamorphosis into a “vermin.” Kafka’s protagonist, however,

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finds that his negatively connoted animal shape robs him of all basis for a human existence, i.e., his function and reputation as a useful member of the social structure, and thus he is ultimately given over to annihilation. Izumi experiences literal, bodily, but also linguistic, pity for the plight of vermin-Gregor. 35 Stage directions during the recitation of the respective passage from Kafka’s text instruct the actor to speak with a voice that is “fractured, as though the sentences had broken bones.” 36 In a similar vein, the “country doctor,” a well-known character from another famous story by Kafka that finds himself in Japan, diagnoses a “linguistic illness”: “The parts, yes, the sentence parts are not joining your body parts,” 37 which once again alludes to the unnaturally accelerated modernization of Japan. Izumi’s third metamorphosis is ultimately a result of the interventions of that “country doctor,” who by means of a pill reverts Izumi’s body to the shape of a figure from his “own” culture: despite reservations, Izumi transforms “into a female puppet from Bunraku theater”; this therapeutic measure is intended to “help him bear” modernity more easily. 38 Izumi himself had previously identified the puppet as a relic “from the olden days”; Bunraku theater originated in Osaka during the seventeenth century and features three “invisible” and silent actors manipulating a puppet the size of a small human. Izumi’s transformation into a manipulatable marionette is a thinly veiled ironic reflection by Tawada on the perception of Japan from a Western perspective, which can see the Japanese people purely through regression to its own cultural relics. Similarly, the metamorphosis into a specifically female figure reproduces patterns of a cultural-hegemonic gaze directed at a foreign culture whose representatives can only be perceived as (subordinate) females. Izumi’s role and identity become more and more fluid as the play progresses. At times he is a “creature” losing itself in a dance together with a transformed Gregor; 39 at other times he takes over the duties of his sister. 40 Later, he functions as the narrator of Gregor’s story and, ultimately, he appears as the train conductor when the parents move out to the countryside. 41 These fluid moments correspond to the recurring imagery of ukiyo-e depiction of the Edo Period, and the associated stereotype of the “floating world” that colored much of Western perspective on Japan after the country’s opening. Tawada uses these images to emphasize the non-identity of a picture from which figures can escape at will, or which is presented to them as an empty mirror. Ultimately, this is true for Izumi himself as well. Though Kafka’s original story is ultimately narrated to its completion in the play—as well as partly re-enacted—Izumi gradually separates himself from it. His threefold metamorphosis allows him to transform from a mere object of change to an actively-participating observer capable of extricating himself from the problems of guilt and victimization inherent in Kafka’s story. This is facilitated by the fact that Kafka kaikoku not only features passages from Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (2014) but also sees the appearance of protagonists from other Kafka

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stories (e.g., “A Country Doctor”) as well as from stories by the historical Izumi Kyoka (such as 夜叉ヶ池 Yasha-ga-Ike [Demon Pond], 2001). Izumi participates in the actions surrounding Gregor Samsa and relates to them but does not offer judgment. He enters into a dialog with the other protagonists and asks disturbing questions that are never answered (“bloody young”—“Blood?” 42). It is this consistency and independence from his outward appearance that distinguishes Izumi from the character “Schein” (the German word for appearance, as well as for illusiveness, or pseudo-, among other meanings like shine or banknote). “Schein” thus becomes the ultimate incarnation of a typical “false friend”: the function of the lodgers in Kafka’s story is transferred to an office employee in Tawada’s “translation”—shain in Japanese. 43 In the middle of the play there is an exchange between Izumi and Kafka/Gregor in which authorship and translation are put into focus once more. This passage also features the concepts of father or mother as they relate to one’s own origin and the origin of one’s works; both are ultimately turned toward the absurd. 44 The Japanese and the German language are also put forward in two places, existing in parallel without ever experiencing translation. One of these two passages features a water snake—Izumi’s “mother” (but really a character from his short story Yasha-ga-ike)—pleading for a recognition of closeness and dissimilarity, 45 while the other is an exchange between Gregor and Izumi about their newfound language abilities and their sensual-senseless use of sibilant sounds in words like “zweisprachig” (bilingual) and “zweckfrei” (purposeless). 46 The twice-translated figure Gregor/Izumi resembles previous characters like Till in Tawada’s eponymous radio-play, 47 or the mix of historical and contemporary German, Japanese, Korean, and French characters in her play Pulverschrift Berlin. 48 Kafka kaikoku is Tawada’s stage on which she allows a grotesque-comical actor to work through a translation of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” in the context of the Japanese Kaikoku Period in which the country was forcefully transformed into following European patterns of thought and behavior. Her translational mode of writing unmasks the violence inherent in transformations/translations, but at the same time refutes the notions of guilt and victimization inherent in the European narrative pattern. The thorough dialog with Kafka’s text and Gregor’s fate ultimately leaves us with astonishment, revealed in Izumi’s final question. Though written (mostly) in German, Tawada’s play is much more than a mere rewriting of one of the most prominent texts of world literature. It performs translationalism on many levels, while Tawada develops the translational form into a possibility for reflection. The act of translation thus preserves the state of a process (as outlined in the Wolf speech) and does not become subject to encrusted patterns of dedicated critique as is common within European discourse— thus avoiding the ideologies inherent in it, as well as the corresponding patterns of domination and occupation. Tawada succeeds because she

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does not take the text as an object that is violently appropriated in the process of translation, but instead returns the transformative potential of translation to the very agents of the process. We thus recognize hints of such a model in Kafka’s original story itself, where linguistic expression and bodily transformation are conflated. Tawada’s practice of reading poems by Celan “in Japanese” 49 comes to mind, with which she also extracted new dimensions and understandings from the originals. It is this way of transformative reading and translational writing that allows Tawada to expose a cultural-critical potential within Kafka’s text. Translational literature as it is increasingly being created by Tawada—but also by authors of a younger generation such as Uljana Wolf— subverts the hierarchies of national languages and cultures. Instead of focusing on the translation as subsequent to the original, they emphasize the simultaneity of languages and cultures as stimulating adventures, as a coexistence of dissimilarities that is to be embraced. Translational writing, with its tendency to recognize similarities and false friends alike, and its practice of co-speaking, aims at a rehabilitation of the bodily-sensual dimension of language and speech in terms of a “homopoetics” in which original and translator, and speaker and author, “recognize” one another. The critical potential inherent in translational writing is never abandoned, however, and it categorically refuses to submit to the hegemonic demands of monolingual thought, and the temptations of national appropriation of languages, texts, and cultures. NOTES 1. Miho Matsunaga. “Schreiben als Übersetzung. Die Dimension der Übersetzung in Werken von Yōko Tawada” (Zeitschrift für Germanistik 2002, 12 (3): 532–546). 2. Christina Kraenzle. “Traveling Without Moving. Physical and Linguistic Mobility in Yōko Tawada’s »Überseezungen«“ (In Yōko Tawada. Voices from Everywhere, edited by Doug Slaymaker, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007, 91–110); Karl Esselborn. “‘Übersetzungen aus der Sprache, die es nicht gibt’. Interkulturalität, Globalisierung und Postmoderne in den Texten Yōko Tawadas.” (Arcadia 2007, 42 (2): 240–262); Susan C. Anderson. “Surface Translations: Meaning and Difference in Yōko Tawada’s German Prose.” (Seminar. A Journal of Germanic Studies 2010, 46 (1): 50–70); Julia Genz. “Yōko Tawadas Poetik des Übersetzens am Beispiel von ‘Überseezungen’” (Études Germaniques 2010, 259 (3): 465–482); Monika Schmitz-Emans. “Sprache als Fremdkörper: Yōko Tawadas Poetik der Übersetzung.” (In Migration, exil et traduction, edited by Bernard Banoun, Michaela Enderle-Ristori, Sylvie Le Moël. Tours: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2011, 383–407). Genz/Adachi-Rabe 2014; Blioumi 2014; Tobias 2015, and others. 3. Yumiko Saito. “Une tentative de double traduction. Une analyse du ‘Beau-frère à Bordeaux’ de Yōko Tawada.” (Études Germaniques 2010 65 (3 [259]): 525–534); “Zur Genese der japanischen Textphasen von ‚Das nackte Auge’.” (In Yōko Tawada. Poetik der Transformation. Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk. Mit dem Stück Sancho Pansa von Yōko Tawada, edited by Christine Ivanovic. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010, 285–296.); 齋藤由美 子「重訳の試み―多和田葉子の作品『ボルドーの義兄』分析」『れにくさ』東京大学大学院人 文研究科現代文芸論研究室, 2010, 2号: 162–180; 齋藤由美子「多和田葉子の自作翻訳『変 身のためのオピウム』における彼女」『ヴェルボンド』東京大学文学部現代文芸論沼野研究

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室, 2011 第1号: 160-169; “‘Honjakugo’ in der japanischen Übersetzung von Opium für Ovid”. (In Die Lücke im Sinn. Verstehen, Übersetzen, Vermitteln exophoner Literatur am Beispiel Yōko Tawadas, edited by Barbara Agnese, Christine Ivanovic, Sandra Vlasta. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2014, 165–180); “Die Zerstörung der Syntax in ‘Arufabetto no kizuguchi.’ (In Am Scheideweg der Sprachen: die poetischen Migrationen von Yōko Tawada, edited by Amelia Valtolina, Michael Braun. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2016, 183–214); 齋 藤由美子「多和田葉子の新訳「」分析」『れにくさ』東京大学大学院人文研究科現代文芸論 研究室, 2017, 7号: 56–78; “Between German and Japanese Versions of Yōko Tawada’s Early Works: A Comparative Study”. (In World Literature and Japanese Literature in the Era of Globalization. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo. The Department of Contemporary Literary Studies, 2018, 59–64). 4. Yumiko Saito: Die Sprachbewegung in Übersetzungen am Beispiel von Yōko Tawadas Texten. Diss. Berlin [unpublished]. 5. See also Christine Ivanovic, Barbara Seidl. “What is translational literature and how to classify it? Crowd-sourcing as a starting point for corpus building and type distinction in comparative literature.” (Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality TEEM 16. Salamanca, Spain — November 02-04, 2016, ACM New York, NY, USA 2016, 957–963 http://dl. acm.org/citation.cfm?) 6. Matsunaga. “Schreiben als Übersetzung.” 7. Bettina Brandt. “The Bones of Translation: Yōko Tawada’s Translational Poetics.” (In Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism, edited by Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck, Rodopi: Brill, 2015, 181–194). 8. See Yōko Tawada. “Kafkas Performing Arts.” (In: Odradeks Lachen. Fremdheit bei Kafka, edited by Hansjörg Bay, Christof Hamann, 347–359. Berlin: Rombach, 2003). 9. Yōko Tawada. “Interview”. (echo. Mitteilungen des Japanisch-Deutschen Zentrums Berlin (JDZB) Nr. 93, Dezember 2010, 3.) 10. Yōko Tawada Kafuka. (Tokyo: Shūēsha, 2015). 11. Monika Schmitz-Emans. “Autobiographie als Transkription und Verwandlung. Yōko Tawada in den Spuren Kafkas.” (In Grenzen der Identität und der Fiktionalität, edited by Ulrich Breuer. München: Iudicium, 2006, 140–155); Hansjörg Bay. “Transkulturelle Stockungen. Verwandlung und Verhaftung bei Kafka und Tawada.” (In Zwischen Provokation und Usurpation. Interkulturalität als (un)vollendetes Projekt der Literaturund Sprachwissenschaften, edited by Dieter Heimböckel et al., München: Fink, 2010, 251–275); “A und O. Kafka—Tawada.” (In Yōko Tawada. Poetik der Transformation. Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk. Mit dem Stück‚ Sancho Pansa’ von Yōko Tawada, edited by Christine Ivanovic, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010, 149–169). 12. Yōko Tawada. “Kafka kaikoku.” (In Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort. 12 Theaterstücke. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2013). 13. Yōko Tawada: “Laudatio auf Uljana Wolf.” (Erlanger Literaturpreis für Poesie als Übersetzung 2015 an Uljana Wolf. Preisverleihung am 28. August 2015 im Rahmen des 35. Erlanger Poetenfests; https://lyrikzeitung.com/2015/08/31/laudatio-auf-uljanawolf-von-yoko-tawada/). 14. Tawada: “Laudatio.” 15. Uljana Wolf. falsche freunde. (Berlin: kookbook, 2009), 18. 16. Tawada: “Laudatio.” 17. “Rede, seltsam angezettelt.” Rede zur Absolventinnenfeier der Philosophischen Fakultät II der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin am 16. Juli 2014. (https://fakultaeten.hu-berlin.de/de/sprachlit/lehre/download/Uljana%20Wolf_Humboldt_Redel.pdf/ view). 18. Tawada: “Laudatio.” 19. Tawada: “Laudatio.” 20. Wolf. falsche freunde, 10. 21. Tawada: “Laudatio.” 22. Tawada: “Laudatio.” 23. Tawada: “Laudatio.”

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24. Yōko Tawada. Verwandlungen. Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesungen. (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998) 56ff. 25. Yōko Tawada. “Schreiben im Netz der Sprachen”. (Interkulturelle Begegnungen in Literatur, Film und Fernsehen. Ein deutsch-japanischer Vergleich, edited by Hilaria Gössmann, Renate Jaschke, Andreas Mrugalla. 447–454, München: Iudicium, 2011). 26. Saito, Sprachbewegung. 27. cf. Lafcadio Hearn, Insect Literature. (Dublin: The Swan River Press, 2015). 28. Saito. Sprachbewegung. 29. Klaus Schenk. “Kafka-Umschriften. Zur Inter- und Hypertextualität einer Rezeptionsweise.”(In Franz Kafka. Wirkung und Wirkungsverhinderung, edited by Steffen Höhne, Ludger Udolph, 137–163. Köln—Weimar—Wien: Böhlau, 2014 ); Iris Hermann. “Hybride Relektüren in Yōko Tawadas Theaterstück Kafka Kaikoku.” (In Deutschsprachige Literatur und Theater seit 1945 in den Metropolen Seoul, Tokio und Berlin, edited by Iris Hermann, Soichiro Itoda, Hi-Young Song, 279–293. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press, 2015); Lee M. Roberts. “Critique of Japan as an East-West Literary Hybrid in Yōko Tawada’s Kafka Kaikoku.” (Foreign Language Education Research 2017, 20: 17–39); Arina Rotaru. “Yōko Tawada’s Kafka Kaikoku. Modernity, Sacrifice, and World Literature.” (Journal of World Literature 2017, 2 (4), 454–474). 30. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 271. 31. Tawada: “Laudatio.” 32. Translated as “St. George and the translator” by Margaret Mitsutani in 1998b. 33. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 272. 34. (Maruyama 1964). 35. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 277. 36. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 277. 37. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 278. 38. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 279. 39. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 281. 40. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 279f. 41. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 284. 42. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 284. 43. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 275. 44. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 273. 45. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 276f. 46. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku, 279. 47. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku. 48. Tawada. Kafka kaikoku. 49. e.g., Yōko Tawada. “Rabbi Löw und 27 Punkte: Physiognomie der Interpunktion bei Paul Celan.” (In Arcadia 32 H. 1, 1997, 283–286).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bay, Hansjörg. “Transkulturelle Stockungen. Verwandlung und Verhaftung bei Kafka und Tawada.” In Zwischen Provokation und Usurpation. Interkulturalität als (un)vollendetes Projekt der Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaften, edited by Dieter Heimböckel et al., München: Fink, 2010, 251–275. Bay, Hansjörg. “A und O. Kafka—Tawada.” In Yōko Tawada. Poetik der Transformation. Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk. Mit dem Stück‚ Sancho Pansa ‘von Yōko Tawada, edited by Christine Ivanovic, Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010, 149–169. Blioumi, Aglaia. “Semiotik der Kultur als Übersetzung von Schriftzeichen bei Yōko Tawada.” New Semiotics. Between Tradition and Innovation, Proceedings of the world congress of the IASS/AIS. 12th WCS Sofia 2014. http://www.iass-ais.org/proceedings2014/view_lesson.php?id=40

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Brandt, Bettina. “The Bones of Translation: Yōko Tawada’s Translational Poetics.” In Challenging the Myth of Monolingualism, edited by Liesbeth Minnaard and Till Dembeck, Rodopi: Brill, 2015, 181–194. Esselborn, Karl. “‘Übersetzungen aus der Sprache, die es nicht gibt’. Interkulturalität, Globalisierung und Postmoderne in den Texten Yōko Tawadas.” Arcadia 2007, 42 (2): 240–262. Genz, Julia. “Yōko Tawadas Poetik des Übersetzens am Beispiel von ‘Überseezungen’.” Études Germaniques 2010, 259 (3): 465–482. Genz, Julia, Kayo Adachi-Rabe. “Übersetzung als po(i)etisches Verfahren: Yōko Tawadas deutsch-japanische Partnertexte Im Bauch des Gotthards, Orangerie und Spiegelbild.” PhiN Philologie im Netz, 2014, 69: 1–19. Hearn, Lafcadio. 2015. Insect Literature. Dublin: The Swan River Press. Hermann, Iris. 2015. “Hybride Relektüren in Yōko Tawadas Theaterstück Kafka Kaikoku.” In Deutschsprachige Literatur und Theater seit 1945 in den Metropolen Seoul, Tokio und Berlin, edited by Iris Hermann, Soichiro Itoda, Hi-Young Song, 279–293. Bamberg: University of Bamberg Press. Ivanovic, Christine, Barbara Seidl. 2016. “What is translational literature and how to classify it? Crowd-sourcing as a starting point for corpus building and type distinction in comparative literature.” Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality TEEM 16. Salamanca, Spain — November 02 – 04, 2016, ACM New York, NY, USA 2016, 957-963 http://dl. acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3012632&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=744872494& CFTOKEN=22279061 Izumi, Kyōka. 2001. “Yasha-ga-Ike”. In Spirits of Another Sort: The Plays of Izumi Kyoka, edited by M. Cody Poulton. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan. Kafka, Franz. 2014. Metamorphosis. A New Translation by Susan Bernofsky. New York: Norton & Company. Kraenzle, Christina. 2007. “Traveling Without Moving. Physical and Linguistic Mobility in Yōko Tawada’s »Überseezungen«“. In Yōko Tawada. Voices from Everywhere, edited by Doug Slaymaker, 91–110. Lanham: Lexington Books. Maruyama, Masao. 1964. “Kaikoku” [1959]. Kindaishugi 34, Gendai Nihon shisō taikei: 282–312 Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō. Matsunaga, Miho. 2002. “Schreiben als Übersetzung. Die Dimension der Übersetzung in Werken von Yōko Tawada.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 12 (3): 532–546. Murakami, Haruki. 2002. Umibe no Kafuka. Tokyo: Shinchōsha. Roberts, Lee M. 2017. “Critique of Japan as an East-West Literary Hybrid in Yōko Tawada’s Kafka Kaikoku.” Foreign Language Education Research 20: 17–39. Rösch, Felix. 2017. Unlearning modernity: A realist method for critical international relations?” Journal of International Political Theory 13 (1): 81–99. Rotaru, Arina. 2017. “Yōko Tawada’s Kafka Kaikoku. Modernity, Sacrifice, and World Literature.” Journal of World Literature 2 (4), 454–474. Saito, Yumiko. 2010a. “Une tentative de double traduction. Une analyse du ‘Beau-frère à Bordeaux’ de Yōko Tawada.” Études Germaniques 2010 65 (3 [259]): 525–534. ———. 2010b. “Zur Genese der japanischen Textphasen von ‘Das nackte Auge’”. In Yōko Tawada. Poetik der Transformation. Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk. Mit dem Stück Sancho Pansa von Yōko Tawada, edited by Christine Ivanovic, 285-296. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. ———. 2010c. 齋藤由美子「重訳の試み―多和田葉子の作品『ボルドーの義兄』分 析」『れにくさ』東京大学大学院人文研究科現代文芸論研究室, 2号: 162-180. ———. 2011. 齋藤由美子「多和田葉子の自作翻訳『変身のためのオピウム』における 彼女」『ヴェルボンド』東京大学文学部現代文芸論沼野研究室, 第1号: 160-169. ———. 2014. “‘Honjakugo’ in der japanischen Übersetzung von Opium für Ovid.” In Die Lücke im Sinn. Verstehen, Übersetzen, Vermitteln exophoner Literatur am Beispiel Yōko Tawadas, edited by Barbara Agnese, Christine Ivanovic, Sandra Vlasta, 165–180. Tübingen: Stauffenburg.

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———. 2016. “Die Zerstörung der Syntax in ‘Arufabetto no kizuguchi.’ In Am Scheideweg der Sprachen: die poetischen Migrationen von Yōko Tawada, edited by Amelia Valtolina, Michael Braun, 183–214. Tübingen: Stauffenburg. ———. 2017a 齋藤由美子「多和田葉子の新訳」「分析」『れにくさ』東京大学大学院人文研 究科現代文芸論研究室, 7号: 56–78. ———. 2017b Die Sprachbewegung in Übersetzungen am Beispiel von Yōko Tawadas Texten . Diss. Berlin [unpublished]. ———. 2018. “Between German and Japanese Versions of Yōko Tawada’s Early Works: A Comparative Study.” In World Literature and Japanese Literature in the Era of Globalization, 59–64. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo. The Department of Contemporary Literary Studies. Schenk, Klaus. 2014. “Kafka-Umschriften. Zur Inter- und Hypertextualität einer Rezeptionsweise.” In Franz Kafka. Wirkung und Wirkungsverhinderung, edited by Steffen Höhne, Ludger Udolph, 137–163. Köln—Weimar—Wien: Böhlau. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. 2006. “Autobiographie als Transkription und Verwandlung. Yōko Tawada in den Spuren Kafkas.” In Grenzen der Identität und der Fiktionalität, edited by Ulrich Breuer, 140–155. München: Iudicium. Schmitz-Emans, Monika. 2011. “Sprache als Fremdkörper: Yōko Tawadas Poetik der Übersetzung.” In Migration, exil et traduction, edited by Bernard Banoun, Michaela Enderle-Ristori, Sylvie Le Moël, 383–407. Tours: Presses Universitaires FrançoisRabelais. Tobias, Shani. 2015. “Tawada Yōko: Translating from the ‘Poetic Ravine’.” Japanese Studies 35 (2), 169-183. Anderson, Susan C. “Surface Translations: Meaning and Difference in Yōko Tawada’s German Prose.” Seminar. A Journal of Germanic Studies 2010, 46 (1): 50-70. Tawada, Yōko. Das Bad. Translated by Peter Pörtner. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1989. ———. Arufabetto no kizuguchi. Tokyo: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1993. ———. “Der Faltenmann vom Sumida-Fluß.” In Tintenfisch auf Reisen. Translated by Peter Pörtner. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1994. ———. “Gottoharuto tetsudō”; “Sumidagawa no shiwaotoko.” In Gottoharuto tetsudo. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 1996. ———. “Im Bauch des Gotthard”; “Das Tor des Übersetzers oder Celan liest Japanisch.” In Talisman. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1996. ———. “Rabbi Löw und 27 Punkte: Physiognomie der Interpunktion bei Paul Celan.” In Arcadia 32 H. 1, 1997, 283–286. ———. Verwandlungen. Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998. ———. “St. George and the translator.” In: The Bridegroom was a Dog. Translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani. New York, Tokyo: Kōdansha International, 1998. ———. Opium für Ovid. Ein Kopfkissenbuch von 22 Frauen. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2000. ———. Henshin no tame no opiumu. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2001. ———. “Kafkas Performing Arts.” In Odradeks Lachen. Fremdheit bei Kafka, edited by Hansjörg Bay, Christof Hamann, 347-359. Berlin: Rombach, 2003. ———. Tabi wo suru hadakano me. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2004. ———. Das nackte Auge. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2004. ———. Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2007. ———. Schwager in Bordeaux. Roman. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2008. ———. Borudô no gikei. Tôkyô: Kôdansha, 2009. ———. Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2010. ———. “Interview.” echo. Mitteilungen des Japanisch-Deutschen Zentrums Berlin (JDZB) Nr. 93, Dezember 2010, 3. ———. Yuki no rensyūsei. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2011.

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———. “Schreiben im Netz der Sprachen.” Interkulturelle Begegnungen in Literatur, Film und Fernsehen. Ein deutsch-japanischer Vergleich, edited by Hilaria Gössmann, Renate Jaschke, Andreas Mrugalla. 447-454, München: Iudicium, 2011. ———. “Kafka kaikoku.” In: Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort. 12 Theaterstücke. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2013 . ———. Etüden im Schnee. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 2014. ———. Kafuka. Tokyo: Shūēisha, 2015. ———. “Laudatio auf Uljana Wolf.” Erlanger Literaturpreis für Poesie als Übersetzung 2015 an Uljana Wolf. Preisverleihung am 28. August 2015 im Rahmen des 35. Erlanger Poetenfests; https://lyrikzeitung.com/2015/08/31/laudatio-aufuljana-wolf-von-yoko-tawada/ Tobias, Shani. “Tawada Yōko: Translating from the ‘Poetic Ravine’.” Japanese Studies 2015, 35 (2), 169–183. Wolf, Uljana. Kochanie ich habe Brot gekauft. Berlin: Kookbooks, 2005. ———. falsche freunde. Berlin: kookbook, 2009. ———. Meine schönste Lengevitch. Berlin: Kookbooks, 2013. ———. “Rede, seltsam angezettelt.” Rede zur Absolventinnenfeier der Philosophischen Fakultät II der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin am 16. Juli 2014. https:// fakultaeten.hu-berlin.de/de/sprachlit/lehre/download/Uljana%20Wolf_Humboldt_ Redel.pdf/view

SIX Yoko Tawada Writes Ernst Jandl Movements of Alphabetic and Sino-Japanese Writing Across Time and Media Gizem Arslan

YOKO TAWADA’S LITERARY EXPERIMENTATION AFTER ERNST JANDL: WRITING GERMAN WITH LOGOGRAMS In her 2009 Cornell Lecture on Contemporary Aesthetics, Yoko Tawada suggests that “one could write any language, even German, using Chinese ideograms: For example you would write an ideogram that means ‘mountain’ and then simply pronounce the word ‘Berg’ [mountain]. An ideogram doesn’t tell us how we have to pronounce it.” 1 A year later, Tawada appears to have put this idea into practice in her 2010 poetry collection Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik (Adventures of German grammar), which contains three poems written in Sino-Japanese ideograms and the Latin Alphabet. 2 Of these poems, “TIK” (TICK) and “MusikMaschineLärm” (Musicmachinenoise) are dedicated to the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl (1925-2000), perhaps the greatest proponent of concrete poetry in the German-speaking world. Much like Tawada, Jandl’s essays question the unity of the German language, and his poetry disrupts it textual-materially. In the two poems dedicated to Jandl, Tawada intensifies his challenges to linguistic unity by staging an encounter between ideographic and alphabetic writing, and reinvents the concretist emphasis on new “verbivocovisual” configurations as opposed to mimesis and meaning in language. 3 These two challenges are closely interlinked: The poems’ verbal, acoustic, and visual composition makes it 81

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difficult to assign one script to one language. More importantly, the poems’ particular bilingual (German and Japanese) and biscriptorial (alphabetic and Sino-Japanese writing) composition calls for interpretive strategies for which reliance on a hermeneutic notion of sense is insufficient. Beyond their participation in reference and meaning, both poems demand to be read as visual and acoustic encounters between languages and writing systems. In addition to their role as the products of interlingual and scriptorial encounter, “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” unveil more expansive encounters between Tawada and the Brazilian concretists (albeit indirectly), as well as between the print medium and new media. This is particularly evident in Tawada’s introduction of the dimension of time into the lexical field and typo-topography of her poems. On the one hand, she pays homage to the international concretists’ emphasis on participatory and temporal reading practices as well as their preference for simultaneity over the linear-discursivity of writing. 4 On the other hand, Tawada moves concrete poetry into the age of new media by gesturing within the old medium of the book toward the hallmarks of new media, such as time-based representation, modularity, variability and transcoding. 5 Here as elsewhere, Tawada’s creative texts present “a viable opportunity for theoretical inquiry.” 6 In the case of “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm,” these interventions acquire a temporal and historical dimension aligned with her experimentation with time-based media. Obliquely, Tawada’s work reminds us of literary-historical vectors of influence in international concretism and conceptual art beyond the purview of Jandl’s Europe, namely between Brazil and Japan. 7 More directly, these two poems evoke histories of contact between Eastern and Western writing. The juxtaposition of two writing systems not only generates reflection—on the part of both Tawada and her readers—on the semantic, visual and acoustic dimensions of writing, but also on the status of the print medium in the age of new media. The modes of reading and writing—always interlinked practices for Tawada—that “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” perform with Jandl and demand from their readers rests on two key strategies. The first is an aesthetics of fragmentation that interrupts the flow of reading and writing. The second comprises translational and intermedial readings that question notions of native and foreign languages, and publishing practices that address purportedly monolingual readerships. Tawada’s translational writing often steps outside mother tongues, cultivating an outsider’s perspective into any language, and places languages in relation to one another. Intermedial reading strategies are understood here as readings of written signs at once as elements of sound transcription, mathematical notation, visual forms, material objects and bodies. Reading poetry composed of two writing systems requires strategies that exceed reference and meaning, fosters a multilingual perspective to language and

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literature, conjures up the time and variability of new media into the older medium of the book, and challenges existing publishing practices that often favor a monolingual readership. A close reading of Tawada’s concretist poetry through the lens of translation and media aims to develop new modes of reading that are important in these arenas of reception. TAWADA’S EXPERIMENTAL POETRY IN “TIK” AND “MUSIKMASCHINELÄRM” Interlingual encounter, intermediality, and questions of readership are pivotal for Tawada in general, and in particular for Tawada’s poems in the section “Loblieder für die Toten” (Songs of praise for the dead) of the poetry collection Adventures of German Grammar in which “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” appear. In long, multi-part poems dedicated to the Danish experimental poet Inger Christensen and Italian early humanist poet Petrarch, Tawada refers to alphabetization as materialized in the world—recalling Christensen’s 1981 poetry collection alphabet—the recurrence of grammatical terms—another preoccupation of Christensen’s—as well as part-whole relationships and sequences of great import for Christensen and Petrarch. 8 All poems in the “Songs of praise” section have to do with time and sequences, the materiality of writing and questions of readership at some level. In contrast to those dedicated to Christensen and Petrarch, the typography of the poems dedicated to Jandl are experimental, and the poems pose questions regarding time and readership through typography as much as through reference and meaning. “TIK” begins with the onomatopoeic syllables “tak” (tock) and “tik” (tick) written partly in the Latin alphabet and partly in Sino-Japanese logograms: 戦 ak, 術 ik, 時 ik, 計 ak, followed by the words “nautik” (nautics), “aeronautik” (aeronautics), and “astronautik” (astronautics) written together with their Japanese counterparts 航海術 (kōkaijutsu), 航空術 (kūkōjutsu), and 宇宙飛行術 (uchūhikōjutsu) respectively. The parts of the logograms preceding the fragments “ik” and “ak” conspicuously approximate the form of the letter “t” of the Latin alphabet. Additionally, the ideograms 戦 (war, battle) and 術 (way, method) that precede the first pair of “ik” and “ak,” mean “tactic” when written together (“Taktik” in German). The third and fourth logograms that precede the word-fragments “ik” and “ak” have to do with time and clocks on a lexical level: 時 (ji, toki) refers to time and hours, while 計 (kei) means “measure, plan.” Written together, 時計 (tokei) means “watch” or “clock.” In short, “TIK” operates on the semantic, visual and aural registers of written language in a translational moment: The poem calls up the semantic fields of time, navigation and exploration in the seas, skies, and space. “Tak” and “tik” are onomatopoeic syllables that the typographic layout highlights. The resemblance between parts of

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the logorams 戦, 術, 時, 計, and “t” is visual but not meaning-based, that between the Japanese 戦術 (senjutsu) and 時計 (tokei), and the onomatopoeic pair “tik” and “tak” is translational and aural. The second poem “MusikMaschineLärm” complements rather than mirrors the aural, visual and semantic language play of “TIK.” While “TIK” tears linguistic fragments away from their customary referential contexts and juxtaposes them in unusual configurations, both the title and body of the poem “MusikMaschineLärm” fuse linguistic elements that would otherwise be written apart or interspersed with punctuation marks, spaces and other parts of speech. One case in point is the title itself. It consists of the German words for “music,” “machine” and “noise” written together. Composite nouns are very common in German. “Musikmaschinelärm” (literally “musicmachinenoise,” or “noise of the music machine”) is an unusual word but thoroughly admissible compound. The poem’s title is not “Musikmaschinelärm,” however, but “MusikMaschineLärm.” German orthography dictates that all nouns be capitalized, but when building a composite noun, the rule applies only to the first letter of the entire compound. By capitalizing all three nouns in the compound, the poem at once fuses them and indicates that they belong apart. The body of the poem creates a similar tension. It consists of these words’ Japanese counterparts (音楽 (ongaku), 機械 (kikai), 騒音(sōon) respectively) repeated, with twelve ideograms in each row, across twenty horizontal lines. Unlike its title, the poem begins with the Japanese word for noise, followed by machine, then music. The following line presents the nouns in inverse order: music, machine, noise. This typographic presentation exploits the (re)combinatory richness of German and Japanese, as well as the Ancient Greek that forms the root of many words in “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm.” All three languages allow composite nouns to be formed with great ease, generating unique and memorable terms like “Schadenfreude,” as well as rich wordplay in the literary arts and the everyday. “MusikMaschineLärm” can be read separately in this context, or as a composite noun meaning “the noise of the music machine,” or as a combination of “Musikmaschine” (music machine) and “Maschinelärm” (machine noise). The body of the poem achieves a comparable effect in its Japanese composite nouns. “MusikMaschineLärm,” then, urges the reader to read its semantic units both singly and combinatorily. The individual elements of writing and their combinatory potential functions also on the typographic, and by extension, medial level. Given the poem’s monolithic appearance on the page and its repetitiveness, the reader is inclined to quantify it as a whole as well as to take in each sign individually. Its geometric, almost pixellated typographic presentation and the lexical field of its three nouns additionally render it a self-consciously medial poem. The word “machine” between “music” and “noise” suggests that one or both of the latter are mechanically produced, hearkening back to key debates in media studies on mechanical repro-

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duction, particularly of images. “Noise” is also a key term in information theory, understood as any unwanted disturbance that impinges on the transmission of signals and introduces unpredictability into messages, but also as that which delivers important information about the media environment. 9 In media arts understood broadly, noise is art, making possible such things as timbre, time-axis manipulation and the music of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. 10 Compared to this semantic field and layout, “TIK” recalls the verbivocovisual projects of international concretists more vividly, while “MusikMaschineLärm” conjures up information theory and cybernetics. One key thematic and medial dimension on which the poems converge is time. “TIK” is punctuated by the onomatopoeic “tik” and “tak,” as if to add the dimension of time to print, not commonly considered a time-based medium. Likewise, “MusikMaschineLärm” refers to music, perhaps the oldest time-based medium, and juxtaposes it with “machine” and “noise,” as if to move music in time towards other terms central to our understanding of media, particularly since the Second World War. The typographic presentation of “MusikMaschineLärm” also creates a perceptual tension: Are we to take in the poem as a whole, or are we to read it sign by sign, or are we to regard it as a long and repetitive transmission? In short, both poems incorporate time into their lexical field and typographic presentation, gesturing from the empirically static world of the written page toward temporal progression through time. The motion through time compounds the poems’ movement through languages and writing systems. They are both biscriptorial and translational, typographically striking, and demand recombinatory reading despite—or precisely due to—a relatively limited semantic field. Since both poems are sensical as well as sensory, and present metareflections on the print medium and the medium of writing in a translational moment, meaning-based approaches to reading them are not sufficient, though not irrelevant. Both poems require reading strategies attuned to the materiality and history of written material. “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm”s temporal dimension is not only the time of the media in which they appear, but also of the comparative history of writing itself. Both poems allude to the history of writing in the East and West, writing and books as media, and the affinities between concretists and ideographic writing. WHY ERNST JANDL? “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” are both written “after” the concretist poet Ernst Jandl. They share some hallmarks of concretist fascination and practice more broadly: preference for simultaneous perception and verbivocovisual composition of a poem over the discursivity and linear progression more commonly associated with writing in general, fascination

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with ideographic writing, and invitation to participatory and temporal reading practices. 11 Through them, Tawada launches at once a supplemental and critical practice. Explicitly, she pays tribute to a Germanspeaking concrete poet and his poetics of foreignness within the German language. Implicitly, her experimentation with Sino-Japanese logograms recalls the significance of ideographic writing for concrete poetry. On the one hand, Tawada’s fragmented ideograms—and by extension, the copresent and similarly fragmented text in Latin alphabet—draw readerly focus toward their smaller components (lines and circles) derived from elemental geometric forms or toward the monolithic appearance of a full page of text. The poems have a precognitive dimension here, where the reader may have no words yet for the typo-graphic images presented. 12 On the other hand, “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” rely on belated cognition. They demand a kind of readerly double-take, or several, from their readers. In short, Tawada’s experiment with Sino-Japanese and Latin writing systems emphasizes earliness and belatedness over the concretist emphasis on immediacy. Why does Tawada choose to write two poems after the Austrian concretist Ernst Jandl? One reason is Jandl’s status as one of the most important representatives of German-language experimental poetry, whose works have come to be recognized as classics of modern poetry. 13 Language play—including multilingual wordplay and “verbivocovisual” play—and translation in theory and practice—particularly of Robert Creeley, Gertude Stein, and John Cage—are constitutive of Jandl’s literary writing. In short, Jandl’s renown puts him in the company of other towering figures of German-language poetry with whom Tawada frequently engages (including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Else LaskerSchüler, and Paul Celan), while his experimentation with the materiality of language and his translation work resonate with Tawada’s own literary practice. To add to these many literary and theoretical affinities, Jandl has all but invited writers like Tawada to write “TIK”: Jandl’s fragment “gruppen,” on which “TIK” is based, is from an unfinished project entitled “Gedichte zum Fertigstellen” (Poems to be finished). Jandl wrote fragments that would be completed by other poets, and Tawada took up this particular unfinished poem in 2010. On the printed page, Tawada’s fiction-essays on language are inspired by and refer to Jandl’s poetry. Tawada’s eponymous essay of the 2007 prose and poetry collection Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Language police and play polyglots) is written “for” (für) Jandl, and her essay “Ein ungeladener Gast” (An uninvited guest) from the 2017 essay collection Akzentfrei (Accent-free) comments on Jandl’s poetry as “percussion music with German grammar.” 14 Inspired to a great degree by Jandl, these essays reflect with humor and naive surprise on the German and Japanese languages, reveling in their idiosyncrasies and revealing the linguistic and cultural prejudices of their

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speakers. Beyond the printed page, Tawada travels frequently to Vienna and has taken part in exhibits, events, and projects about and dedicated to Jandl’s work, most importantly the Ernst Jandl Show, a traveling exhibition organized by the National Library in Vienna on the ten-year anniversary of Jandl’s death. 15 In addition to their sustained attention to language, translation and materiality, Jandl and Tawada’s oevres overlap significantly in their shared aesthetics, politics, and choice of genre. Both Jandl and Tawada’s works are indebted to early twentieth-century avant-gardes but neither can be described solely in terms of avant-garde aesthetics. 16 Their works betray formal similarities with the avant-gardes, particularly their aesthetics of transgression, their sustained attention to the aural and visual dimensions of language and their antigrammatical experimentation with the materiality of language. However, in contrast with the avant-gardes’ “explicit repudiation of the art of the past—especially the art of the classical and the Romantic periods—a revolt against the idea of art, its identity, its symbolic order and the institution of art,” both Jandl and Tawada’s writings can be seen as embedded artistic praxes, with claims not to rupture but to continuity. 17 Irreducible to the avant-gardes but certainly inspired by them, Tawada and Jandl are fascinated with language’s sensory dimensions. Their writings tear bits of linguistic material away from their customary contexts and present them in constellations that demand new ways of seeing literature and art, but also the world at large. In addition, while Tawada and Jandl often refrain from politicizing their aesthetic projects, their writings offer subtle but searing critiques of monolinguistic and monocultural paradigms. One particular and prominent point of resistance in Jandl’s poetry to a monolingual view to German is the concept of a “run-down language” (heruntergekommene Sprache), through which Jandl sought to achieve a foreignization effect in German. 18 “Run-down language” can be understood as the aestheticization of a language with faulty syntax and incorrect morphology (in Jandl’s case, German mixed with dialect and English). 19 Helmut Neundlinger identifies in Jandl’s concept of the “rundown language” a “dialectics of alienation,” “in which he [Jandl] figuratively makes himself into a foreigner, a klutz in his own language and artificially puts himself in the condition of utter alienation with respect to his own identity.” 20 Tawada creates similar effects in her works by presenting moments of naive surprise at everyday practices and playful engagement with canonical German-language texts, both of which elicit laughter as evidence of alienation and delight alike. Whether it is in the self-distancing from the mother tongue or playful engagement with the phonetics, semantics, and grammar of their literary languages, Jandl and Tawada achieve foreignizing and humorous effects in their literary works that question the very concept of mother tongues and distinct languages.

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THE HISTORY OF JAPANESE WRITING IN “TIK” AND “MUSIKMASCHINELÄRM” The presence of two writing systems and multiple languages in “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” generates a multilingual and intermedial reading perspective, which throws Tawada’s omission of other Japanese writing systems in these poems into starker relief. In addition to SinoJapanese logograms (kanji), the logogram-derived phonetic scripts hiragana (used to gloss kanji and to agglutinate adjectives and verbs) and katakana (used to transcribe loanwords from other languages and foreign names) are entirely absent from Tawada’s two poems. If one allows for the commonly used and recognized Latin alphabet (romaji) and Arabic numerals as well, written Japanese comprises five distinct writing systems. In fact, it is one of the most complex writing systems of the world, and possibly the most complex used by a sizable population. 21 Both “TIK” and “Musikmaschinelärm” are composed almost entirely of nouns, for which Japanese uses logograms. However, onomatopoeic words such as “tik” and “tak,” as transcriptions of the German or adapted to Japanese onomatopoeia, would conventionally be written in katakana or hiragana. Thus, the poems, the titles of which both refer to sound, paradoxically omit phonetic Japanese scripts from their typographic repertoire. 22 Why does Tawada appear to distill the multiplicity of writing systems in Japanese to just one? Does Tawada want to titillate her Western readers with the visually more elaborate and more recognizably eastern logograms? Does she intend to confound her Japanese or perhaps even Chinese readers with the phonetic excess of the alphabet? Tawada’s welldocumented and extensively demonstrated resistance to monolingualism and her equally critical treatment of the German and Japanese languages’ expressive possibilities would suggest otherwise. 23 Another possibility here is that Tawada’s employment of Sino-Japanese logograms exploits the relative paucity of bi- or multilingual readers with ability in Japanese and German. Combined with the poems’ resistance to immediacy in the time of reading—as discussed above—this paucity generates gaps in understanding, misunderstandings, and belated cognition—hallmarks of many of Tawada’s texts and multilingual performances. 24 Additionally, the presentation of logographic and alphabetic writing without phonetic syllabaries opens up reflection on the history and nature of logographic versus phonographic writing that endows Tawada’s concretist response to Jandl with transhistorical and translingual significance: First, Tawada’s “TIK” intimates and inverts Eurocentric biases that venerated phonographic over logographic writing. Second, Tawada highlights the status of Sino-Japanese and alphabetic writing alike as mutable and in motion. Finally, in teasing apart the visual and aural dimensions of writing, “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” demand discrete attention to visual,

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aural, and semantic dimensions of writing, without any one of which the poems’ readings would be incomplete. Because visual and aural dimensions of written language do not require access to cultural understanding based on a hermeneutic notion of sense, the visual and aural approach to written language demands readerly vigilance and receptivity with respect to purportedly illegible signs and subjects. Tawada’s Tübingen and Hamburg Poetics lectures and some shorter essays indicate that she has studied the history of Sino-Japanese writing to some detail. 25 Many of her essays on writing systems and reading conventions, as well as Japanese translations of German-language authors, hinge on the tension between the pictographic and phonographic in Sino-Japanese and alphabetic writing alike. Tawada does not explicitly refer to phonocentrism or phonocentric bias here. However, her readings of German-language literature in translation often pay sustained attention to written and spoken language in fragmentation (letters, phonemes, morphemes over larger units of utterance), particularly the visual form of letters of the alphabet and Sino-Japanese logograms. In one of her essays on Paul Celan’s poetry, Tawada professes her preference for the visual form of writing. She recounts a conference at which she presented on the prevalence of the radical for “gate” in Japanese translations of Celan’s poems. Tawada recounts having to defend her position to a member of the audience who underestimates the value of her analysis, since, after all, the audience member holds, what matters in the reading of poetry is sound, and “the graphic aspect could not play a significant role.” 26 After this discussion, Tawada recalls Celan’s poem “Bei Wein und Verlorenheit” (With wine and lostness) from the 1963 poetry collection Die Niemandsrose (The No-One’s-Rose). She observes that the poem plays multilingually with the German word “Neige” (remains, dregs), French “neige” (snow) and English “neigh,” which are pronounced quite differently but look very similar when written. Therefore, the reader needs to be attuned to the graphic dimension of written language rather than its phonetic value if she is to discover the multilingual wordplay. She herself, Tawada says, is an “Augenübersetzer” (eye-translator). 27 This self-identification neither means that sound is incidental or peripheral in Tawada’s writing and performances, nor that her writings elude reference and meaning. To the contrary, Tawada’s performances often exploit acoustic similarity to humorous and alienating effect, and her texts lend themselves to rich hermeneutic interpretations. The aural and semantic are simply two of several textual dimensions (e.g., bodily, visual) addressed in Tawada’s critical and creative work. Tawada’s essayistic work signals knowledge of the history of and contemporary debates surrounding the use of Sino-Japanese, Cyrillic, and Latin alphabets, as well as modes of reading unfamiliar scripts that Tawada has encountered in various parts of the world. 28 Tawada’s deliberate focus on graphic dimensions of Sino-Japanese and alphabetic writ-

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ing resists Eurocentric biases in the reading of Chinese and alphabetic writing alike. Ignace J. Gelb’s influential account in A Study of Writing (1952) embodies the biases in question. Gelb espouses a teleology of writing that tends toward full phonography, a linear evolution from logography to the alphabet. 29 Gelb’s work is not unique but “expressive of fundamental cultural attitudes toward what writing is and should be,” and in fact, the work of enormously influential media theorists like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong too betray similar attitudes. 30 These works overlook the phonographic and logographic adaptability of logograms in Japan, where their presence and influence were particularly long-lasting. Phonographically-minded Western studies of writing systems emphasized phonographic adaptation, while overlooking logographic adaptations. 31 In addition, Chinese writing has been “criticized as cumbersome, imperfect, even primitive, by others who keep predicting its replacement by the more efficient alphabet,” a triumph that alphabetic writing has yet to claim over the Chinese writing system. 32 “TIK” can be read in terms of this debate, particularly because the combinations of letters and logograms highlight the tension between the status of writing as sound transcription and image. In the last three sections of the poem, the German nouns “Nautik,” “Aeronautik,” and “Astronautik” are printed in lowercase below Japanese words with the same meaning. The words in the Latin alphabet and not their Japanese counterparts are fragmented and shifted: The “-tik” is not written together with “nau,” “aeronau” and “astronau” but in line with and immediately succeeding the Japanese compound nouns for the same concepts. The German counterpart of the ideogram pronounced 術 (jutsu) meaning “ways, method,” is “-tik.” That is to say that these three word combinations include the ideogram 術 and the phoneme “-tik” pleonastically. In addition, the placement of SinoJapanese writing and its lexical counterpart in German recalls glosses of unfamiliar, obsolete or foreign written material, particularly in Japanese publishing. In Japan, particularly in newspapers and magazines published for mass consumption, obsolete or relatively obscure logograms are glossed in the phonetic syllabary hiragana. These glosses (furigana) typically appear in small print above or beside the logograms. In “TIK,” Tawada inverts this and other protocols of glossing: The phonetic writing appears not above but below the ideograms, and it is not clear which writing system is glossing the other, if that is indeed the case. This move questions power relations that shaped the history of Japanese writing and is presented in “TIK” between Sino-Japanese and alphabetic writing. Tawada’s “TIK” stages a drama—or battle—here: Writing systems belonging to competing civilizations clashed and thrived on either side of the Great Wall of China. Both writing systems were employed in scholarship that espoused the superiority of one over the other. That “TIK” dramatizes a power struggle between discrete writing systems does not mean that it presents the two writing systems as antitheti-

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cal, static or homogeneous. The lexical field of navigation and exploration in “TIK” is not original to Tawada—it originates from Jandl’s “gruppen”—but Tawada’s recreation intensifies the mobility and mutability of written material that existed in Jandl’s poetry. “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” both exclude the other phonetic writing systems used solely in Japan in favor of logograms and letters of the alphabet, both of which traveled the world more widely. Sino-Japanese logograms, like letters of the Latin alphabet, are immigrants—and permanent residents—in Japan. They migrated from China to Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and to some other Asian countries, and were transformed substantially over the course of history across these geographies. 33 The nouns “Nautik,” “Aeronautik,” and “Astronautik” in “TIK” are Ancient Greek in origin, derived from the word “ναῦς” [naus: ship]. This etymology aligns not only with the Indo-European family ties between the German and Ancient Greek languages, but also the alphabetic lineage of Latin script, which was derived from the Greek alphabet, which in turn was brought to Hellas through Phoenician mediation. Like the route of Chinese writing to Japan and beyond, the Phoenician alphabet traveled over island settlements and across water. 34 It is no surprise that a morpheme derived from the Ancient Greek word for “ship” is repeated thrice in Tawada’s poem. The scripts of “TIK” are shapeshifting seafarers, particularly in the Mediterranean and the Sea of Japan. TAWADA’S LITERARY AND POLITICAL INTERVENTIONS: LINEARDISCURSIVE WRITING AND GLOBAL PUBLISHING Tawada’s literary work in general disrupts reading fluency: The 2007 poem “Slavia in Berlin” (Slavia in Berlin) replaces German parts of speech with names of cities, states, countries, and continents around the world that acoustically resemble them (“Los Angeles” instead of “los” (off, away), “Finnland” instead of “finden” (to find), “München” (Munich) for “Münzen” (coins), etc.). 35 Tawada’s multilingual performances often incorporate German, Japanese, English, and sometimes even Chinese, Dutch, and French. Her audiences have to contend with a combination of illegibility, belated cognition, and gaps in understanding. Mishearings, misreadings, misunderstandings abound in the experiences of Tawada’s fictional characters and her semi-autobiographical accounts of life in Germany and Japan, as well as of extended stays in other parts of the world. In short, interruptions and gaps belong not only to the diegetic world of Tawada’s texts, but also to the very experience of reading them. Tawada’s disruptions of linear-discursive writing go hand in hand with her disruptions of monolingual fluency. In the case of Adventures of German Grammar, this critique takes on a medial dimension as a challenge to practices surrounding the production and circulation of the book as

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object and medium, as well as the constitution of readerships. To recall Yasemin Yildiz’s definition, in the monolingual paradigm, “individuals and social formations are imagined to possess one ‘true’ language only, their ‘mother tongue,’ and through this possession to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture, and nation.” 36 Tawada explicitly critiques monolingual fluency in her 1996 short text “Talisman”: “Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. They gave the impression that they could think and feel nothing but that which their language offers them so quickly and eagerly.” 37 Here, as Brian Lennon observes, the narrator’s “own position as a nonnative speaker of German makes her profoundly, physically wary of fluency in any language, of the exclusionary exuberance of monolingualism, its inherent self-celebration.” 38 “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” in particular, and Adventures of German Grammar more broadly, question the disruption of writing or fluency, but also the book as monomedial or monolingual. The book Adventures of German Grammar presents itself as medial palimpsest: Its cover features a faint black-and white photograph of what appears to be a book on German grammar, with Sino-Japanese ideograms and hiragana characters printed in bright colors strewn across the cover. The pages of the titular section are made to look as though they have been printed over faint copies of a grammar overview of German, while behind the texts in the section titled “Utopien” (utopias), one can see flowers in shades of gray. The section entitled “Die Mischschrift des Mondes” (The Mixed Writing of the Moon) features a poem in German, but with verb and adjective stems as well as nouns written with the SinoJapanese ideograms that correspond to their meaning. In short, Adventures of German Grammar is critically aware of its status as medium, and takes both the larger medial complex of the book as well as individual written signs as media, themes and objects. To what kind of circulation does this collection aspire, and what kind of readership does it address? More to the point, what practices associated with the publication and circulation of books and constitution of readerships does Adventures of German Grammar critique? Many of Tawada’s works pose challenges to a publishing industry that produces and circulates books for an imagined monolingual readership. Two key nodes in this landscape are the publication industry’s treatment of language difference, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, strategies employed by authors in order to reach a broader international readership. In his analysis of the publishing industry, Brian Lennon identifies the colliding forces of the plurilingual spirit of new emphases of comparative literature, and the monolingual letter of the publishing industry. Anglo-American publishing in particular, observes Lennon, imposes editorial pressures to write non-difficult English and elects to represent language difference in translation instead of allowing for the actual presence of language difference on the page. 39 He holds that typo-

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graphic conventions in Anglo-American publishing as well as authorialeditorial translations of foreign words are tied to constructions of reading markets that are quite baseless: monolingual readership at home and monolingual non-Anglophone readership abroad. 40 From the vantage point of literary production, Rebecca Walkowitz coins the term “born translated,” to designate texts—novels in particular—that are opportunistically “pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which they have, in fact, been composed.” 41 Walkowitz’s term complements Lennon’s observation about the occlusion and domestication of linguistic difference in Anglophone publishing, in that she observes that literary works—or rather, their authors—anticipate and preempt some practices associated with their production and circulation, in order to be widely translated. Both Lennon and Walkowitz contend with the dominant monolingual paradigm, according to which individuals only have one true language, the mother tongue, the only real language of literary production. Potent and maligned as it may be, however, monolingualism is often difficult to observe in the form of diktats, political traditions or agendas, as David Gramling and Yuliya Komska illustrate. 42 Even as the canon of world literature “takes the translated monolingual book as its most granular integer of political appearance,” Gramling maintains, “[m]onolingualism manages other languages; it does not oppose them.” 43 In short, the monolingual paradigm is as inconspicuous as it is far-reaching. Its influences on trends in literary production, circulation and reception can neither be easily traced or facilely labeled as malicious. To this global landscape of publishing and reception, Adventures of German Grammar poses a small-scale yet incisive challenge. Tawada aims to reach a heterogeneous readership, as suggested by her employment of two writing systems and languages that share few bilingual readers, but also her long-term choice of Konkursbuch Verlag as publisher. Lennon, Yildiz, and Walkowitz analyze monolingualism in literary production and publication, but there is also a preference for (linear-)discursivity in the publishing industry, admittedly more prevalent in the publication of prose than of poetry. Still, most commercially available literary works do not foreground the mediality of the written page and the practice of writing, thus positing the reader not only as monolingual but also as monomedial. The typo-topographic landscape of Adventures of German Grammar in general and “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” in particular oppose this trend. Even if a reader were to be a fluent reader of both Japanese and German, customary modes of literacy that rely on taking in a written sign or even a word as a whole will be insufficient for the kind of literacy that Tawada demands in these poems, since they rely on a combination of visual and aural reading in addition to reading for semantic sense. “TIK” continually and deliberately forces its readers to reconcile themselves to reading unfamiliar material presented in alternative combinations, axes and iterations. “MusikMaschineLärm”s very title

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refers to the possibility that the poem might appear as music to some readers and noise to others, or music in parts and noise in other parts. Admittedly, Adventures of German Grammar’s literary language is mostly German and it is printed mostly in the Latin alphabet. The choice of font Futura, however, harmonizes with a literary project in which both the Latin and Sino-Japanese writing systems are subject to fragmentation and mutation. Tawada aims to confront her German-speaking readers with the strangeness of Japanese script, but she also aims to render the familiar Latin script strange. 44 The Futura font is sans serif and minimalistic. Letters like “t” that are written with rounded stems and corners even in sans serif fonts like Arial and Calibri are, in Futura, composed entirely of straight lines. The letter “t” looks like a simple and symmetrical cross, while letters such as “a” and “p” are written with rounded forms that are almost perfect circles. The choice of font here presents elemental geometric forms, the line and the circle, from which one can build all letters of the alphabet, and to which one can reduce it with a material-visual eye attentive to fragmentation, as Tawada’s entire readerly and writerly practice is. It is not surprising given these factors that Tawada’s work has been published since the 1980s by Konkursbuch Verlag, priding itself on its quaint, marginal status and in fact launched as a reaction against Suhrkamp Verlag, one of the leading European publishers of literature, particularly from the twentieth century. In the words of its co-founder and Tawada translator Peter Pörtner, “Konkursbuch is ‘betwixt and between’ in the best sense. It stands joyfully athwart the Zeitgeist.” 45 If we also recall Lennon’s critique of Anglo-American publishing practices that seek to contain, manage, or obliterate plurilingualism to serve the preferences of a monolingual readership, Tawada’s presentation of strongly plurilingual material can be read as a challenge to publishing practices from outside the Anglo-American axis, but also from the margins of the German publishing landscape. “THE LETTER AS LITERATURE’S POLITICAL AND POETIC BODY” “schreiben und reden in einen heruntergekommenen sprachen sein ein demonstrieren, sein ein es zeigen, wie weit es gekommen sein mit ein solchenen” 46 Ernst Jandl, “von einen sprachen” 47 “Writing and speaking in an run-down tongue be an demonstrating, be an showing, how far it be comen with such an one” 48 When you think of all these debates surrounding the choice of script in the wide swath of land between East Asia and Turkey, it seems rather astonishing that people who use the Latin alphabet never

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seem to question their own choice of script. I am surely one of the few authors in Europe who often asks herself whether European languages couldn’t also be written using different forms of writing. Writing with European ideograms would be an art project I haven’t yet put into practice, but it’s already had an influence on my writing. 49

In her 2016 essay “Ein ungeladener Gast” [An uninvited guest], Tawada revels in Ernst Jandl’s percussive music with German grammar and cites the poem “von einen sprachen” [“From an language”] as a case in point 50. Tawada does not refer to the visual dimension of the poem, but the percussive rhythm she enjoys in this poem and in Jandl more generally is not only aural but also visual. In “von einen sprachen,” the ubiquitous use of the indefinite article “ein” [a/an] and the ending “-en” (which builds infinitives and substantives from verbs) ensure that almost every word ends with “in” or “en.” This exaggerated use of rhyme and alliteration introduces letteral and visual redundancy into the typography of the poem (with a preponderance of “e”s, “i”s and “n”s and very similar looking syllables). It also intensifies both the prevalence of the syllables “ein” and “en” in the German language and the semantic excess that already exists in the poem (“demonstrieren” [demonstrating] and “zeigen” [showing]). Here, linguistic excess at the level of typography, sound, and meaning is at once alienating and harmonious. Tawada’s essay on contemporary aesthetics, “The Letter as Literature’s Political and Poetic Body,” articulates the cultural and political stakes of such literary projects that are at work on the visual, aural, and semantic dimensions of language. Latin alphabet users’ power and privilege resides in not having to justify their choice of script, or worse, be criticized for their backwardness in not reforming it. The history of writing in the world, especially as it was written by Western scholars, directed its skepticism and criticism to Eastern—and particularly Chinese—writing. Inverting this power relation in her experimental poetry, Tawada engages with Jandl, who questioned the visual, aural, and semantic unity of the German language from within. Despite his particular renown in the German-speaking world, Jandl experimented with other languages (particularly English), and his oeuvre interlinks with the international concretist movement, whose vectors of influence lie partially outside Europe, and some of whose proponents looked to ideographic writing as an ideal. In the translational and medial drama that Tawada sets between ideographic and alphabetic writing, she does not use “European ideograms” per se, but the individual written signs of Latin and Sino-Japanese writing systems. Tawada’s poems “TIK” and “MusikMaschineLärm” render their texts opaque, not only because German may not be immediately intelligible to speakers of Japanese and vice versa, but because alphabetic and Sino-Japanese writing are rendered strange to their own readers as well. The two scripts’ recombinatory pos-

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sibilities, visual resemblances between smaller units of ideograms and letters, as well as the semantic meaning they produce, demand vigilant reading practices that step outside the implicit self-evidence of mother tongues. NOTES 1. Tawada’s Cornell Lecture on Contemporary Aesthetics was later published in Asia-Pacific Journal. Tawada, “The Letter,” 7. 2. This essay will refer to these written signs as ideograms when referring to them generally. Ideograms as they relate to and provide cues for sound will be referred to as phonographs. They will be termed pictographs when referring to their visual presentation of things in the world, and as logograms when referring to their function in language as distinct from their visual and acoustic dimensions. 3. Perloff, Unoriginal Genius, 64; Fahlström, “Hipy papy bthuthdththuthda bthuthdy,” 108–120. 4. Erber, Breaching the Frame, 134-137. 5. Manovich, Language of New Media, 18-48. This revelation of new within old media does not mean that there is a clean historical break between old and new media, and in fact supports existing theories that the language of new media bears important similarities to the communicative principles of old media. See Koepnick and McGlothlin, eds, After the Digital Divide?, 4. 6. de Bary, “World Literature,” 8. 7. An in-depth investigation into Tawada’s potential engagement with Brazilian concretist Haroldo de Campos and the concretist fascination with ideographic writing lies beyond the purview of this essay. It is important to note, however, that de Campos was fascinated by so-called ideographic writing and influenced by Ezra Pound. Pound edited and popularized American orientalist Ernest Fenollosa’s essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry” (1918, 1936). In this essay, Fenollosa claims that Chinese notation is not a series of arbitrary symbols but rather “based upon a vivid shorthand picture of the operations of nature” (6). European writing, according to Fenollosa, operates by “sheer convention,” whereas Chinese writing is based on “natural suggestion” (6). Ezra Pound, the poet of the Cantos, which incorporate both Chinese characters and quotations from languages other than English, acted as broker of the first exchanges between de Campos and the Japanese language artist Kitasono Katsue. In one of his letters to Katsue, de Campos expresses his conviction in the “kanjification” of poetry (Erber, Breaching the Frame, 127–129). For a detailed analysis of the “dialogue by deletions” between Pound and Fenollosa, see drafts of Fenollosa’s essays and Haun Saussy’s introduction in Fenollosa and Pound, Chinese Written Character. For a detailed history of Brazilian-Japanese vectors of influence regarding visuality of writing in a nonalphabetic writing system, see Erber, Breaching the Frame, 122–144. 8. Christensen was fascinated by the alphabet and the Fibonacci series, while Petrarch’s Il Canzoniere contains an introduction and 365 poems, one poem for each day of the year. 9. Clarke, “Information,” 168. 10. Clarke, “Information,” 164. 11. Erber, Breaching the Frame, 125, 137–38. The preposition “nach” is most commonly used to mean “to” or “after” (in terms of time), but in the case of literary works, it can also mean “in the manner of.” 12. Tawada’s poetry shares this defining typographic feature with that of one of her key literary inspirations, Paul Celan. For a detailed analysis of Celan’s “photo-graphic” images and his recourse to the genre of landscape poetry, see Baer, Remnants of Song, 231–255.

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13. Römer, Dichter ohne eigene Sprache?, 10–11. 14. Tawada, Akzentfrei, 45. 15. For a more detailed account of Tawada’s literary activity inspired by Jandl, see Stuckatz, Ernst Jandl, 312–317. 16. Admittedly, it is notoriously difficult to describe avant-garde aesthetics in general, since the avant-garde is not a single concept but a conglomeration of various movements and projects. 17. Mersch, “Transmedial Strategies,” p.5; Stuckatz, Ernst Jandl, 24. 18. “Heruntergekommen” is a multivalent word, meaning “dilapidated,” “decayed,” “derelict,” or “corrupt.” The author has elected to translate it as “run-down.” This choice more closely reflects the sense of physical movement in the German word, which literally means “come-down.” 19. Stuckatz, Ernst Jandl, 7. 20. Neundlinger, “Einleitung,” 14. 21. Coulmas, Writing Systems, 122. 22. Hiragana are derived from cursive forms of Chinese logograms, and katakana were originally used as glosses of Chinese script. The hiragana derivations from logograms are apparent only in a handful of signs, and not immediately apparent without explicit study. 23. For Tawada’s resistance to monolingualism, see Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 109–42; Lennon, In Babel’s Shadow, 20–21; Matsunaga, “Schreiben als Übersetzung;” Kaindl, “Of Dragons and Translators.” For Tawada’s treatment of the constraints of German and Japanese as national languages, see Koiran, Schreiben in fremder Sprache; Kim, “Ethnic Irony.” 24. Yasemin Yildiz observes that Tawada’s bilingualism is one “addressing itself to ‘monolinguals’—that is, an audience most likely only fluent in one of those languages—and confronting them with perspectives gained in an unfamiliar language” (Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 115-16). Yildiz’s observation points to a key paradox in Tawada’s work: On the one hand, it critiques monolingual and monocultural paradigms that are significant for German and Japanese histories and languages. On the other hand, it offers perspectives and experiences that are striking because they are addressed to monolinguals. In a literary performance by Tawada, for example, one at once confronts the perspectives gained in an unfamiliar language and experiences gaps between languages when only one part of the audience laughs at an unusual observation or turn of phrase. 25. Tawada, Verwandlungen; Tawada, “Rabbi Löw;” Tawada, Talisman; Tawada, “Die Krone aus Gras;” Tawada, “Fremde Wasser.” 26. Tawada, “Die Krone aus Gras,” 67. 27. Tawada, “Die Krone aus Gras,” 69. 28. Tawada, “Canned Foreign;” Tawada, Überseezungen; Tawada, “Letter;” Tawada, Schwager in Bordeaux. 29. Gelb, Study of Writing, 240. 30. Lurie, “Development of Japanese Writing,” 180. For a summary of alphabetic biases in the study of writing and challenges launched at Gelb, see Baroni, “Alphabetic vs. non-alphabetic writing,”129–130. 31. Lurie, “Development of Japanese Writing.” 32. Coulmas, Writing Systems, 91. 33. Coulmas, Writing Systems, 111–136. 34. Stroud, “Art of Writing”; Knight, “Roman Alphabet”; Cross, “Invention and Development.” 35. Tawada, “Slavia in Berlin,” 7. 36. Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 2. 37. Yoko Tawada, “Canned Foreign.” 38. Lennon, In Babel’s Shadow, 21. 39. Lennon, In Babel’s Shadow, 2, 5. 40. Lennon, In Babel’s Shadow, 9.

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41. Walkowitz, Born Translated, 3-4. Walkowitz gives her term “born translated” so many definitions and applies it to such diverse literary works that the term is difficult to define. Jan Steyn observes in his review of Walkowitz’s book, “[a]s Walkowitz’s catalog of ways to be born translated grows, it begins to seem that it would take a very rare contemporary novel not in some way to belong to the category” (Steyn, “Born Translated,” 244). 42. Gramling, Invention of Monolingualism, 18; Komska, “Trade Publisher Archives,” 292. 43. Gramling, Invention of Monolingualism, 11. 44. Many thanks to Claudia Gehrke of Konkursbuch Verlag for supplying the name of the font. Futura is Tawada’s font of choice in nearly all of her books in German, published by Konkursbuch Verlag. The Futura font is not specific to Tawada and is used in many books published by Konkursbuch Verlag. This is not to say, however, that the font is not particularly well-suited to Tawada’s literary practice. 45. Pörtner, “Konkursbuch.” 46. Jandl, Bearbeitung der Mütze, 122. 47. Jandl, Bearbeitung der Mütze, 122. 48. Translation by Gizem Arslan. The German original’s syntax and grammar are deliberately and conspicuously faulty, particularly the use of infinitives (even when the verb needs to be conjugated) and of the indefinite article “ein” [a/an]. This version aims to reflect these idiosyncrasies in the English translation. 49. Yoko Tawada, Cornell Lecture on Contemporary Aesthetics, 2009 50. Yoko Tawada 2016, 45

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arslan, Gizem. “Metamorphoses of the Letter in Paul Celan, Georges Perec, and Yoko Tawada.” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2013. Baer, Ulrich. Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Baroni, Antonio. “Alphabetic vs. Non-Alphabetic Writing: Linguistic Fit and Natural Tendencies.” Rivista di Linguistica 23, no. 2 (2011): 127–159. de Bary, Brett. “World Literature in the Shadow of Translation: Reconsidering Tawada Yôko.” Special Issue of POETICA: An International Journal of Linguistic-Literary Studies no. 78 (2012): 1–16. Brandt, Bettina. “Schnitt durchs Auge: Surrealistische Bilder bei Yoko Tawada, Emine Sevgi Özdamar und Herta Müller.” Text + Kritik IX (2006): 74–83. Clarke, Bruce. “Information.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 157–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Coulmas, Florian. The Writing Systems of the World. The Language Library. New York, NY: B. Blackwell, 1989. Cross, Frank Moore. “The Invention and Development of the Alphabet.” In The Origins of Writing, edited by Wayne M. Senner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989, 77–90. Erber, Pedro R. Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2015. Fahlström, Öyvind. “Hipy papy bthuthdththuthda bthuthdy—Manifesto for Concrete Poetry.” In Öyvind Fahlström i etern: manipulera världen: Fåglar i Sverige, Den helige Torsten Nilsson, bilder & manuskript Öyvind Fahlström on the air: manipulating the world: Birds in Sweden, The Holy Torsten Nilsson, pictures & manuscripts, edited by Teddy Hultberg, translated by Stephen Croall, 109–121. Stockholm: Sveriges radios förlag Fylkingen, 1999.

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Fenollosa, Ernest, and Ezra Pound. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Edited by Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Gelb, Ignace J. A Study of Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Gramling, David. The Invention of Monolingualism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2016. Jandl, Ernst. Die Bearbeitung der Mütze. Sammlung Luchterhand. Darmstadt; Luchterhand, 1981. Kaindl, Klaus. “Of Dragons and Translators: Foreignness as a Principle of Life Yoko Tawada’s St. George and the Translator’.” In Transfiction: Research into the Realities of Translation Fiction, edited by Klaus Kaindl and Karlheinz Spitzl, 87–101. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014. Kim, John Namjun. “Ethnic Irony: The Poetic Parabasis of the Promiscuous Personal Pronoun in Yoko Tawada’s ‘Eine Leere Flasche’ (A Vacuous Flask).” The German Quarterly 83, no. 3 (2010): 333–352. Knight, Stan. “The Roman Alphabet.” In The World’s Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, 312–332. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Koepnick, Lutz P., and Erin Heather McGlothlin, eds. After the Digital Divide?: German Asthetic Theory in the Age of New Media. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. Koiran, Linda. Schreiben in fremder Sprache: Yoko Tawada und Galsan Tschinag. München: Iudicium, 2009. Komska, Yuliya. “Trade Publisher Archives: Repositories of Monolingualism?” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 53, no. 3: 275–296. “Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke.” Accessed October 1, 2018. https://www. konkursbuch.com/. Lennon, Brian. In Babel’s Shadow: Multilingual Literatures, Monolingual States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001. Matsunaga, Miho. “‘Schreiben als Übersetzung’: Die Dimension der Übersetzung in den Werken von Yoko Tawada.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 12, no. 3 (2002): 532–546. Mersch, Dieter. “Transmedial Strategies in in the Aesthetic—The Literary and Its Other.” translated by Rett Rossi. Paper presented at the Conference “Intermedial Literature: Concerning Image, Sound & Writing in Contemporary Literature,” Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, September 2008. Neundlinger, Helmut. “Einleitung: von ‘tagenglas’ zu ‘leuchten.’” In “Von einen sprachen”: Poetologische Untersuchungen zum Werk Ernst Jandls, edited by Michael Hammerschmid and Helmut Neundlinger, 11–17. Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2008. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Römer, Veronika. Dichter ohne eigene Sprache?: Zur Poetik Ernst Jandls. Berlin: Lit, 2012. Steyn, Jan. “Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature by Rebecca Walkowitz (Review).” Comparative Literature Studies 54, no. 1: 242–245. Stroud, Ronald S. “The Art of Writing in Ancient Greece.” In The Origins of Writing, edited by Wayne M. Senner, 103–19. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Stuckatz, Katja. Ernst Jandl und die internationale Avantgarde: über einen Beitrag zur modern Weltdichtung. Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2016. Tawada, Yōko. Akzentfrei. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2016. ———. “Canned Foreign.” Translated by Susan Bernofsky. Accessed May 20, 2016. http://www.konkursbuch.com/html/Leseproben/yokoenglisch.htm. ———. “Das Tor des Übersetzers oder Celan liest Japanisch.” In Talisman, 121–134. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1996. ———. Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2007. ———. Fremde Wasser: Vorlesungen und wissenschaftliche Beiträge. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2012. ———. Talisman. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1996. ———. “The Letter as Literature’s Political and Poetic Body.” Translated by Susan Bernofsky. The Asia-Pacific Journal 34, no. 1: 1–10.

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———. Überseezungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2002. ———. Verwandlungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1998. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

SEVEN Sprachmutter The Death of the Mother Tongue Paul McQuade

“The age when women were mothers is over.” 1 This remarkable sentence appears in the second part of Tawada Yōko’s novel Yuki no renshūsei (2014). 2 Developing from Tawada’s interest in the media furor around the polar bear cub Knut, who died in the Berlin Zoological Garden in March 2011, this novel imagines the biographies of Knut’s female forebears: Tosca, a bear working with the trainer Ursula Böttcher in the then DDR, and an unnamed Soviet writer in the first section, “Grandma’s Theory of Devolution.” 3 The novel ends with an account of Knut’s life, in the third section, which appears to have distracted from the book’s effect as a composite of several voices, rendering it instead into the story of Knut—evinced in the French translation of this novel by Bernard Banoun as Histoire de Knut (2016)—with the first sections serving merely as backstory to the novel’s only male narrative voice. While many commentators have naturally focused on the overt themes of animal-human relationships in this novel, what interests me here is the problem of maternity and the linguistic tie: a theme that concerns not simply this novel but a common metaphorics at work throughout all of Tawada’s writing. It is around this statement—“the age when women were mothers is over”— that we will orient our reading of a text that is unique in Tawada’s oeuvre, representative as it is of a shift in her linguistic practice. 4 The questions we must ask here concern the nexus of the conceptual apparatus that bears the name mother tongue. If, as Tawada suggests, the age when women were mothers is over, then what exactly is it that has passed? 101

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And how are we to understand its end, which is the history and dominion of a maternal ideology and maternal language? Which raises the question: When we read a text, any text, beyond the frame of exophony, migrancy, and so forth, is it language, Sprache/語, or the mother/母, die Mutter, we must speak of? And yet in raising the question of the mother tongue, we appear to risk breathing life into an antiquated notion. Modern linguistics and studies of second-language acquisition prefer terms such as first language (L1) and native language, by which it seems possible to bypass this romantic cliché. In linguistic studies concerned with territories beyond Western Europe, it has been especially important to do away with this term, which, as Thomas Bonfiglio demonstrates, emerges in the European Middle Ages around the cult of the Virgin Mary. The primal scene of language: an infant imbibing words with mother’s milk. This image draws on themes of lactation and sacramental haemophagy as part of a larger effort to figuratively corporealize language, which pre-exists in a social field prior to the event of birth. It is precisely through these metaphors that language and the language community—nation or otherwise—partake in the devotion of religious commitment as much as the intimacy of the parent-child bond. 5 And in so doing, they inscribe language—like the machine of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony 6 —in a tattoo, the ink appearing undifferentiated from the surface of the skin. And yet, for all that, this concept of language, steeped in medieval religiosity, and seemingly historically removed from our present, is nevertheless inherited as a disciplinary conceit. The philology of German Romanticism as much as the virulent linguistic politics of the Third Reich cast a shadow over the present of linguistic thought. One land, one language, one nation. Christopher Hutton writes, of the linguistic Weltanschauung of the Third Reich: It was the “quasi-natural” primal bond between mother, child and language that was both the origin of the Volk and its point of maximum vulnerability [my emphasis]. The language was imbibed with the mother’s milk, and that socializing moment shaped the child in the image of the language, and fused it onto the body of the Volk through the intense emotional bond to the mother. 7

Can we truly say that this is limited to the linguistic politics of the Third Reich? In what sense does this logic not underpin not only national language, but language, as such? What can and cannot count as language? Minority language, major, dialect or sociolect, this image of the priority and naturalness of language figures in every language community. It is a network of power, infused with maternal metaphor, which has not lessened with the diminution of the term mother tongue, nor with the putative decline of nation-states and their idioms. Whether we refer to it as a Muttersprache, langue maternelle, cainnt mhàthaireil, or 母語 (bogo), each of

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these bears within it the history of this rhetorical maneuver by which social relations are naturalized through figuration. The mother tongue is an ethnocentric linguistics which privileges the Volk by use of the “mother” as the figural index of the linguistic field (i.e. a discreet “language,” a Volksprache). 8 It is in this way that we must remember that the ideology of the mother tongue is not simply a matter or whether or not the term mother tongue exists in a language—as a translated term or as cognate—but a matter of whether the tropology of the mother tongue is operative. Which is to say that its metaphorical figuration governs the social arrangements of kinship ties, property, territory, and the fiction of ethnicity. A conceit, and symptom, summed up succinctly in a comment by the director Pedro Almodovàr: “The mother is at the centre of all relationships: with men, women, children, society, land and reality.” 9 The term mother tongue itself makes clear the ethnolinguistic nationalism criticized by those who take aim at native language and the ideology of the native speaker (“native speakerism”). 10 In too readily assuming that it is possible to do away with the mother tongue, something goes astray in the prestidigitation between mother tongue and native speaker. I would like to suggest here that we view terms like native language, native speaker, or first language as epithets which serve to veil the stakes of the mother tongue: namely, the incorporation of language, familial relations, and territory, through maternal metaphors. 11 It is from this point of view that we must begin to stake out an alternative conceptuality in order to understand the figural economy of Tawada’s work in toto. Her exophony cannot be thought within the mother tongue, but it is also not a movement against, or a retreat from it. Consider the following: Many authors have such a pathological (krankhaftes) relationship with their mother tongue and avoid living abroad. But I see a chance in this destroyed (zerstörten) relationship to the mother tongue and to language in general (my emphasis). One becomes a word-fetishist. Every piece, or even every letter, can be touched and changed; you no longer see a semantic totality (semantische Einheit), and do not allow yourself to be taken into the flow of speech. One stays still and takes close-ups of the details. The enlargement of the component parts is disorienting because it shows entirely new images of an object with which one was intimately familiar. Just as one’s own mother cannot be recognised when seen through a microscope, one cannot recognise one’s own mother tongue in a close-up. But art is not a matter of portraying the mother in a way in which she can be recognised. 12

It is clear that for Tawada one must be careful not to indulge such a pathological relationship to the mother tongue—native language, first language, L1, etc.—in which a phobia of the foreignness or Fremdheit of a foreign language means it must be kept at a distance. Such an attitude is characteristic of a pathology centered on the presumption of monolin-

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gualism. It is simple enough to critique such a presumption: ethnolinguistic, racial, territorialized. A fear of difference as endangering the locus of an identity conceived of in terms of self-sameness. Like an immunological response to this discourse comes the inevitable glorification of multilingualism as the celebration of difference, hybridity, and betweenness. 13 Our problem remains, however, that the relationship to and between language remains within the untroubled thought of the maternal paradigm, without the destruction or Zerstörung of the relationship to the mother tongue. Indeed, it is easy, as Deleuze writes, to “conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them nonetheless remains a homogeneous system in equilibrium.” 14 It is a problem whereby even in its heterogeneity language is articulated in units which correspond to cultural sovereignties. 15 This problem persists even in work which celebrates the need and importance of translation. In Kate Briggs’ recent This Little Art, Briggs characterizes the anglophone reception of books in translation thus: We receive these books newly made by the hands of translators, and the small contacts that those hands make, between translator and writer, reader and translator, language and language, culture and culture, experience and experience are, as Edith Grossman puts it, as vital to our continued reading and writing, to the vitality of our languages, our cultures and experiences as the books themselves. 16

A dizzying array of conjunctive “ands”—one and the other, in a relation that remains opaque save for an interaction facilitated by translation. One culture and another. Linguistic sovereignties whose borders are molded by the process of translation. Briggs, as a translator, and a reader of translated books, is praising the necessity and importance of translation, all while remaining within a paradigm which views literature as the repository of a national culture, even as that culture is disseminated, mixed, and problematized. Exophonic writers trouble such a paradigm because their work cannot (or is not permitted to) occupy a traditional place within a national literature. The exophonic “outside” is a site where political and social tensions, as much as the issue of translation, surface. Yasemin Yildiz even goes so far as to categorizes Tawada’s work as indicative of a “problem of inclusion” within the mother tongue, as opposed to other writers whose relationship to language is formed in exile, suppression, dialectical subordination, and so forth. 17 And yet even these linguistic relations—of suppression and minority language—can rearticulate the problematic of the mother tongue which is undermined in Tawada’s work. The Nobel laureate Herta Müller, from a German-speaking minority in Romania, provides an example of this. In a speech delivered on the occasion of the Radka Denemarková, translator of Müller’s The Hunger Angel (Atemschau-

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kel, 2009), being conferred the Magnesia Litera Award for translation, Müller writes of her own relation to language, not as “destroyed” but as “vulnerable”: Your mother tongue feels as direct and unconditional as your own skin, and it is just as vulnerable if held in low esteem, treated with contempt, or even banned by others. Having grown up in a village speaking a dialect and learning standard German at high school, I found it difficult to find my bearings in the official Romanian spoken in the capital. For the first two years in the city it was easier for me to locate the right street in an unfamiliar part of town than the right word in the national language. Romanian was like pocket money. No sooner would I be tempted by something in a shop window than I would discover I was short of the money needed to buy it. There were so many words I did not know, and those that I did would not come as quickly as they were needed. Today, however, I know that this kind of inching along in another language, the hesitancy that forced me below my intellectual level, also gave me time to marvel at how objects were transformed by the Romanian language. 18

Let us take a moment to recall the metaphor by which the mother tongue is deployed here: “as direct and unconditional as your own skin.” We are never far from the ultimate anteriority of the mother tongue, as close as skin, as unconditional as mother’s love. In Müller’s work, this confrontation—eye-to-eye, in Müller’s terms—between two languages fundamentally alters the mother tongue (German) through the richness of the foreign language (Romanian): I became more and more aware that the Romanian language had words that were more sensuous, more in tune with my perception, than my mother tongue. I would not now want to live without this string of transformations, in speech or in writing. There is not a single Romanian sentence in any of my books. But Romanian is always with me when I write because it has grown into my way of seeing the world. 19

While the foreign language is capable, through its richness and territorial propriety (recall that it is in the capital that Müller deals with Romanian, not the dialectical province of her “own” language), of operating at a subterranean level within the mother tongue, it never displaces the mother tongue as the locus. The mother tongue remains sedimented, prior, anterior, even as it is enriched by another language. As Müller writes: “Your mother tongue comes to you without any effort on your part. It is a dowry that comes into your possession without you noticing. It is then judged by another language that has been added later and that comes from somewhere else.” 20 The relation to language, however, is not zestört or destroyed. Die Muttersprache, the mother tongue, remains as it is: immoveable in its priority.

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Here we reach a turning point. Are we to say then, simply, that there is no mother tongue? That because it is, in the end, a fantasy of a community grounded in the sentimentality of language, therefore something to be dismissed? Our work here is precisely to demonstrate that while it is possible to dismiss the ideology of the mother tongue and native speaker, understanding and countering its tropological effects is another matter. We cannot state with polemic surety that there is no mother tongue. 21 This simple dismissal, notably made by Deleuze and Guattari, effaces the effects of the concept of the mother tongue in social and institutional reality. We can show that a language bound up intimately within the parental-child matrix, taken in with mother’s milk and remaining beyond the effects of socialization, has never existed. Yet this project would fail to take stake of this concept’s profound and far-reaching effects as a fantasy which regulates the heterogeneity of languages. In Müller’s case, Romanian enriches her writing without a single Romanian sentence being written and the language does not put in question the status of the mother tongue, which remains as close to her as her own skin. 22 For Tawada, however, the mother tongue is not seamless, and one cannot claim birth as the right to language: [Monika] said that the woman was an “Eingeborene” (a native). I had completely forgotten that this German word existed. If it is possible to describe a “Native American” as an “Eingeborene,” then we can understand a “native speaker” as someone who is born into (hineingeboren) a language [in English in the original]. I was born into Japanese in this way, the way someone is thrown into a sack. Since then these words have been for me an exterior skin. The German language, however, is something I ingested, and has sat in my stomach ever since. 23

For Müller, the mother tongue is a “direct and unconditional” skin; for Tawada, it is an external layer, a fact further emphasized in Katakoto no uwagoto, where Tawada describes Japanese as clothing (衣服, ifuku). 24 Language does not have a direct, “unconditional” relation. It is not a skin, nor does it condition a psychic interiority, seen, for example, in the short story “Tabula Rasa” in the collection Kitsunetsuki, or in a more developed form in “Eine Leere Flasche” in Überseezungen, where the reader encounters with the question: “In what language do you dream?” The narrator of that story, a woman who dreams in Afrikaans, despite not speaking it, is told: “People dream in the language of the country (Sprache des Landes) in which the soul lives.” The narrator answers: “I have many souls and many tongues.” 25 This multiplication—of the soul, of the psyche itself—and of tongues—Sprache as much as Zungen—flies in the face of the ideology of the mother tongue. The problem we are taking up here in the figure of the mother can be seen throughout Tawada’s writing. She writes, for example, in “Sieben Geschichten der Sieben Mütter” that “Mothers have played a huge role in

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my life thus far.” Then clarifying: “I don’t mean my biological mother, but other mothers, andere Mütter: die Stiefmutter, die Gebärmutter, die Doktormutter, die Perlmutter, das Muttermal, die Muttererde, das Mutterseelenallein.” 26 These words are mother-compounds. We have stepmothers, the womb, a doctoral supervisor, mother of pearl, a mole, topsoil, and Being-Completely-Alone. She continues: What fascinates me, in the image of the mother, has nothing to do with nature or with family. Rather it has to do with a space, from which thoughts and images emerge and develop. The air in this space has a dense, material quality like water in a womb. In it it is often impossible to distinguish what lives in the space from the space itself. The doctoral supervisor, die Doktormutter, is in this sense, the ur-form of the mother. 27

This formulation of the mother seems to fly in the face of so many biological presuppositions. It tells us that the ur-form of the mother is not a biological link but a social arrangement and a figuration whose consequences are material. What is signified by the term “mother” is simply a body or object that is necessary for the tropological arrangement termed “maternity,” which thus takes the signified “mother” as its origin. This new age, where women are no longer mothers, is one in which what goes under the signifier “mother” need not be a female body. The structure, however, remains the same. In a memoir of her own pregnancy, Chitra Ramaswamy, an Anglo-Indian journalist living in Scotland, interviews the Spanish director Pedro Almodòvar. In the context of a discussion of Almodóvar’s All About My Mother, Ramaswamy writes: Transformation is Almodóvar’s great theme: child to adult, man to woman, woman to mother. All About My Mother teaches us that anyone can become a mother, or for that matter a woman, if they desire it, enact it, embody it and live it. If we cannot carry babies in our bodies we can still summon motherhood into our being through acts of will. We can mother without being mothers. We can mother without being women. We can be mothers without giving birth. We can mother without having children at all. 28

This is a liberatory view of maternity, and a familiar jubilance. Just as multilingualism comes as the supposed counter of a presumed monolingualism, this opening of the “mother”—its place in structure—seems to counter the genealogical fantasy of a biologically deterministic heterosexual reproductive system. It is no coincidence that Yuki no renshūsei references the so-called Rabenmutter, a derogatory term for “bad mothers” which is used to refer to Tosca in the novel. Working women in Germany even now suffer this slur, itself a mother-compound blurring the humananimal distinction. Unlike the raven, it is the proper place of a mother to rear children, to raise them, to induct them in language and culture. Even a critic as sophisticated as Barbara Johnson is still capable of claiming that

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a “child comes into language through the mother’s address. It is her job to transform the little animal into a little human being.” 29 And yet here, on the knife-edge of promise, anyone can be a mother, even “without being mothers.” It is for this reason that, in Yuki no renshūsei, a Russian man, to a polar bear, occupies the same place in the structure of maternity as any biological mother. And yet still this figure of the mother—beyond any determining biological sex—comes to guard the symbolic pact of the social link from disturbance and displacement, lest the various systems predicated upon this “maternity” of the origin be undone. This structure is precisely what is at stake in the tropological arrangement of the mother tongue. Let us look to Yuki no renshūsei to see this logic in effect. At this point in the novel, the polar bear narrator of the first section has defected to West Berlin, where she is being encouraged, rather forcefully, to write her memoirs by a liberal literary organization: The following day, Wolfgang came to visit me for the first time in a while. We spoke about the ape story [Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”, “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie”]. “If you’ve got the time to read I think you should use it to write,” he said with a pained expression. “Reading is a waste of time for writers. The time you spend reading other writers’ books is time you’re not writing your own.” “But reading is good German practice, isn’t it? If I write in German you won’t need to translate it. It’ll save you time, won’t it?” “No, you have to write in your mother tongue. You have to pour your feelings out naturally.” “What’s a mother tongue?” “The words of your mother.” “I’ve never spoken to my mother.” “Even if you’ve never spoken to her, your mother is your mother.” “I don’t think she spoke Russian.” “Ivan is your mother, or have you forgotten? The time when women were mothers is over.” 30

One need not stress the reference to Kafka (and there are many in Yuki no renshūsei) to demonstrate the logic of what Wolfgang is saying: it is perfectly circular and circularly absurd. The mother is the mother. Even if a child has never spoken to her, the mother tongue is the words of this mother, even if that mother is male. What appears here as remarkably modern was, however, always the case—it is not the mother Dante invokes in his praise for the vernacular, but the wet nurse. There was always the possibility of prosthesis, often thermalized from a female perspective in the domain of speculative fiction: Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, or Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season. There has been no lack of problematizing this structure of maternity because it is always the sociolinguistic link which triumphs over biology. And yet it is this structure of maternity—even maternity beyond the mother, the female body, maternity simply as a practice, an étude or renshū, 練習—that determines the clearest channel of pure speech, how one will understand a language as a mother tongue, privileged in its command of the psyche

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by a naturalness and priority that cannot be undone by reproductive technology, adoption, or displacement. Tangling the threads of biology, sociality, and linguistics, the mother tongue appears as an impossible knot. The mother tongue is the language of the mother. The mother is the one who gives language. Round and round we go, in a tautological circle from which neither psychoanalysis nor linguistics has broken free. 31 Even those writers considered exophones are capable of operating within the logic of the mother tongue for all that they have supposedly left theirs behind. Consider Jhumpa Lahiri, who writes in In Other Words: I have to listen to those [first Italian manuscript] readers, I have to follow their advice. I have to remove the incorrect or wrong word and look for another. I can’t defend my choice: one can’t contradict a native speaker. I have to accept that in Italian I am partly deaf and blind, and so I’m afraid of being a spurious writer. 32

This is Ann Goldstein’s translation of Lahiri’s Italian which states: “Non posso difendere la mia scelta: non si può contraddire un madrelingua.” 33 Un madrelingua in Italian, meaning both a native speaker as well as being the name for first language or la lingua materna. We are firmly within the nativist logic of the mother tongue here. The status of the mother, and the mother tongue, is the last bastion of surety in language: it cannot be contradicted. And it is only a native speaker, that is, one who possesses the birthright to this tongue, eine Eingeborene, who may access it. That the mother tongue has many children appears only to increase the desire for her/it [sie]. Consider the famous passage from Joyce’s Ulysses: “Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life.” 34 Joyce terms paternity a legal fiction—it is only the mother who guarantees the line in the last instance. But unlike Joyce, and unlike the surety with which Freud tells us that “no one possesses more than one mother, and the relation to her is based on an event that is not open to any doubt and cannot be repeated,” 35 it is language itself that Tawada tells us places in doubt the surety of the mother and her infallible maternity: “Everyone as a child often thought that their mother might not be their ‘actual’ mother but a stepmother,” she writes. Further: This allegation comes from a knowledge that is not available to most adults: What is in the belly of the mother cannot be what signals itself with the word “I”. Because there is a world in there that is entirely different to the one out here. Just as one cannot remain oneself after death, one cannot be the same before and after birth. And so each child is born a counterfeit. A child is lost in being born, and another child takes its place. That is/am I. [Das ist/bin ICH] 36

The third and last section of Yuki no renshūsei demonstrates this fact profoundly. From the perspective of Knut, the Japanese text utilizes the language’s ability to communicate without a grammatical subject. There is,

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in this text, no “I,” no “ich.” It is only some pages later that, by the intercession of the third person (“das ist”) Knut is forced to take on the first person and learn to say: I am. Here it is not a matter of, as in Müller, language coming without condition, like a dowry, a skin inherited from one’s mother which will garb the locus of the speaker. It is instead language as a matter of surfaces that exist in a social field. Far from the priority and interiority of the mother tongue, which then interacts with a social “outside” of the family, language is a social casing. In Knut’s case, a box at which he scratches (and the verb “to scratch” [kaku], in Japanese, as Tawada has dealt with elsewhere, is also a homophone for “to write”). 37 Here, for comparison, are the original Japanese, Tawada’s German translation, and my translation of the Japanese: 力強い腕の持ち主は、ミルクをくれる前に必ず熱っぽく「クヌート」と何度も呼 ぶので、ミルクを飲みたいという気持ちそのものを「クヌート」と名付けることに した。 飲み始めると暖かさが上から下へ道を作る。その道がクヌートという名の欲望 を線状に引き延ばし, その先端がお腹に達すると, 今度は心臓が強く動きだ し, そこから指の先まで放射線状に暖かいものが広がっていく。下腹は重くな りごろごろ鳴って, お尻がすこしかゆくなる。そのうちまた眠ってしまうのだけ れど, 意識がなくなる前のその暖かさが広がっている区域全体がクヌートにな る。 38 Der Mann mit den kräftigen Armen rief jedes Mal leidenschaftlich das Wort ‘Knut!’, um die Milch anzukündigen. Die Lust auf die weiße Flüssigkeit bekam den namen “Knut.” Kaum hatte er einige Züge Milch in sich gesogen schon bahnte sich die Wärme ihren Weg durch den Brustkorb. Die Milchlust namens Knut erreichte den Bauch. Das Herz war zu spüren. Etwas Warmes verbreitete sich fächerförmig aus der Herzensmitte, es kam in den äußersten Fingerspitzen an. Der Unterbauch murmelte schwermütig, der Anus juckte, und kurz bevor er einschlief, war er bereit, den ganzen erwärmten Bereich als Knut zu bezeichnen. 39 Before the owner of the strong arms gave any milk, he would say the word “Knut” over and over, and so the word “Knut” became attached to sensation of wanting to drink. When the body started to drink, the warmth made a path from top to bottom. That path drew the desire called “Knut” out in a straight line, and when the tip of it reached the stomach, the heart began to beat strongly and a warmth radiated out and through the fingertips. The lower stomach grew heavy and grumbled, the backside started to itch slightly. While this happened the mind fell asleep again, but before losing consciousness, the whole area where the warmth had spread became “Knut.”

This “counterfeiting,” as Tawada calls it, of a child in language, can be thought of as an induction of a living being into language, a system

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which will ultimately fail deictically to allow this being to ever refer to itself fully. The time difference or Zeitverschiebung between the first “das ist” (“that is”) and “ich bin” (“I am”) codes the terms of identification and affection which will thus enable the conceit of the mother tongue to function. Knut, for example, identifies not as Knut but with the word Knut only as it refers to a knot of desire linked to his “mother” Matthias: “Not his father then, his mother?” “That’s right. However you look at it you’re a manly mother. No, no, a womanly father.” It is only via the intrusion of wolves (whom Tawada describes as “fascists”) 40 and a Malaysian sun bear who derides Knut’s use of the third person that Knut finally learns the word “I.” This social force is nowhere to be found within the logic of the mother tongue, despite the fact that there can be no language without it—what language could take this place, a connection between mother and child as seamless as the tie of an umbilical cord? It is a fantasy. And yet it persists in the logic and deployment of the mother tongue, a term which, as Ivan Illich writes, “From its very first use, instrumentalizes everyday language in the service of an institutional cause”: In the decades before Luther, quite suddenly and dramatically, mother tongue acquired a strong meaning. It came to mean the language created by Luther in order to translate the Hebrew Bible, the language taught by schoolmasters to read that book, and then the language that justified the existence of nation states. 41

Illich has no interest in locating the effects of this transformation on women’s bodies. Yet we should note that throughout the late 18th century in Europe, woman becomes enmeshed in the symbolic pact of nation, which co-opted the maternal relation and made the womb into the space of national subject production and rendered every child into a blank slate for what Illich calls the “taught mother tongue.” As a result of contemporary colonial expansion, this transformation became globalized as a modular form called the “nation-state.” The cult of the mother is never far from the nation-state, and as we have shown, today these issues are still at stake despite the readiness of some commentators to claim that the end of these concepts is at hand. The point would not be that advances in the historicization of linguistic knowledge or in reproductive technology have fundamentally altered age-old principles and ushered in a new epoch or episteme, but that these principles themselves have been revealed to be phantasmatic in origin. Between the mother tongue, national language, and vernacular, a series of displacements and forces cleave the putative cohesion of language. It is against the undoing of the ideological totality of the mother tongue that the figure of the mother comes forward as a mechanism of defense, as guardian of the mother tongue and the social tissue of “maternity.” Even where one has been able speak of dialects, pidgin, creole, and so on, this form of language has always been in relation to an interior emotional landscape which is truer than the social

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exterior of a dominant language. These languages themselves are caught within a maternal ideology in which the “mother-language” (also called a “Sprachmutter” in classical German philology) births other languages. In each case language can only be thought in terms of subordination and hierarchy to the maternal origin and true inheritor. What then of a literary studies of today? (Subjective and objective genitive.) How is the discipline to make sense of the literature of exophony without a maternal genealogy to guide it? When Wolfgang, in Yuki no renshúsei, asks the polar bear writer to write in her mother tongue we see a short-circuit in the logic detailed above. The mother tongue is the words of the mother. Even liberated in views such as Ramaswamy’s, the maternal genealogy persists, meaning that even postcolonial, feminist, Marxist, and deconstructive analyses have not moved beyond the tropology of the mother tongue. This is why the concept of an exophonic literature presents a problem. In the history of the Western academy, literary departments that have dealt with Anglophone and European languages and cultures have traditionally been able to claim their work as being of importance to the project of the humanities in general. Area Studies, on the other hand, has since its inception been dismissed as producing knowledge based on an ethnic other that is somehow excluded from this general humanity. 42 Rather than belabor the long historical trajectories of these disciplinary formations, I would like instead to focus on something which both have in common: a reliance upon the same conceptual apparatus, namely a sorting by area, language, province. In short, the mother tongue haunts both disciplines. The concept of the mother tongue is a tropological force which governs the production of knowledge by tying it to maternity. 43 The idea that Tawada’s writing, and her thoughts, in general, can be confined to the priority of Japanese as her mother tongue plagues readings with an unintended ethnocentrism. As a Japanese speaker, Tawada writes, in “An Uninvited Guest,” that Japanese is important, but that it cannot govern her work. She writes: “All of these thoughts, which come to me, have something to do with the fact that I speak Japanese [dass ich Japanisch kann]. But my thoughts cannot be confined to the asylum camp that one calls a Japanese origin [japanische Herkunft].” 44 An act of confinement within the asylum of a national origin. Compare this with the comments from the grandmother of the first section of Yuki no renshūsei: “Is it appropriate behaviour for a bear to stick its nose into politics? Was I myself, who thought of such important matters, not locked in an invisible cage, forced to work as evidence for the criticism of my country’s failure to observe human rights?” 45 Here, the Soviet writer is lifted up in Western academic discourse merely as an ethnological object, with Cold War political intent, yet never quite capable of making a political intervention herself. This “invisible cage” amounts to a depoliticization which is in itself inherently political. It stops in its tracks all that

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might be accomplished by writers concerned with whether or not their work, opinions, or interventions may be “appropriate.” This is the danger of the mother tongue: as the most natural, or in Müller’s words “unconditional,” means of explication, it forecloses any creative invention or production that cannot be explained in terms of this origin even if the origin only appears in negated or comparative terms, for example reading Tawada’s German texts always in comparison with her Japanese origin. This opening of a creative field beyond the ready-made models of national language and culture falters across disciplines. If we are to open our scholarship to the promise of an exophonic literature, and exophony more generally, then we must think of how to follow Tawada’s tracks or traces, to move, as she says, from the mother tongue to the Sprachmutter. I would like to suggest here that, in contrast to the figure of the mother deployed in defending the culturalism of the mother tongue, it is in the figure of the Sprachmutter that we find an opening into another logic which will be indispensable in thinking more fully of modern literature today. In an essay by the title of “Sprachmutter,” we are told of an experience of a German office. Tawada writes: There was also a female character (weibliches Wesen; female being) on the desk: a typewriter (eine Schreibmaschine). She had a big, broad body covered in tattoos, and on her body was visible all the letters of the alphabet. When I sat down in front of her, I felt that she was offering me a language. Her offer didn’t change the fact that German wasn’t my mother tongue (Muttersprache) but it did give me a new Languagemother (Sprachmutter). 46

It would be possible to trace the figure of a Sprachmutter in multiple places in Tawada. Recall, for example, the dead woman in “The Bath,” where the masculine word, der Rat, transforms into die Ratte, rats, giving us the figure of an advisor, a rat-giver, whose rats the narrator must destroy with a hammer at the behest of the police. 47 Consider also the spectral figure of Deneuve in The Naked Eye, where the cinema becomes a mother and a space of thought and image: ma, mama, shinema (マ, ママ, シ ネマ／間, まま, 死ねま). It is easy to see in this the echo of Tawada’s previous idea of “a space, from which thoughts and images emerge and develop,” which was connected to the water of the womb, the Gebärmutter. In Yuki no renshūsei, rather, we have a Bärmutter, Tosca’s grandmother, who appears in dream-states, or, rather, as the novel states, in a “third space” between animals and humans. It is in these places, gaps, fissures, or especially the “zure,” wherein one must linger in Tawada’s writing, rethinking what it is that has been displaced. One would find here, always, it seems, the figure of this other mother, this Sprachmutter, whose promise is to untie the ties that bind, to remove the staples of the mother tongue which cling to the body itself.

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Language makes a person; birth into language is undeniable. But the liberatory power of the Sprachmutter is that she reworks the conduits of language, and just like the “mother” itself, what occupies this place in structure need not be inherently feminine but, as in Yuki no renshūsei, merely serve as the cornerstone of a maternal genealogy. The Sprachmutter is not simply a negation of the mother tongue; nothing can change the linguistic milieu of one’s birth, though this does not determine in advance all other linguistic phenomena unless one yields to the ideology of the mother tongue. It is in the Fremdheit—and above all, in the mother tongue as Fremdheit—that one finds the possibility of doing something otherwise. Paraphrasing Gertrude Stein, Tawada’s narrator in “Eine Leere Flasche” says: “the mother tongue makes the person, whereas in a foreign language, it is the person who makes something.” 48 And so, if the figure of the mother, most notably articulated within the cult of the mother, mentioned in Yuki no renshúsei and taken up at length by Julia Kristeva in “Stabat Mater” governs a relationship which we have gathered within the trope of maternity and the “mother tongue,” then this Sprachmutter would govern an alternative logic. The opening may be a foreign language, or it may be not; exophony, Tawada tells us, does not require multilingualism. As seen in Müller, the opportunity may be presented, while the relation to a language phantasized as maternal remains intact, unzerstört. Rather than the simple act of writing in a language that cannot take the place of a first, exophony in Tawada must be thought in terms of a strategy that is capable of producing a new relationship to and in a signifying economy. It is for this reason that it is always possible, even when one speaks only one language. The movement is, as in the subtitle of the book of Exophony, outside the mother tongue: bogo no soto. And yet the Japanese particle “no” here is both subjective and objective genitive: it refers to the outside of the mother tongue as much as the mother tongue’s outside. A mother tongue outside itself. This is the closeup exophony allows us; to view up close an object with which we were once intimately familiar but depicted in a way in which this ‘mother’ is no longer recognizable. Tawada tells us: “In a foreign language one has something like a staple remover [Heftklammerentferner]: It unstitches [entfernt] everything that clings together [sich aneinanderheftet] and clings to itself [sich festklammert].” The Sprachmutter, this feminine being who incorporates all the letters of the alphabet, does not promise the warm welcome, the succor of milk, or the coverlet of skin. Unlike the Muttersprache we see in Müller, she is not handed over like a dowry. Where every movement of the mother tongue’s tropes is toward the centrality of a psychological interiority, a maternal line, and a genealogy—subjective and objective genitive—the Sprachmutter sends us outward, softly: soto, exo. All these knots which stitch themselves together—biology, linguistics, maternity—come undone. And their undoing cannot be forestalled by

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the deployment of the mother tongue as an exile to an ethnolinguistic origin which, for Tawada, would be the asylum camp of the Japanese language. Even exophony is still capable, as in Lahiri, of operating within the logic of the mother tongue. Indeed, insofar as exophony poses the threat to the centrality of this “mother” and the concepts which rest upon it—the mother is at the center of all relations, Almodóvar reminds us: with men, women, children, society, land, and reality—maternalism is deployed against it. It transforms exophonic writing into an inert yet charming bauble; a looking glass in whose reflection the culture of the madrelingua seems that much richer. We, however, cannot be content with imposing a maternal genealogy as the last resort for understanding difference in terms of “culture,” “language,” “race,” and so on. And we do not overcome these problems by replacing the concept of the mother tongue with a vernacular, a more natural, or interior language. The paradox is rather that it is the recognition of the trope of maternity, and the figure of the mother as dead, that one begins to unstitch the mother tongue. For Tawada, it is not the biographic fact of migration that opens this concept—that kills the mother— but poetry. In Celan, for example, where each word is haunted by the ghost of his mother, murdered in a Nazi death camp. Of Celan’s poem, “Zweihäusig, Ewiger” (“Dioecious, Eternal”), Tawada writes: “Where is the mother? In the word ‘Mutter’ (mother) just like the word ‘Gott’ (god), I see the double T—the crown of grass. Both crowns are absent: the first has been murdered and the second is not coming.” 49 The mother is murdered. The mother tongue is dead. And yet we still meet her in Tawada’s work: in dreams, in hauntings, in visions of the snowfields and of burnt faces, in the space of the cinema, where images scatter across the naked eye. This kind of space Tawada has consistently thought in terms of ma (間), a central concept of Noh theatre, where the stage becomes a sacred space where the dead make their return. 50 In her reading of Celan, Tawada still notes that, though the mother is dead: “Grass, which grows over the dead as ‘silence,’ makes the dead invisible while at the same time forming a medium one must deal with in order to approach the dead.” And this “grass,” Tawada notes, is “immediately recognisable as writing.” 51 (“An ideogram that signifies “writing” also has the radical “the crown of grass”: “著 “). 52 The movement toward this dead mother, this languagemother or Sprachmutter, brings us close to the productive nature of the Gebärmutter or womb while never bringing us back to an original state. This is because it is language itself separates us from this phantasmatic return to the origin: what signals itself with “I” cannot coincide with what was preverbal. (Das ist/bin ICH.) But the movement outside of the mother tongue—bogo no soto—teaches us that it is always possible, in a foreign language, in this linguistic exile, to make something. This is, after all, the heart of poetry itself: for example, in

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poeisis, the Greek verb “to make,” or clearer still, in Scots, where the poet is called a makar, a maker. This is why the death of the mother tongue is not a freedom from the effects of the concept, nor is it by any means the triumphant cry of a polylingualism that has outdone monolingualism as the dominant paradigm. Rather it is the rebirth of language itself, the renewal of the promise of language: to make something (etwas machen). And this beyond all genealogical confines which have so far regulated our language and our thought within the domain of the mother tongue. In this figure of the Sprachmutter there is instead a relation which cleaves into the joins of the mother tongue; it is not skin, but cloth, a sack into which one is hurled. And outside this sack there is, still, the freedom to move forward, into this age when women are no longer mothers. It is time, also, that the mother tongue be left behind. In Yuki no renshūsei, Tosca states that the human soul “Is made of words. And not just normally understood words, but broken words, images that have failed to become words, the shadow of words.” 53 To understand this, we must make or mak many souls, and many tongues, whose origins remain ungovernable by the figure of the mother. In this, we must remember that—by coincidence or not, by some historical deviation—the word Sprachmutter was first used in German in the context of historical linguistics. There, it signaled a mother language, the root of language: Indo-European, Hebrew, Latin, the divine languages reflecting the lost original Adamic power of the word. In Tawada’s work, we must think that the Sprachmutter may very well be this kind of mother language, but not in the sense of a genealogy or inheritance but rather as the source of language itself: broken words, images that have failed to become words, the shadows of words. To think language in this way—beyond the root or mother, beyond the radix or matrix—is the effort required in reading Tawada’s work. And in this effort, I am simply trying to listen to the echo of a thought I hear throughout Tawada’s work, condensed or verdichtet in a quote from the essay “Accent”: “It is not my purpose to distinguish between a regional colouring, a foreign accent, a sociolect, or a medical speech defect. Instead I would like to suggest that every deviation—jede Abweichung—be taken as an opportunity for poetry.” 54 NOTES 1. Yōko Tawada, Yuki No Renshūsei (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2011). 54. Unless otherwise noted, translations of Tawada’s work are my own. 2. In English Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2017), translated from the German Etüden im Schnee (2014) by Susan Bernofsky. 3. The Japanese title is Sobo no Taikaron (祖母の退化論) which uses “taikaron” (devolution, degeneration) as opposed to the German Evolution (Evolutionstheorie der Großmutter). While the Japanese text appears prior to Tawada’s own German transla-

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tion, we would do well to retain the sense of involution in the teleology of an evolutionary schema in this text. 4. Yuki no renshūsei is the first text Tawada has translated herself from Japanese into German. For a discussion of this see Kotoba to aruku nikki (2018) written over the course of the translation process. 5. The term “mother tongue” appears first, in 1432, with “native speaker” appearing over a hundred years later in 1586 in the first vernacular English grammar, Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar. 6. Andrea Bachner has an invaluable discussion of the role this text plays in the context of poststructuralist conceptions of subjectivity. See Andrea Bachner, The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories, First edition. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). 7. Christopher Hutton, Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (Routledge, 2012). 8. The use of Volksprache and Schriftsprache has been used in classical German linguistics as a means of differentiating between the written language (“Schriftsprache”) and the oral (“Volksprache” or “language of the people”). The tension between these fields led Romantic thought to view the mother tongue as the repository of a culture foreign to the culture of writing (in Europe, Latin). Derrida’s reading of LéviStrauss’s “The Writing Lesson” in Tristes Tropiques is particularly rich in exploring this distinction in the field of linguistic anthropology and in a non-European context. See “The Violence of the Letter: From Lévi-Strauss to Rousseau” in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fortieth Anniversary edition. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 9. Almodóvar, quoted in Chitra Ramaswamy, Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy (Text Publishing Company, 2017). 10. See, for example, Thomas M. Paikedays’s The Native Speaker is Dead! (1985), or Rey Chow’s more recent Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as Postcolonial Experience (2014). Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, in Mother-Tongue in Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism, claims that mother tongue did not exist as an object of discourse in Japan until the 1980s, after first being introduced by resident Korean writers (zainichi chōsenjin) in the 1960s. Yokota-Murakami therefore argues that ideas of maternality were not tied into the problem of nationality in a linguistic sense until it was brought forward in the scission between 母語 (bogo) and 母国語 (bokokugo) among zainichi writers. This is contrasted with the term mother tongue in a European context, framed by the vernacularization movement of Dante, despite the fact that as Bonfiglio demonstrates, Dante’s rhetoric has deeper roots in earlier medieval thought. We must beware yielding to an exceptionalism here; this argument cannot hold when the mother tongue is thought, as I am doing so here, as symptomatic of ethnolinguistic nativism more generally. 11. Thomas Bonfiglio’s work is exemplary in demonstrating this confluence and extending it also into arboreal metaphors. 12. Tawada, “Schreiben in Netz der Sprache,” in Yōko Tawada, Talisman (Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1996). 13. An important counterpoint to such valorization of ‘betweeness’ can be found in Leslie Adelson’s “Against Between: A Manifesto,” in Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading, ed. Salah. Hassan, Iftikhar. Dadi, and Leslie A. Adelson (Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001). 14. Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 15. Naoki Sakai refers to this arrangement as the “modern regime of translation” and the operation by which this difference is managed to articulate two separate “identities” the “schema of co-figuration.” See Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 16. Kate Briggs, This Little Art (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).

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17. See Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 18. “The Space between Languages - Asymptote,” accessed September 30, 2018, https://www.asymptotejournal.com/nonfiction/herta-muller-the-space-between-languages/. Translation by Julia Sherwood. 19. “The Space between Languages - Asymptote.” 20. “The Space between Languages - Asymptote.” 21. Deleuze and Guattari make this move in A Thousand Plateaus: “There is no mother tongue, only a takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.” Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 22. This reading is also in keeping Naoki Sakai’s reading of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée in Translation and Subjectivity, where the mother as the keeper of the mother tongue haunts the polyphony of the text. 23. “Die Ohrenzeugin,” in Tawada, Talisman, 103. 24. It is important to note, however, that this cleavage is not primarily linguistic; the first experience Tawada says she has of an alienation akin to a “destroyed” relationship to the mother tongue is actually the breaking of a bone, described in the essay, “Byōin to iu ikoku e no tabi” [“The Hospital: A Journey to a Foreign Country”], in Yōko Tawada, Katakoto no uwagoto, Shinsōban. (Tōkyō: Seidosha, 2007). 25. “Eine Leere Flasche,” in Yōko Tawada, Überseezungen (Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2002), 70. 26. Tawada, “Sieben Geschichten der Sieben Mütter,” in Talisman. 27. Tawada, “Sieben.” 28. Ramaswamy, Expecting. 29. Barbara Johnson, Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 66. 30. Tawada, Yuki No Renshūsei. 31. For a comprehensive study that bucks this trend, see Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, The Babel of the Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1993). 32. Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words, trans. Ann Goldstein, First edition. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 179. 33. Lahiri, 178. 34. James Joyce, Ulysses, New Random House ed., corr. and reset. (New York: Random House, 1961), 266. 35. Sigmund Freud, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men”, in Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 390. 36. Tawada, “Sieben Geschichten der Sieben Mutter,” in Tawada, Talisman. My translation. 37. The homophonic verbs kaku can be written as “to write” (書く), “to scratch” (掻 く), or “to depict” (描く). See Yōko Tawada, “Tawada Yōko does not exist”, in Douglas Slaymaker, ed., Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007). 38. Tawada, Yuki no renshūsei. 167–168. 39. Yōko Tawada, Etüden im Schnee: Roman (Tübingen: Konkursbuch, Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2014), 212. 40. Yōko Tawada, “The Profound Empathy of Yoko Tawada - The New York Times,” 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/30/magazine/yoko-tawada.html. 41. “Vernacular Values by Ivan Illich,” accessed October 1, 2018, http:// www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1980_vernacular_values.html. 42. This is taken up at length by Naoki Sakai in the distinction between humanitas and anthropos. See Naoki Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos,” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (December 1, 2010): 441–464, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2010.526539.

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43. Consider Yasemin Yildiz’ claim that Tawada’s border-crossing is representative of a general trend of Japanese women seeking out the foreign in the 1980s (See Yildiz, The Postmonolingual Condition, 2012), or Chantal Wright’s mystifying hunt for a subterranean Japanese in her translation of “Portrait of a Tongue” (Tawada, Portrait of a Tongue [Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press: 2013]). 44. Tawada, “Ein ungeladener Gast,” in Yōko Tawada, Akzentfrei (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2016). 46. My translation. 45. Tawada, Yuki no renshūsei. 46. Tawada, “Von der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter,” in Tawada, Talisman. My translation. 47. See Tawada, “The Bath,” in Yōko Tawada, Where Europe Begins (New York: New Directions, 2002). 48. Tawada, "Die Ohrenzeugin," in Tawada, Überseezungen, 111. My translation. 49. Tawada, “Die Krone aus Gras,” in Yōko Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2007). My translation. 50. This interest in Noh is usually in the context of the theater of Heiner Müller, the subject of Tawada’s MA thesis. See Tawada, “Karada, koe, kamen—hainaa myuraa no engeki to nō no ma no koō, in Tawada, Katakoto no uwagoto. 51. Tawada, “Die Krone aus Gras.” My translation. 52. Tawada, “Die Krone aus Gras.” My translation. 53. Tawada, Yuki no renshūsei. My translation. 54. Tawada, “Akzent,” in Tawada, Akzentfrei. 23. My translation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Amati-Mehler, Jacqueline. The Babel of the Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension. Madison, CN: International Universities Press, 1993. Bachner, Andrea. The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories. First edition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Briggs, Kate. This Little Art. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017. Deleuze, Gilles. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ———. Essays Critical and Clinical. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Fortieth Anniversary edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. Hutton, Christopher. Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language. London: Routledge, 2012. Johnson, Barbara. Mother Tongues: Sexuality, Trials, Motherhood, Translation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Joyce, James. Ulysses. New Random House ed., corr. And reset. [New York: Random House], 1961. Lahiri, Jhumpa. In Other Words. Translated by Ann Goldstein. First edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016. Ramaswamy, Chitra. Expecting: The Inner Life of Pregnancy. Text Publishing Company, 2017. Sakai, Naoki. “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos.” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (December 1, 2010): 441–464. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2010.526539. ———. Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

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Salah, Hassan, Dadi Iftikhar, and Leslie A. Adelson, eds. Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, 2001. Slaymaker, Douglas., ed. Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Tawada, Yōko. Akzentfrei. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2016. ———. Etüden im Schnee: Roman. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2014. ———. Katakoto no uwagoto. Shinsōban. Tōkyō: Seidosha, 2007. ———. Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2007. ———. Talisman. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 1996. ———. “The Profound Empathy of Yoko Tawada - The New York Times,” 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/30/magazine/yoko-tawada.html. ———. Überseezungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, 2002. ———. Where Europe Begins. New York: New Directions, 2002. ———. Yuki no renshūsei. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2011. “The Space between Languages - Asymptote.” Accessed September 30, 2018. https:// www.asymptotejournal.com/nonfiction/herta-muller-the-space-between-languages/. “Vernacular Values by Ivan Illich.” Accessed October 1, 2018. http:// www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1980_vernacular_values.html. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Yokota, Jeri. Mother-Tongue in Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism. [S.l.]: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. https://link.springer.com/openurl?genre=book&isbn=978-981-108511-6.

EIGHT Yoko Tawada’s Überseezungen Feminist Self-Translation and Creative Resistance Madalina Meirosu

Yoko Tawada’s writing communicates the pleasures of experiencing language and captivates readers by the way she delights in the embodied experience of language—by the way she takes pleasure in feeling language. Academic interest in Tawada’s work, of course, extends beyond this aspect of her writing. Critical approaches to her early work in German have often focused on the creative use of translation in her writing; on her own creativity in navigating the space in-between languages and cultures, a space that she has defined and created for herself; and on her practice of exophony. 1 Building on this rich critical terrain, this chapter explores Tawada’s creative use of language in the collection Überseezungen and other earlier texts, with particular attention given to the essay “Wörter, die in der Asche schlafen,” where creative language functions as an act of resistance to the hegemony of a single language. I focus on the womanhandling aspects of her text that emerge in the narrator’s attempts to establish agency when confronted with everyday violence. Barbara Godard’s concept of womanhandling 2 gives the word “manhandling” a feminist twist and expresses a shift in translation studies that promotes the creativity and visibility of women translators. Additionally, in the context of Tawada’s insistence on language as an embodied or fullbodied experience, I show that it is important for a second-language speaker to appreciate the bodily basis of language in order to assert themselves against—but also through—the foreign language.

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In this chapter, I use translation studies to read Tawada’s narrators as translators who continually need to negotiate a place for themselves within different languages and cultures, and the systems that contain them. Additionally, in light of translation’s long history as a gendered activity, I highlight the activist aspect of Tawada’s self-translational texts. Lori Chamberlain’s foundational work regarding the gendered metaphorics of translation shed light on the fact that translational relationships have historically been expressed in terms of gender stereotypes and gendered power relationships. 3 Previously consecrated terms such as les belles infideles 4 disparage both women and translations. Partially in light of these considerations, feminist translation theorists and translators have mounted a challenge to women’s traditional invisibility in a male-dominated society that takes the form of a refusal by female translators to efface their presence from the translated text. This has not always been an easy transition to make, and the Canadian school of feminist translation in the 1990s noted “the difficult process by which women translators have extricated themselves from the classical notion of submission to the original.” 5 Barbara Godard, Luise von Flotow-Evans, and Susanne de Lotbinière-Hardwood are some of the founders of this movement, the main goal of which is to make the translator, and especially the woman translator, visible. Von Flotow-Evans suggests that, while translators in general live in between two cultures, women translators live in between at least three, with patriarchy being “the omnipresent third.” 6 As woman migrants, all of Tawada’s narrators in Überseezungen are in a similar position to that of a translator who needs to mediate between two cultures and patriarchy, with the balance of power tipping in favor of the host culture in which the narrator presents as an outsider. Doubly disempowered, the narrator seeks to negotiate a more advantageous position. Within such a context, Godard’s definition of feminist discourse applies to Tawada’s narrators’ attempts to reshape the language and discourse around them: “As an emancipatory practice, feminist discourse is a political discourse directed towards the construction of new meanings and is focused on subjects becoming in/by language.” 7 In Tawada’s essay “Wörter, die in der Asche schlafen,” for example, the narrator challenges the power that the (presumably) native men have over her by creatively contesting the language and culture of her oppressors. She is womanhandling the language by transforming the process of self-translation into creative resistance against the target language. She is, in this instance, rendering visible the process of translation through a dramatization of an act of self-translation, whereby she rejects both her forced invisibility as a woman and as a self-effacing foreigner speaking a second language. By making this process visible, she comes close to what Susan Bassnett understands to be the purpose of translation theory, namely, to show the processes that are undertaken in the task of translating, rather than to provide a set of norms that will allow a translator to create a perfect

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translation. 8 Building upon the Canadian feminist theorists and Polysystem Theory, the recent work of Olga Castro raises the possibility of a third wave of feminist translation studies. Castro proposes that “doubts can also be raised about whether translation arises from a material source text that has a stable signification.” 9 Tawada raises such doubts by questioning language in general, a feminist move that corresponds to Castro’s contention that adhering to language is adhering to the patriarchal system that the language supports, and consequently to the violence that it perpetrates. Tawada’s linguistic strategies to defamiliarize and recreate language, as well as the visibility of the processes that the narrator undertakes for this process of creative self-translation, function as protests against the hegemony of language, against patriarchy, and against daily aggressions targeting those identified as others. YOKO TAWADA’S TRANS(-LINGUAL; -GRESSIVE; -FORMATIVE; PARENT)LATIONAL FICTION IN GERMAN The transgressive character of Tawada’s use of the German language manifests itself in the title of the collection Überseezungen. This title is a linguistic invention that approximates the German word for “translations,” “Übersetzungen,” but at the same time creatively points to at least two more possible readings: über Seezungen (about common soles; or, when translated literally, about sea tongues) and übersee Zungen (overseas tongues). The polyvalence of the title heralds the multiplicity of meanings astir in the text itself. It showcases the magic of Tawada’s creative talent as she conjures a semantic space wherein she questions the ability of German to express her poetic ideas while simultaneously praising the German language for an elasticity that invites and adopts such inventions. Doug Slaymaker proposes an additional reading of the title as “tongues across the water,” which he interprets as a sign that “perhaps the physical tongue forms the bridge that allows us to cross the chasms, bodies of water, and link places and people.” 10 Indeed, language is a bridge that connects people, one made possible by an actual organ—the tongue. The tongue serves as a bridge for words that must pass over it in order to exit one body and enter another. The tongue, though, is not only a bridge, but also a “sea creature” (sea tongue or common sole) that lives in the human body, an oceanic body that is mostly made out of water, as Tawada points out in her short story “The Bath.” The seas in which the “sea tongues” are swimming are human bodies, seas that contain continents of selfhood, which selves seek to connect with one another by way of innocuous, but oh-so-important, tongues. Fluidity of meaning is always present in Tawada’s writing, with fluidity itself being a central thematic concern. 11 Bodies of water, words, languages, gender, and migration inhabit a constant state of changeability.

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Human faces look different in the mirror each morning. Human bodies, composed of water, change shape “from moment to moment like a mud swamp, shifting with the movements of the water below and the footsteps of the people walking above it.” 12 This kind of fluidity is especially evident when she employs a language beyond its established boundaries. Yasemin Yildiz proposes that Tawada’s multilingual literary form should be seen “not only [as] a site where the contours of national language(s) are made porous but also [as] partaking in a large reimagination of language subjects and affiliations.” 13 That is, Tawada transcends both the semantic boundaries of a national language and the boundaries established by cultural concerns; such is the fluid, uncontainable nature of her translingualism. 14 This art of fluidity is premised upon a technique of foreignization which allows Tawada to artificially delimit cultural spaces, the borders of which she soon transgresses. With respect to this technique of foreignization, Reiko Tachibana writes that Tawada’s “process involves observing a foreign culture carefully from outside and systematizing her interpretation of the culture by gathering her observed pieces together. This reflects her conscious efforts to distance herself further (or doubly) from an ‘unfamiliar’ culture.” 15 In a similar vein, Chantal Wright understands Tawada’s fictitious Japanese gaze to be a literary device through which the narrator achieves the distance required to describe a culture from the outside, which distance affords her an epistemic advantage that she would not have as a cultural “insider.” 16 Tawada’s estranged narrators tell their stories in ways that create a “retrospective foreignization” of German culture. 17 This technique of foreignization enables Tawada to generate transgressive language and texts, as she flaunts her in-betweenness as a foreigner living in another language and culture. And it is this very subject position—as outsider participating in the target culture— that allows her to shed light on the intersectional, in-between space she inhabits. Additionally, this technique of foreignization highlights the uncomfortable feeling of speaking a language, any language, be it the mother tongue or a foreign language, as an outsider. Women are, in principle, outsiders to the languages they inhabit, for the most part, because languages are instruments that helped create and maintain a patriarchal order in society and have contributed to oppressive systems of organization. Participating in language without a critical stance is an act of solidarity with the convoluted hisstory of that language. This foreignizing technique sets the stage for translations that reinvent the target language. But is this not problematic? Can such a transgressive use of the target language still be considered an ethical translation? The answer, I contend, is yes, provided that we bear in mind Maria Tymoczko’s point that translations are to be read and discussed as “records of cultural contestations and ideological struggles, rather than as simple linguistic transpositions or literary creations.” 18 Translation is a form of

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“metatext,” one that reveals—to those who speak the language of translation theory—the historical and geopolitical contexts, as well as artistic and ideological constraints, that led to the production of the translation. 19 Tawada’s metatextual self-translation into German, made particularly visible in those moments where her narrator meditates on her creative linguistic choices, reveals Tawada’s activist stance vis-à-vis translation. Her linguistic inventions seem to correspond to Venuti’s concept of “foreignization,” which encourages both the disruption of the target language’s cultural codes and the registering of cultural differences within the foreign text (or language). 20 However, while Tawada’s translations do disrupt the target language’s cultural codes, she is not animated by a postcolonial political agenda; she writes not against the hegemony of a language, but rather against the hegemony of language itself as a fixed set of rules. As such, Tawada’s translational fiction is more than a text: it is an act of linguistic and cultural subversion. In this way, her work parallels the politics of postcolonial translation “where the function [of the text] is as important as the product itself.” 21 However, Tawada’s political protest is not that of a colonized culture protesting its colonization but rather that of an individual protesting the hegemony of any and all language that confines and constrains. Within this context of activist translation with its transgressive treatments of language, Barbara Godard’s call for “womanhandling” the text adds a layer of gender activism that seems appropriate to Tawada’s work. Godard encourages the “woman translator” to leave behind the rules that mandate the invisibility of the translator so as to make herself seen: The feminist translator, affirming her critical difference, her delight in interminable re-reading and re-writing, flaunts the signs of her manipulation of the text. Womanhandling the text in translation would involve the replacement of the modest, self-effacing translator. Taking her place would be an active participant in the creation of meaning [ . . . ] Hers is a continuing provisionality, aware of process, giving self-reflexive attention to practices. The feminist translator immodestly flaunts her signature in italics, in footnotes—even in a preface. 22

This is exactly the kind of work that Tawada does in her translational fiction. She is not a self-effacing speaker and writer in the target language, careful to obey all the rules of the language and of the cultural context in which she writes. She actively participates in creating new German words, new concepts of German-ness as seen through a foreign lens, and is continually aware of the mental and bodily processes underlying her linguistic revolutions. 23 Her process is transparent: approaching the German language phenomenologically, she observes the way in which speaking German and hearing German is felt in her very flesh, and she makes visible the various stages and processes that inspire invention

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or transformative self-translation. The result is a hybrid language that will cater to her individual needs more than the standard, patriarchal language. TRANSLATION AND CREATIVITY Translational identities are created at the intersection of cultures, in the spaces where the migrant lives and works; the intersection of cultures writes changes on the body and language of the migrant. The migrant’s body is a legible text; the migrant’s utterances are constant self-translations, and the negotiation among various languages, cultural spaces, tensions, and power structures, create and re-create the self in translation. The migrant not only needs to learn to speak a new language but needs to find new equivalents of herself (or paraphrases of herself) in the newly adopted language and culture, thus creating translational identities. Tawada’s transparent efforts at self-translation reveals the process of the formation of such an identity to the reader. One of the ways she does this is by focusing on the embodied experience of spoken language. Audible words are produced through the laryngopharyngeal and oro-nasal apparatuses, an experience many language speakers are not attuned to; as she highlights this bodily production of language she creates a new space in which the embodied experience of the speaker takes center stage. The body itself becomes a liminal space in which two languages and cultural spaces meet and spark linguistic inventions. She is thus, in Hiltrud Arens’ terms, “going beyond the body of language (Sprachkörper) to incorporate the language of body (Körpersprache), very often to challenge the former.” 24 Yoko Tawada’s embodied experience of language and her thoughtful expression of it shows that language learning and speaking is far more nuanced than simply learning new grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. For it is the body that speaks, that feels the difference in uttering sounds and that feels either exhilarated by the trip it is taking into unfamiliar territory or frustrated by the impossibility of disciplining itself to pronounce a new language. Language itself acts on the body: “Jeder [Konsonant], jeder Vokal und vielleicht auch jedes Komma durchlaufen die Fleischzellen und verwandeln die sprechende Person.” (Each consonant, each vowel and perhaps also each comma penetrate the flesh at the level of the cells and transform the speaking person.) 25 In “Zungentanz” the narrator reveals the body’s resistance to certain sound juxtapositions, which she finds “organically impossible” to utter. It is telling that the problematic word here is “Wunsch” (“desire”). The desire to personalize the German language arises from the impossibility of pronouncing the German word for desire, a word which contorts her tongue into unnatural positions and constitutes a subtle assault on her body. The narrator wants to insert an

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“o” into the word in order to create a more palatable version of desire. And the question that follows this brief meditation on the bodily limits of language speaks to the tension that will inform the rest of the Überseezungen collection: “Also warum sollte ich nicht einen ‘Wunosch’ haben anstatt eines Wunsches?” (So why should I not have a “desidre” instead of a “desire”?) 26 Tawada’s narrator contests the necessity to obey the rules of the foreign language. This desire to have/possess language on one’s own terms produces the textual jouissance that is the collection Überseezungen. The linguistic inventions that emerge from the bodily encounter with the foreign language fluidize and blur the boundaries between mute body and articulate mind as well as highlight the productivity of the body in the process of emancipation in language. Bettina Brandt acknowledges the role of the body in the production of meaning: “The body in Tawada’s texts is never a mere object; it is itself a site of transformation that with the help of the senses, converts mere sensitiveness into sense and sensibility.” 27 Brandt’s poetic interpretation of the body’s role in Tawada’s work also calls attention to the general way in which Tawada challenges cultural constraints. Along these lines, Hiltrud Arens proposes that “Tawada is interested in showing how changeable and not fixed many definitions that we perceive as fixed actually are, though we take them for granted—so it is one of her tasks to reveal and break these fictional boundaries.” 28 Tawada herself speaks of her desire to break boundaries, patterns, barriers of language, and even the dichotomous thinking that insists on a distinction between original and translation: Mir kommt es manchmal sogar so vor, als gäbe es gar nichts Festes, aber indem ich übersetze entsteht plötzlich das, was man als Original bezeichnen kann und was ich als Übersetzung, als Endprodukt bezeichnen kann. Beide Seiten, das Original und die Übersetzung entstehen in der Bewegung der Übersetzung selbst. (Sometimes it seems to me as if nothing immovable exists, but in my process of translation a product takes form all of a sudden, a product that can be defined as an original, but which I can define as a translation or a finished product. Both sides of the page, the original and the translation, take shape in the movement of the translation itself.) 29

Following a similar logic, both the German language and invention in the German language (more deeply, both subject position toward the foreign language and assertion of individual power through creativity that transgresses the conventional limits of language) take shape on the pages of Tawada’s German works.

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VIOLENCE AND LINGUISTIC RESISTANCE In the course of transcending linguistic barriers and boundaries, Tawada dramatizes unexpected violence, both verbal and non-verbal, perpetrated on a migrant who lives in a foreign language. This unexpected violence can take forms as simple as the withholding of physical touch, which one of her narrators experiences as a form of violence because it produces physical pain and longing. While living in North America, this narrator’s body misses being touched and spoken to intimately, aches for the intimate experience of embodied connection she had in Germany. 30 Violence can also take the form of an all-encompassing, engulfing sea of foreign language and culture; against this threat, the narrator decides to maintain her accent so as not to be swallowed by her new language. 31 Alternatively, violence can take the form of physical and verbal attacks, such as those that the narrator of “Wörter, die in der Asche schlafen” (“Words that Sleep in the Ashes”) suffers on her path to the vet as she carries her sick cat in a basket on her bike. A man passing by on his own bike spits his malodorous saliva onto her scalp, while later a man who apparently had been deserted by mail-order brides from Thailand assumes the Asian narrator is from Thailand as well and repeatedly insults her using “Arschloch” (“asshole”) as his insult of choice. This short story reveals a violence lurking in insults, a violence that is registered in the narrator’s body—first in the form of a wordless attack, then in the form of a verbal assault. After the man passing by has spat on her head, the narrator awaits the words that she assumes will complete the insult, for “jeder, der eine böse Tat auf die Straße spuckt, ergänzt sie mit einer sprachlichen Begleitung.” (Each person that “spits” a bad deed on the street completes it with a spoken accompaniment.) 32 Because the words never come, the narrator wonders momentarily if the spitting might have been an accident. This first stage of the healing process, namely, denial, features an attempt to translate the event into logical language, or rather into a language where the logic is that nobody would perpetrate such an assault without a reason. This attempt at denial is brushed away by the silent realization that the narrator was assaulted because she is a slight Asian woman, twice foreign to the male attacker. And then her first act of rebellion or innovation is to linguistically transform the spit into a marine animal: a jellyfish. Though the metaphor appears to be an innocuous one, associating the consistency of the saliva with a jellyfish, the narrator also avails herself of the quasi-homonymy between the German word for jellyfish (die Qualle) and the German word for agony and torment (die Qual). 33 The sting of being spat on is contained in the threatening form of a possible sting from the jellyfish. The source (die Quelle) of the torment (die Qual) is the jellyfish (die Qualle).

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Another strategy of evasion consists of repeating or reciting language in the fashion of language-learning drills, which may offer temporary relief by transporting the speaker to a safe place where language and its cultural background are controlled in bite-sized pieces that make sense: “Ein Geruch ist das, was gerochen wird. Das Gehör dagegen ist nicht das, was gehört wird. [ . . . ] Vielleicht hing sogar ein Rest Haut von der Qualle an meiner Stirn. Ich konnte mein eigenes Gesicht nicht sehen. Das Hören, das Gehör. Das Riechen, der Geruch. Das sehen, das Gesicht.” (A smell is that which one can smell. In opposition to this, the hearing is not that which can be heard. [ . . . ] Perhaps there was still a piece of skin from the jellyfish on my forehead. I could not see my own face. The act of hearing, the ability to hear. The act of smelling, the smell. The act of seeing, the face.) 34 The repetitions buffer and mask the pain she has suffered. Through control over the (assumed) language of the perpetrator, the victim begins to assert control over her bruised feelings. The next step in this process of healing through linguistic self-assertion is to find words not yet spoken, not yet in currency, that are specifically hers, that would erase her shame by asserting control over the (assumed) language and culture of the perpetrator. In pursuit of a creative word, the narrator forgets to speak of the malodorous saliva and becomes embroiled instead in a linguistic game that considers the merits of various playful insults. 35 Because she cannot speak them “from her stomach,” she rejects German insults related to animal names. This reference to the importance of the digestive system in speaking a language reminds the reader of the essay “Ohrenzeugin” (“Earwitness”) from the same collection where the narrator confesses to wearing the Japanese language as an outer layer of skin, whereas she has swallowed the German language in order to keep it in her stomach and feel it from her gut when speaking. 36 But in order to use the German language to full cathartic effect, the German in her belly—with its emphasis on animal swear words, for which she has no stomach in light of her predominantly vegetarian diet—needs to make space for new ways of thinking, feeling, and swearing. This is one of Tawada’s linguistic interventions: she achieves catharsis through linguistic creativity. Language that is embodied must be spoken in terms immediately available, and familiar, to the body. Within this logical framework, the insult she settles upon, the appropriate word to throw back at the man who spat on her, the insult that provides catharsis in the wake of the assault, is “Fenchel” (“fennel”), a vegetable that the narrator eats almost every day. The fennel’s white body reminds her of the helmet of the assailant. The stems and leaves are “unanswered questions” that remain on the table uneaten, like the motivation of the assailant. Linda Koiran rightly interprets this creative outburst against the “spitter” as a protest against the everyday racism that the Asian narrator encounters in Hamburg. 37 Indeed, the racism and sexism she suffers mir-

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ror the disturbing, malodorous spit she cannot completely get rid of— even when she thinks she is free of it, it is still there. The faceless spitter merges in her mind with a faceless crowd of potential assailants that she must contend with every day. Against the background of this negativity, the invention and utterance of the tailor-made insult, along with her feet stomping on the ground in solidarity with her tongue, are both intended as a protest and performance of assertiveness. Tawada’s work has been characterized as performative: Michiko Tanigawa characterizes Tawada’s writing as “über-setzende Performance” (trans-posing performance), 38 while Petra Fachinger, when speaking about the “logic of trans” and of “writing across” in Tawada’s texts, highlights Tawada’s performance of self-identity. 39 In addition to these interpretations of various performative aspects of Tawada’s work, Godard’s concept of “transformance,” which is a process of “constructing meaning in the activity of transformation” by which translators perform the source text, is an appropriate theoretical framework. 40 In Tawada’s case, the narrator quite literally performs (by stomping her feet) the tailor-made insult from her source-language, a language she has just invented in a thought process made visible to the reader. She utters a German word that does not sound like an insult and does not seem to express anger which is accompanied by bodily language that makes it clear that the German word has been mobilized to repay insult with insult. By employing a “foreignizing” gaze which reveals dimensions of a culture which only an outsider can see, and by giving examples of creative linguistic resistance, Tawada empowers those on the margins to assume control of and shape what seems to be the immovable core of the dominant culture. The narrator’s linguistic invention of an appropriate swear word (“Fenchel”) to counteract racist aggression translates into a performative act of self-assertion, one that challenges the (assumed) linguistic and cultural space of the assailant. The intervention of the oppressed in the encounter with the spitter—and she is oppressed owing to her status as a second-language speaker, as an Asian, as a woman, and as a disrespected migrant—demonstrates power over language. This power allows her to return from the removed, interior space where she processes the assault back to the stinky dead-fish smell of the Hamburg harbor. Slowly, the facelessness of the assailant melts into the blurry contours of the surrounding background, suggesting an overlap between the faceless man with foul-smelling breath and the foul-smelling port, which is also presumably the home of threatening jellyfish. Having scarcely escaped from managing one crisis, the narrator is subject to the misguided racist and misogynistic words of yet another assailant, this time an older inebriated man. The physical reaction of being verbally assaulted stuns the narrator: “ich war im Käfig meines eigenen Brustkorbs eingesperrt.” (I was trapped in the prison of my own ribcage.) 41 Her reaction is to “clarify” to herself that she does not fall into

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the general category targeted by the assailant, which seems to be women from Thailand. The narrator is still clear-headed enough to see the ridiculousness of objecting to being lumped together with Thai women, but this clarity is eclipsed by a whirlwind of bodily emotions which in turn are quickly muted by a rapid stream of intellectualizing sentences as she ponders the vulgar use of “asshole”: Meine Ohrläppchen wurden warm, die Zunge wurde feucht. Es ist seltsam, dachte ich mir, dass man den Namen eines Körperteils als Schimpfwort benutzt. Wenn es ein Körperteil wäre, auf das man eventuell verzichten könnte, wäre es noch zu verstehen. Zum Beispiel der Blinddarm. Oder die Mandeln. Oder der Bauchnabel. Aber der Anus ist viel zu wichtig. Ohne ihn kann man nicht leben. Ich war verblüfft von der Idee, dass dieser Mann mich mit einem unverzichtbaren Körperteil gleichsetzte . . . (My earlobes became warm, my tongue moist. It is peculiar, I thought, that the name of a body part is used as a swearword. At least if this were a body part that one could dispose of, then it would be more understandable. For example the appendix. Or the tonsils. Or the bellybutton. But the anus is far too important. Without it one cannot live. I was puzzled by the idea that this man compared me to an indispensable body part. . . . ) 42

The rapid fire of physical sensations that accompany the bodily reception of the insults, the quick succession short sentences, the questions regarding the logic behind the language that the man is using, all come together to build a protective wall against the pain resulting from the violence perpetrated casually by the embittered man. The narrator utters two short sentences in response to the man, as she advises him on the importance of the anus for the body and suggests that if he has something against this particular hole he should have his removed surgically, which triggers a mechanical response in the man who simply repeats the same insult. Unfazed, the man rejects the narrator’s attempts at regaining agency. Her linguistic proposal falls on deaf ears. Again, aware of her body’s needs, the narrator breathes deeply in order to gain some distance from the moment and recover her equilibrium. She imagines that she is able to peek into the “cage” of her inner space, a deserted landscape that has been filled with ashes. 43 Injured and burned by daily insult and physical aggression, this inner space turns to ashes and, as the narrator says, can be reborn only if the narrator finds the “nameless name” that performs the magic reawakening. 44 Both here and in her appropriation of the word “fennel,” Tawada’s womanhandling of language and of self-translation becomes particularly visible through her depiction of the creative process that leads to linguistic transgression. The narrator’s search for an adequate response to everyday aggression performs a linguistic resistance to this aggression. Rather than remaining

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invisible so as to avoid being spotted by various assailants, the woman/ migrant/self-translator asserts her presence through a process of creative linguistic transformation. The reader is invited to step into the heart of this process; every step of creative resistance is displayed as a precious achievement of catharsis. These are a few of the remedies employed by Tawada in the face of personal insult and injury she encounters in a foreign language and culture. Her resistance takes the form of the German language drill-like utterances that buffer and push back the pain; her phenomenological approach to the bodily perception of insults; and the re-creation of language to legitimate her right to exist in the language. Often in the essays from Überseezungen Tawada’s narrators talk about the various ways in which languages challenge their perceived sense of reality—even their own mother tongue is not spared her criticism. For example, in Verwandlungen (Metamorphoses), the narrator is critical of the Japanese language’s ability to express gender identity early in life: Ich hatte Schwierigkeiten mit all diesen Wörtern, die “ich” bedeuten. Ich fühlte mich weder wie ein Mädchen noch wie ein Junge. Als Erwachsene kann man sich in das geschlechtsneutrale Wort “watashi” flüchten, aber bis man so weit ist, ist man gezwungen, ein Junge oder ein Mädchen zu sein [ . . . ] Man muss sich weder weiblich noch männlich fühlen, um das Wort “ich” zu verwenden” [ . . . ] Ich wollte sprechen, das heißt, durch meine Stimme Schwingungen in die Luft bringen, ohne mich entscheiden zu müssen, welchem Geschlecht ich angehöre. I had difficulties with all these words that meant “I.” I felt neither like a young girl, nor like a young boy. As an adult, one can take refuge in the neutral word “watashi,” but until that time comes, one is forced to be a young girl or a young boy. . . . In German one needn’t feel either female nor male to use the word “ich.” . . . I wanted to speak, that is to bring movements in the air through my voice, without having to decide for myself to which gender I belong. 45

Similar questions regarding gender preoccupy the narrator in “Bioskop der Nacht” (“Cinema of the Night”), 46 part of the Überseezungen collection, where the narrator is pleasantly surprised to discover that all nouns in Afrikaans are feminine, that is, they are preceded by the definite article “die,” which is the feminine article in German. 47 Tawada’s linguistic adventure extends beyond her relationship with German as she sets out to investigate the ways in which language itself—above and beyond particular languages such as Japanese, German, English, Afrikaans, and even French (which she has no familiarity with)—creates sites of oppression. She is constantly searching for magic words or formulas, creative inventions, disruptions of grammatical rules or semantic hybridizations that can give the speaker agency over a language that imposes constraints on

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its speaker. Similar to her journey to find the magic word that can remove the negative feelings that fester in the wake of being spat upon, she seeks to create alternative linguistic spaces that feel refreshingly new and safe. 48 Tawada’s unspoken assumption is that language does not belong to the source culture, or to a culture in general, but to the speaker/creator who reinvents it. She objects to allowing a language or a culture, be it her mother tongue or an adopted tongue, to determine in an impersonal manner those parts of her experience that define her. The essays discussed in this chapter allow Tawada to reveal the palimpsestic nature of language, as layers of meaning are superimposed on words by narrators who are in the process of self-analysis or of self-assertion in a hostile environment. This hostile environment can be language itself or a foreign territory. Tawada sometimes uses polyglossia in Überseezungen, but more interestingly she demonstrates the existence of polyglossia within one single language. She shows how creative and idiosyncratic language use by individual speakers challenges the notion that a single, shared language is being spoken. This personal, idiosyncratic language use is the equivalent of a feminist attempt to contest structures of power that underlie language use. Tawada’s linguistic innovations support the attempts of a marginalized self to create a space for herself in a sea of foreignness. In a European context in which migration has become the focus of fiery debates, controversies regarding language learning have come to occupy center stage. Tawada raises awareness of the dangers of linguistic violence or hegemony through her own playful, humorous, and engaging manner of questioning language. Though only a second language German speaker, she demonstrates the power to reshape the apparently immovable sets of rules of the German language, as she womanhandles (manipulates, rewrites, hijacks, takes ownership of) the German language and its cultural milieu. And she invites others to a similar disregard—or a creative rewriting—of these same rules in order to forge new translational identities. NOTES 1. Reiko Tachibana, “Tawada Yoko’s Quest for Exophony: Japan and Germany,” in Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 153. Reiko Tachibana gives a succinct explanation of Tawada’s understanding of exophony: “For Tawada, ‘exophony’ refers to the productivity of writers whose creative curiosity leads them to compose a symphony of fresh tunes using a new instrument—in this case a language other than their ‘mother’ tongue (bogo).” 2. Barbara Godard, “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation,” Tessera. La Tradution au féminin. Translation Women 6 (Spring 1989). This term is explained later in this chapter. 3. Lori Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” Signs 13.3 (Spring 1988) 454–472.

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4. Translation has long been associated with infidelity in Western European culture. The aphorism traduttore, tradittore (translator, traitor) circulated as early as the Renaissance. Because cultural tropes conventionally connected women to infidelity, translations and women both came to be the “beautiful unfaithful ones.” Faithful translations, like faithful women, are homely, while the beautiful ones are treacherous, or so at least declares Georges Mounin in his book on translation theory Les belles infideles (1955). 5. Luise Von Flotow-Evans, Translation and Gender Translating in the “Era of Feminism” (Manchester, UK: St. Jerome Pub., 1997), 35. 6. Von Flotow-Evans, 36. 7. Barbara Godard, “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation,” Tessera. La Tradution au féminin. Translation Women 6 (Spring 1989): 44. 8. Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 1991). 9. Olga Castro. “(Re-)Examining Horizons in Feminist Translation Studies: Towards a Third Wave,” 7. Online at https://rua.ua.es/dspace/bitstream/10045/13037/1/ MonTI_01_08_trans.pdf 10. Doug Slaymaker, “Introduction,” in Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 9. 11. For excellent articles on fluidity in Tawada’s work, see Bernard Banoun’s article about water metaphors as an apt description of the translation process in “Übersetzen als Durchscheinen-Lassen. Gedanken-Gänge eines Yoko Tawada-Übersetzers,” in Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, ed. Christine Ivanović , (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 455–68; Christina Szentivanyi’s discussion of Tawada’s “transformative flow” in “‘Tawada Yoko Does Not Exist’” / ‘Dichter sind Alchemisten’—Transformatives Fließen in Texten Yoko Tawadas,” in Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, ed. Christine Ivanović (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 441–448; and Ette Ottmar’s analysis of Tawada’s fluid translingualism in “Zeichenreiche. Insel-Texte und Text-Inseln bei Roland Barthes und Yoko Tawada,” in Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, ed. Christine Ivanović (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 207–230. 12. “The Bath,” in Where Europe Begins, trans. Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden (New York: New Directions, 2002), 3. 13. Yasemin Yildiz, “Tawada’s multilingual moves: toward a transnational imaginary,” in Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 78. 14. Of course, the very act of writing translational fiction could be read as a transgression, according to Christina Kraenzle: “If languages create boundaries, then to translate oneself into another idiom might be regarded as an act of transgression.” See Christina Kraenzle, “Traveling without moving: physical and linguistic mobility in Yoko Tawada’s Überseezungen.” in Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 103. Tawada takes this transgression of self-translating further by crafting a space between languages and cultures which she then inhabits—a singular space that belongs to neither one nor the other language and reflects her own fluid experience of being-in-language. 15. Tachibana, 278. Michiko Mae also identifies a similar literary strategy which she describes in terms of “Verfremdung,” which is a result of Fremdheitserfahrung: “Die Fremdheitserfahrung besteht aus zwei Momenten: zum einen der Fremdheit der anderen Sprache und Kultur; zum anderen dem eigenem Fremdsein.” See Michiko Mae, “Tawada Yokos Literatur als transkulturelle und intermediale Transformation,” in Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, ed. Christine Ivanović (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 371. 16. Chantal Wright, “Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Texts,” in Portrait of a Tongue: [an Experimental Translation] trans. Yoko Tawada and Chantal Wright (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013), 8. 17. Wright, 10.

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18. Maria Tymoczko, “Translation: Ethics, Ideology, Action,” The Massachusetts Review 47.3 (2006): 443. 19. Tymoczko, 446–447. 20. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 81. Tymoczko draws attention to potential pitfalls of Venuti’s version of “foreignization,” one of which concerns its status as an elitist strategy that caters to a highly-educated readership (454). Tawada’s texts seem addressed to such a readership, for one needs to have a nuanced understanding of the German language (and perhaps even some understanding of Japanese language and culture) in order to appreciate the sparkling spirit of her texts. Tawada is not a migrant with a poor understanding of language but rather a highly-educated migrant. She was not driven away from Japan by war or need, but she left Japan motivated by her love for the German language and her desire to attend a university in Germany. Thus, her audience is comprised of readers who might fall into similar categories—either German native speakers or speakers of German as a foreign language who are fluent in German. However, one should not dismiss Tawada’s work as elitist. Consistent with standpoint theory as discussed by Christine Halse and Anne Honey, Tawada’s fictional narrators constantly define, question, assert, and recreate their own position without claiming universality for it, always asking the reader to define her own relationship to language. See Christine Halse and Anne Honey, “Unraveling Ethics: Illuminating the Moral Dilemmas of Research Ethics,” Signs 30.4 (2005): 2152. 21. Tymoczko, 455. 22. Godard, 50. 23. Interestingly, Tawada’s texts encourage the kind of womanhandling in the translation process that Godard calls for in her activist article. Chantal Wright’s translation of “Portrait of a Tongue” is accompanied by an “Introduction,” a scholarly article on translating Tawada, as well as Wright’s own lavish comments and musings in parallel with the translated text. In this instance, the presence of the translator overshadows the original German text. 24. Hiltrud Arens, “Das kurze Leuchten unter dem Tor oder auf dem Weg zur geträumten Sprache: Poetological Reflections in Works by Yoko Tawada,” in Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 71. 25. Yoko Tawada, “Verwandlungen,” in Verwandlungen (Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998) 23. My translation. All subsequent translations accompanied by the German original in the text are my translations. I use the published translation without the German original whenever a translation is available. 26. Yoko Tawada, “Zungentanz,” in Überseezungen. (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2002), 14. With respect to this word “desidre,” in an attempt to be faithful to the spirit of Tawada’s linguistic inventions, instead of adding a vowel to the English word that already has so many of Tawada’s desired vowels, I added a consonant to change the rhythm of the word in a manner similar to the change that occurs in her linguistic invention. However, the result is likely just as unpronounceable for Tawada as the original German word, and so my translation, despite its efforts to mirror Tawada’s creativity, fails to offer a pronounceable word. Susan Bernofsky proposes another translation (“wanot” from the English word “want”) and talks about the difficult choice involved in the process of finding this equivalent, as well as the ways in which this semantic choice alters the structure of the rest of the sentence. See Susan Bernofsky, “Disoriented Language: On Translating Yoko Tawada” in Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, ed. Christine Ivanović (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 449. 27. Bettina Brandt, “The Unknown Character: Traces of the Surreal in Yoko Tawada’s writings,” in Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 111. 28. Hiltrud Arens, 54–55.

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29. Interview with Joachim Büthe, Deutschlandrundfunk, 09.23.2002. Online at: http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ueberseezungen.700.de.html?dram:article_id=80652. 30. Tawada, Überseezungen, 140. 31. Tawada, Überseezungen, 135. 32. Tawada, Überseezungen, 20. 33. There may even be another source for the word in the sounds emanating from the nearby harbor, which may invoke marine life. 34. Tawada, Überseezungen, 21. 35. Tawada, Überseezungen, 22–25. 36. Tawada, Überseezungen, 102. 37. Linda Koiran, “Schattenloses Schreiben im Unterwegs?: Suche nach Vergangenheitsspuren in den deutschsprachigen Texten von Yoko Tawada,” in Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, ed. Christine Ivanović (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 346. 38. Michiko Tanigawa, “Performative Über-setzungen/über-setzende Performance: zur Topologie der Sprache von Yoko Tawada,” in Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, ed. Christine Ivanović (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 351. 39. Petra Fachinger, “Postcolonial/postcommunist picaresque and the logic of trans in Yoko Tawada’s Das nackte Auge,” in Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, ed. Christine Ivanović (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 298. 40. Godard, 46-47. 41. Tawada, Überseezungen, 28. 42. Tawada, Überseezungen, 30. 43. The narrator is playing with the quasi-homonymy between “Asche” (“ash”) and “Arsch” (“ass”) that she distinguishes in the muddled language of the man. The linguistic play goes further by adding “Aas” (rotten carcass) to the previous words, which suggests a transformation of her own interior space into a place of destruction, ash and rotten carcasses. 44. Linda Koiran, 346, connects the image of the ash-filled oven with concentration camps and mass murder, thus connecting the text with German history and Paul Celan’s work, Celan being an author about whom Tawada has written extensively. I suggest a different interpretation that reads the inner space of the narrator as a mythical phoenix that is constantly being reborn from out of its own ashes. 45. Tawada, “Eine Leere Flasche,” Verwandlungen, 54–57. 46. “Bioskoop” is the Afrikaans word for cinema. The short story focuses on the narrator’s Dream-language,” which she identifies with Afrikaans. 47. Tawada, “Bioskoop der Nacht” Überseezungen, 65. Doug Slaymaker perceptively analyzes Tawada’s use of pronouns in two of her Japanese works in the context of his discussion of Tawada’s pushing of bodily and linguistic boundaries. See Doug Slaymaker, “Traveling without Roads: Body and Place in Tawada Yoko’s Fiction,” in Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, ed. Christine Ivanović (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010), 323-25. 48. In “Wörter, die in der Asche schlafen,” Tawada describes the creative process as an essential element in securing one’s physical safety: “Ich musste ein Zauberwort finden, mit dem ich den Geruch verbannen konnte.” (I had to find a magic spell that would help me to remove the stench), 27.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arens, Hiltrud. “Das kurze Leuchten unter dem Tor oder auf dem Weg zur geträumten Sprache: Poetological Reflections in Works by Yoko Tawada.” In Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, 59-76. Edited by Douglas Slaymaker. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007.

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Banoun, Bernard. “Übersetzen als Durchscheinen-Lassen. Gedanken-Gänge eines Yoko Tawada-Übersetzers. In Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, 455-68. Edited by Christine Ivanović . Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010. Bernofsky, Susan. “Disoriented Language: On Translating Yoko Tawada.” In Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, 449–453. Edited by Christine Ivanović . Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010. Brandt, Bettina. “The unknown character: traces of the surreal in Yoko Tawada’s writings.” In Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, 111–124. Edited by Douglas Slaymaker. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Fachinger, Pertra. “Postcolonial/postcommunist picaresque and the logic of trans in Yoko Tawada’s Das nackte Auge.” In Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, 297-308. Edited by Christine Ivanović . Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010. Godard, Barbara. “Theorizing Feminist Discourse/Translation.” Tessera. La Tradution au féminin. Translation Women. Vol. 6. (Spring 1989): 42–53. Halse, Christine, and Anne Honey. “Unraveling Ethics: Illuminating the Moral Dilemmas of Research Ethics.” Signs. 30.4 (2005): 2141. Jaggar, Allison. “Globalizing Feminist Ehics.” In Decentering the Center: Philosophy for a Multicultural, Postcolonial, and Feminist World, 1–25. Edited by Uma Narayan and Sandra G. Harding. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000. Koiran, Linda. “Schattenloses Schreiben im Unterwegs? Suche nach Vergangenheitsspuren in den deutschsprachigen Texten von Yoko Tawada.” In Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation : Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, 329–349. Edited by Christine Ivanović . Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010. Kraenzle, Christina. “Traveling without moving: physical and linguistic mobility in Yoko Tawada’s Überseezungen.” In Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, 91-110. Edited by Douglas Slaymaker. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Mae, Michiko. “Tawada Yokos Literatur als transkulturelle und intermediale Transformation.” In Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, 369–384. Edited by Christine Ivanović . Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010. Slaymaker, Douglas. “Introduction.” In Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, 1–13. Edited by Douglas Slaymaker. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. ———. “Traveling without Roads: Body and Place in Tawada Yoko’s Fiction.” In Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, 323–328. Edited by Christine Ivanović . Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010. Szentivanyi, Christina. “‘Tawada Yoko Does Not Exist’” / ‘Dichter sind Alchemisten’—Transformatives Fließen in Texten Yoko Tawadas.” In Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, 441–448. Edited by Christine Ivanović . Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010. Tachibana, Reiko. “Tawada Yoko’s Quest for Exophony: Japan and Germany.” In Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, 153–168. Edited by Douglas Slaymaker. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Tanigawa, Michiko. “Performative Über-setzungen/über-setzende Performance: zur Topologie der Sprache von Yoko Tawada.” In Yoko Tawada: Poetik Der Transformation: Beiträge zum Gesamtwerk, 351–368. Edited by Christine Ivanović . Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2010. Tawada, Yoko. “The Bath.” In Where Europe Begins, 1–56. Translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden. New York: New Directions, 2002. ———. Überseezungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2002. ———. Verwandlungen. Tübingen: Konkursbuchverlag, 1998. ———. and Joachim Büthe. Interview. 09.23.2002. Deutschlandrundfunk. http://www. deutschlandfunk.de/ueberseezungen.700.de.html?dram:article_id=80652 Tymoczko, Maria. “Translation: Ethics, Ideology, Action.” The Massachusetts Review. 47.3 (2006): 442–461. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 1995.

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Wright, Chantal. “Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Texts.” In Portrait of a Tongue by Yoko Tawada. Translated by Chantal Wright. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013. Yildiz, Yasemin. “Tawada’s Multilingual Moves: Toward a Transnational Imaginary.” In Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, 77–90. Edited by Douglas Slaymaker. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007.

NINE Laudatio for Uljana Wolf Erlangener Literary Prize for Poetry as Translation, 2015 1 Yoko Tawada (Translated by Bettina Brandt) 2

In German, when people talk about someone’s lexicon, they use the word “word treasure” (Wortschatz). Words that we know and that know us are precious treasures. Among these, there are words that sit heavily on the stomach or are carved into the heart. Most words we keep in the brain, however, and though this is the organ of knowledge we don’t know how they are stored there. Are they arranged in alphabetical order, or thematically? Or, like in a botanical dictionary, ordered by color or by season? In any event, for each new language, we attempt to build a new word treasure chamber. I myself am particularly anxious not to mix up the meaning of English words with those of German words. Apparently, I must have built a watertight wall between the two languages. Otherwise I cannot explain why I never heard the English word “eagle” in the German word “Igel” until I read Uljana Wolf. She developed a new order (or disorder) for the chambers in the language center. She is an excellent interior designer of multilingual poetry. When she interconnects words with elegant lines and steps over the borders between languages, an unexpected formation appears as poetry. It’s like the constellations: between the individual stars there is a distance of millions of light years but because their light reaches our present at the same time, we can detect an image. But how does Uljana Wolf single out the words that are suitable to become stars? She is a Master of Similitude. We learn to ignore certain similarities, to avoid confusion. The English word “bad” has nothing to 139

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do with a German bathroom (Badezimmer) and a German letter (Brief) is not necessarily brief. Uljana Wolf is not afraid of similarities. Quite the contrary. She welcomes each confusion with open arms as an opportunity for a new friendship. Reading the line “Weder im guten noch im bad” [Neither in good nor in bad”] in the poetry collection entitled “Falsche Freunde,” [“False Friends”] I was reminded how a Japanese publisher had been very interested in my novella “Das Bad,” which at that point had only been published in German, and I couldn’t fully understand why. Later it turned out that it was because of the title: Das Bad [the Bath.] The publisher, who did not know German, thought that this was a novel about a bad girl. Uljana Wolf plays with obvious similarities that normally are collectively repressed. Here is another example: “liegt aber eine strähne im brief, gar eine lange” (“but the letter contained a strand of hair, a really long one”). 3 The English word “brief” and the German word “Brief” [letter]: are they etymologically related – distant relatives perhaps? Or do they just look similar by chance? The hole in etymological knowledge brought up a personal, somewhat embarrassing memory, in which I had mixed up these two words. Once we have learned the meanings of the words “Brief” and “brief,” we no longer see the similarities, even though they are obvious, or precisely because they are obvious; just like the purloined letter of Edgar Allan Poe. We don’t want to get confused, we want to avoid mistakes at all cost. False friends could lead us to linguistic mistakes, and, as a general rule, it is embarrassing to make mistakes, especially in the English language. Those who dream of international success must speak the language, but not play with it, let alone make embarrassing mistakes in it. Did anybody ever ask the English language whether it is happy in this role, or whether it wouldn’t prefer to experience a new poetic adventure with Uljana Wolf? Some people think that authors, unlike translators, do not need a dictionary since their words must come directly from their hearts. In truth, poets and poetesses spend a lot of time with dictionaries. Oskar Pastior once told me that he was immersed in dictionaries for days and weeks on end when he was writing poetry as he was translating Petrarch. The term “multilingual poetry” conjures up the image of a poetess at the breakfast buffet collecting tasty words from different language platters for her own plate. In the case of Uljana Wolf, I don’t think of a breakfast buffet so much as a desk on which many dictionaries are placed closely together. Translating is an intriguing, but difficult, dangerous, and unthankful job. Not every translator can or will last long in that particular open situation in which the seemingly stable meanings of the original appear to be dissolving while a new word from the target language is nowhere in sight yet. Those in this situation are directly confronted with the materiality of language. There, language can be touched

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in the form of letters – an almost menacing intimacy without any security whatsoever. This is the “Ellis Island” of translation. It is not certain yet that a word, or what once was a word, can build a new future in the new language. Translators, for whom this situation is uncanny, quickly want to reach the target language and quickly want to forget the menacing transitional period. Uljana Wolf takes her time at the threshold of translation, at the Ellis Island of language. She maintains the original language as a movement and steps mimetically into the target language. What emerges is not a translation as a finished product but a kind of corporeality. Translation for me has increasingly turned into such a walk in the garden, and that in two respects. On the one hand, it is essential to walk together with and next to the original poem, that is to say, to give more importance to the walking, striding, jumping of the poem than to its speaking, puzzling, calling. I am not talking about objectively countable verse and feet (though that too), but rather the rhythmic-gestural imprint that each line, with its rise and fall, its cadence, leaves on my body. 4

For a literary prize that is awarded for “poetry as translation,” the thought that poetry would be a radicalization of translation, is particularly interesting. Uljana Wolf writes about this. “To leave translation behind me and instead step into where nothing is working anymore and everything goes, and play with an ‘impurity’ which has been proliferating in my poetry for some time now.” 5 I imagine a radical translation that knows of no way other than to cross over into poetry. There, not every single word of the original text has to be replaced by a word in the target language. There, you don’t have to serve readers, only represent the process of translation as an artistic act. There, you don’t have to compromise to find an answer but can leave all open questions open. Impurity is a counter-measure against the cleansing of the national language, or the Apartheid in the brain. English words are allowed to be visible in a German text, and not simply as loanwords with a visitor’s pass. In this movie theater, there is no longer a strict division of labor between the original language and the subtitles. How absurd this question then sounds: “In which language do you think?” Don’t we think simultaneously in all languages, those we know and don’t know? False friends can often be found between two related languages. That is why they are also called “false brothers” in German. English and German are closely related languages, Polish and German also belong to one family, the family of Indo-European languages. The poetess is not interested in measuring the distance to the self. Rather, she questions the concept of one’s own language, of what is called the “mother tongue”

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but, in reality, belongs to the “fatherland.” In a lecture at Humboldt University she talked about “Falschländischen” (“falselandic”) as an alternative to “Vaterländischen” (“fatherlandic” or national): “Well, I do write in German, but despite having studied German at the university, I write by no means in a vater- but rather a falschländische manner.” 6 One knows that proximity is sometimes more difficult than distance. Uljana Wolf’s language has a smoothness that knows how to deal with a difficult proximity. Most Germans overlook Polish words when they encounter them. One could endlessly list the reasons for this ignorance. The language is too foreign, the cities are too boring, it does not qualify as vacation destination, the lifestyle is not cool, there is no money to be made, small countries should learn the language of the bigger countries and not the other way around, etc. But what stops us from looking into them when the words are already in front of our eyes? Why doesn’t one try to write them down and get inside their heads? Uljana Wolf looks at and works with neighboring West-Slavic words. Even if you don’t know the Polish word “kochanie,” you can immediately understand what the book title “Kochanie, I bought some bread” means, since you can detect the English word “Honey,” in the word “Kochanie.” “Honey, I bought I some bread.” The word “co-lover” ought to exist, “kochanie” therefore as well. For a small child, no language is inaccessible. He or she picks up every word, looks at it closely, turns it around, takes it apart, and eats it. The child works tirelessly with the language. Why do we lose this skill? Why do we avoid foreign languages, except for when we can abuse them as proof of accomplishment? Uljana Wolf’s interaction with languages is very appealing, liberating, and stimulating. I, on the other hand, work with two languages that are rather far removed from each other: Japanese and German. The distance between the two languages is not of a geographical nature. Because in Eastern Siberia, not far from Japan, the night is called “Ночь.” The Polish word “noc” is clearly related to the Russian word “Ночь” but also to the German word “Nacht.” The Japanese night “yoru” has no common root with these European words. For German-speaking people, there is, in other words, no reason, to exoticize Slavic languages. Uljana Wolf works with Polish words and dares to take half a step into the night. “Half” sounds derogatory in German, but I mean it in a positive sense. Because “half-night” means “mid-night.” One reaches the midpoint from which the moon stands as close as the sun. In the poem “Herbstspiel” the word “Herz” (or “heart”) rhymes with the word “Scherz” (or “joke”). It’s a poem full of emotion that makes me not the least bit sentimental. The heart persists as a percussion instrument, it joyfully plays richly varied rhythms. Still, we are not dealing with “Lautpoesie,” or sound poetry here, Uljana Wolf does not write loudly, she writes loudly and softly. The poet Ernst Jandl refers to this as

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“laut und luise” or loud and louise. I remember how he once turned the Bible into sound poetry. “Him Hamflang war das Wort (“Am Anfang war das Wort,” or “In the beginning there was the Word.”) I still hear this sentence in Jandl’s voice. In Uljana Wolf’s poetry it reads a little differently: “Am anfang war, oder zu beginn” or “at first there was, or in the beginning.” The word “begin” changes into the dance “beguine,” and, indeed, the feet of the poem start demonstrating new steps. I don’t know if there was a word at the beginning, and if so, what word that might have been. But how about beginning with translation instead? Because multilingualism characterizes our present. Some still view it as divine punishment, but in the process of radical translation every single one of the many languages can become my beautiful “Lengevitch.” NOTES 1. Yoko Tawada’s laudatio für Uljana Wolf, accessed May 10th 2019. http://archiv. poetenfest-erlangen.de/2015/eventdetailb41b.html?EventID=404&VonSeite=events. asp. 2. Bettina Brandt would like to thank Uljana Wolf for her suggestions and edits. 3. Uljana Wolf, Falsche Freunde: Gedichte (Idstein: Kookbooks, 2009), 11. 4. Uljana Wolf “Translating Isabel Bogdan” newsletter of the Verein der Übersetzer (VdÜ), 2014. 5. ibid. 6. REDE SELTSAM ANGEZETTELT, speech held at the graduation ceremony of the Philosophy Faculty II of the Humboldt University in Berlin on July 16th, 2014.

TEN Spherical Narrative Temporality in Tawada Yōko’s Fiction Dan Fujiwara

INTRODUCTION Novel writing is a temporal art. Temporality in the novel has been the subject of countless literary studies and has become one of the main fields in literary criticism. Fiction is heavily influenced by the apparent linearity of the texts, sentences, and even the words that materialize it on the paper, and generally the act of reading, follows this linearity from beginning to end at least once. Of course, in practice, things are slightly more complicated, as there is a significant gap between the actual temporal sequence of events within the narrative itself and the time taken by the act of narration and reading. Further, in fiction writing, events are not always recounted in chronological order, as narration is contextualized by non-time features such as causality. While it is true that in many cases the end of a novel coincides with the final sequence of events, novels do not always start with the first event in the series. 1 In one respect, we can say that reading narratives is the act of considering this temporal difference to be a literary effect produced by writers as they give fictional narrative structure to a chronological order of events, which we then reconstruct in our minds while reading. What is more, as a duration organized by a beginning and an end of the narrative, this fictional narrative structure—the plot—also presupposes the linear model of temporality, because it characterizes the (original) sequence of events as an interesting narrative. 2 The text of a novel results from the intersection of two

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different linear continuities, which is to say that this text is deeply influenced by the linear model of temporality. However, whereas this linear model of temporality serves as a basic framework for reading narratives in much literary criticism, some of Tawada Yōko’s fiction—I will limit my discussion here to her Japanese language works—appears to be written according to alternative narrative temporalities and calls into question the role of linear continuity in novels. So, while in most literary studies dealing with the narrative temporality of fictions the assumption has been this linear model, I will explore in this paper the ways that some of Tawada Yōko’s fiction cuts in another direction, creating alternative narrative temporalities which appear not to be linear., three novels—Kyūkei jikan (Spherical Time, 2002), Jisa (2006; Time Differences, trans. Jeffrey Angles, 2017), and Kentōshi (2014; The Emissary, trans. Margaret Mitsutani, 2018)—appear to be written as narratives that use an unlikely (or paradoxical) temporality resembling a globe or some other spherical object rather than the linear model I suggested at the outset to be dominant. What is this “spherical temporality,” as I call it, taking this phrasing from one of Tawada’s titles? How is it portrayed in narratives? How does it come to frame Tawada’s writing and thereby our reading? In answering these questions, I would like to push against the dominant linear model of narrative temporality in order to highlight the original and experimental aspect of Tawada’s storytelling; this will also suggest a framework for reading her fiction. BEYOND OR WITHIN READERS’ EXPECTATION My first example is the novel Kyūkei jikan (2002). This title is a neologism combining two Japanese common words—kyūkei (球形 spherical) and jikan (時間 time)—which together can be translated as “time in the form of a globe” or “spherical time.” This expression is highly revealing and helpful for creating our working hypothesis, not only because it seems to suggest that this novel is a narrative with a non-linear temporality (as I would like to highlight in Tawada’s novels), but also because it brings to mind a homonym, a common expression in Japanese written with different Chinese characters (休憩時間) and which means “breaktime” or “pause.” Since the title of a novel and its text interact with and elucidate each other, this ambivalent title, reflecting Tawada’s characteristic wordplay, provides a hint as to how we might read the narrative itself. In turn, a thorough understanding of the narrative content might help us define the mysterious concept of “spherical time” which apparently influences the author’s narration. This novel consists of three different narratives—one about a high school girl named Saya, one about her classmate Katsuo, and one about their classroom teacher Sonoda Yasuo. Each narrative describes events

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that take place outside of school hours, during their breaktime from everyday life at high school. It is important here to draw further attention to just what it is that the protagonists experience during their breaktime, since this may help our understanding of the concept of “spherical time.” Saya’s narrative can be summarized as follows: While doing an internet search on the word dojin (native), used by a salaryman who criticized her for doing her makeup on a station platform, Saya discovers a tearoom with the same name. A few days later, she enters the tearoom and meets a mysterious lady named Isabella, who describes a country she has visited on horseback. Fascinated by the story, Saya keeps going to the tearoom after school to listen to this “lady with a head of white hair,” 3 until she discovers at a library that Isabella is in fact Isabella Bird, who traveled to Japan in the middle of the nineteenth century and is no longer alive. In other words, the narrative unfolds in a way that suggests that Saya has simply seen an apparition of the famous English explorer or is suffering from hallucinations. Meanwhile, her classmate Katsuo also has an intriguing encounter with a student named Kondō. This event takes place outside Katsuo’s home after he has argued with his parents and is looking for someone to light his cigarette. While worrying about his boyfriend Makkun’s long absence, Katsuo gradually becomes interested in Kondō who abnormally worships the sun and believes it is the origin of fire. However, he eventually learns that Kondō has had a serious mental breakdown after being falsely accused of setting fire to his classmate’s house while he was at high school. The narrative of Saya and Katsuo’s teacher Sonoda Yasuo follows a similar pattern. After abandoning his idea of studying in the United States with his girlfriend Machiko, Sonoda has an encounter with an old man who looks just like Taisā, an old junior high school teacher Sonoda hated because of his violent attitude, in a yakitori bar he accidently entered while thinking of him. He gets into an argument about education with this Taisā lookalike, who in reality, logically, should already have been dead. Feeling an uncontrollable urge to hit the old man, Sonoda flees from the bar and begins to think he should go to the mountains to hold back his violent feelings. This seems to be what Sonoda ultimately does, since on the last page the narrator says that “Sonoda has already been absent from illness for two weeks.” 4 What is striking about these three narratives is that each of them features a dream, an illusion or even a delusion that takes place during the protagonist’s “breaktime” (between classes, after school, at home, on national holidays, etc.). Thus, we find, in Tawada’s “spherical temporality” the protagonists are living a “reality” that they only later come to understand is illusory. If each of these narratives constituted a full chapter and was presented consecutively like a collection of short stories, we could simply see them

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as being written about “spherical time” or “breaktime.” However, it does not appear to be quite so simple, since the 171 pages of the novel are divided into 46 sections of varying lengths, each clearly separated by a blank line and with no accompanying title or number. In other words, the text is not written in a way that enables readers to immediately and clearly perceive the three separate narratives. The narrative organization is not simple either. The text begins with an episode in which Saya is applying her makeup while sitting on a platform. However, as readers progress through the novel, they gradually become aware that the third-person narrator is switching his/her focalizing character from Saya to Sonoda to Katsuo, and so on, between sections. Overall, the narratives of Saya and Katsuo constitute almost the entire text, while Sonoda’s story is recounted only in the first half of the text. Thus, we can distinguish in the same text-space three different thirdperson narratives, each recounted gradually without any textual device or hint to make this free-hopping narrative strategy intelligible. This puzzling narration clearly influences our reading—and understanding—of the novel, since it invites readers to identify three different narratives which do not, however, influence each other. It is true that Saya and Katsuo meet by chance in a public library and have a conversation there, but this unexpected encounter does not influence the narrative development. What is more, all three narratives are placed in the same text-space under the same title, leading readers to wondering if there is a hidden, broader narrative that could justify the coexistence of the three narratives in the organized continuity of the text. The text as a whole is therefore written in a way that encourages us to apply a linear model of narrative temporality to our reading, despite the apparent contradiction with what the title—“spherical time”—seems to suggest. The question, then, is how should we understand this contradiction between two narrative temporalities. I suggest that this contradictory situation is precisely one of the main features of this novel. In fact, it is clearly described in the text itself, in particular through the character of Namiko, to whom I would like to draw further attention. Namiko, another of Saya’s and Katsuo’s classmates, appears as a minor character in the three narratives. Described as a malicious girl, she joins Saya and Katsuo’s narratives midway through the text as she purposely tries to disturb her classmates. Indeed, in the middle of the novel she sends a letter, purportedly from another student, to Katsuo mocking his homosexuality and another (this time anonymous) letter to Makkun claiming that Katsuo is dating Saya. She also advises Saya to pay attention to Katsuo after overhearing him invite Saya to the movies. Namiko’s interference in Saya and Katsuo’s narratives is more than just a minor story line, however; it brings them to an end. The events take place toward the end of the novel, the 43rd and 44th sections to be precise. The third-person narrator describes Namiko locking her class-

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mates—Saya, Katsuo and his boyfriend—in the basement of an abandoned warehouse and manipulating Kondō into setting fire to the room. The end of this scene is recounted from Katsuo’s point of view: Kondō seemed not to hear Katsuo’s voice and his clumsy fingers kept striking the matches. But it was no use. The first and second joints of his fingers were creased with countless wrinkles, like overlapping torii archways. The first match broke with a snap. The second lit briefly but was blown out by the wind. The third burst into life and Kondō cupped his hands around the flame. The flame spread to a piece of paper and burned brightly. He’s going to throw it in from the window, thought Katsuo. 5

This surreal episode does not merely end Saya and Katsuo’s narratives, it also creates a sudden and surprising subversion in the narrative organization that was previously delegated to the third-person narrator. The 45th section, which directly follows this episode, is presented as a firstperson narrative that appears to be an inner monologue by Namiko describing her obsession with cleanliness and her ill-feeling toward her classmates. In other words, Namiko does not only end her classmates’ narratives; she also assumes the narrator’s position. At the end of this first-person narrative, we can read Namiko describing how she burned three pictures of her classmates, mirroring the episode in the underground room. Furious, I opened my drawer and picked up the pictures of that dirty boy and the traitor girl from my stolen picture collection. I also found Makkun’s picture and lined up all three of them. How will I kill them? Tired of ripping the pictures, I decided to burn them. On my shelf I had a tin with a pretty rabbit drawn on it. It was a souvenir given to me by an uncle I hate, apparently for storing tea. I put the three pictures in it and tried to burn them. At first, they didn’t catch fire but then the flames leaped up so fiercely and close to my face that I unintentionally let out a scream. I quickly put the cover on the tin and pushed down on it hard with my hands. It might be completely dark inside the tin, I’ll throw it away as it is then! The tin will never be opened again and it’ll disappear from this world. With that thought, I suddenly felt a little more relaxed. Now I’ll probably be able to sleep tonight without stealing Mom’s sleeping pills. 6

In this scene, the surreal ultimate episode where the three classmates— Saya, Katsuo, and his boyfriend—are going to be burned is presented again but with its context replaced by a “tin,” allowing us to suppose that the description of the episode could be a delusion entertained by Namiko. However, we must consider that Namiko’s delusion also ends her classmates’ “breaktime,” in other words their “spherical time.” The character Namiko, in particular through her intriguing and engaging way of

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taking part in other narratives, can be seen as related to the feeling of suspicion and impatience readers gradually develop as they search for a broader narrative linking Saya, Katsuo, and Sonoda’s seemingly unrelated story lines. Namiko’s final intervention, which brings her classmates’ narratives to a sudden close, also coincides with readers’ desire for some kind of conclusion; in other words, it corresponds to their obsession with having an ending, as would be usual with a linear model of narrative temporality. Namiko’s interference in the novel relieves the reader’s frustration with the third-person narrator, who delays bringing narratives together. Thus, the character of Namiko can be seen as an allegory of readers’ feelings about the novel’s narrative temporality. If the text ended with Namiko’s inner monologue, we could conclude that it is written within the linear model of temporality, since in the last sentences of her monologue Namiko evokes her “feeling of relief” and believes she will fall asleep, which makes us feel a sort of end coming. However, it is difficult to completely favor this interpretation when reading the 46th section, the very final one of the novel, just after Namiko’s monologue: Wrapped in her denim jacket, Saya was smoking and sitting on the rooftop of her school building. In the deepening autumn, the sunlight was still strong but it was cold in the shade. She saw a slender white smoke plume rising in the distance. The chimney also smokes, thought Saya. But she was not enjoying it like a geisha girl draping a kimono on her shoulders and smoking her pipe as she has seen in the schoolbook. She was hurriedly smoking, holding more firmly her tight jacket. Sonoda had already been absent for two weeks due to illness. A substitute teacher found right away that Saya was copying on her notebook an ukiyo-e picture presented in the schoolbook and shouted at her not to confuse with art time. Offended, she decided to skip his class this week and spend her time on the rooftop of her school building. “Not to confuse with art time? Everything is art time!” saying firmly in her mind, Saya exhaled smoke into blue sky like a toy steam locomotive. 7

Here, the third person narration comes back with some remains of the three narratives unfolding within spherical time. Indeed, in the image of smoking that influences the text of this last section, Katsuo’s narrative is still perceptible as it begun with the young protagonist looking for someone to light his cigarette. Further, Saya’s posture—“sitting on the rooftop”—coincides with the first section of the text in which the narrator describes her “sitting on a platform,” and Sonoda’s absence can be seen as being momentary. In this sense, the three narratives developed within the spherical temporality have not completely disappeared despite Namiko’s subversive interference bringing the linear temporality onto them. Thus, readers are definitively—and probably forever—left in an ambivalent situation as to the novel’s narrative temporality, caught between the linear model and the spherical model. This uncertainty without any be-

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ginning or without any end might be necessary condition that readers have to accept if they wish to grasp this novel as being named “spherical time.” TIME DIFFERENCE OR SIMULTANEITY The short story Jisa (2006; Time Differences, trans. Jeffrey Angles, 2017) also provides a reading mode based on the idea of spherical temporality, as suggested by the title itself. Indeed, Jisa, meaning “time difference” in Japanese, is recognized as such when we attempt to discern the local times in different places at the very same moment. Time difference paradoxically presupposes simultaneity between different events, each happening in different places around the globe. In other words, time difference, or to be more precise, simultaneity, can also be seen as one of the characteristics of spherical time. We saw how this was the case in Kyūkei jikan, where three different narratives unfold simultaneously. My point here is to show how the paradoxical aspect of spherical temporality—namely, time difference as simultaneity—influences the narration, and how we can read this short story as another of Tawada Yōko’s challenges to linear temporality. As in the example above, Tawada again organizes the narrative into an ambiguous coexistence among multiple narratives. Jisa is composed of three title-less narratives, all recounted gradually in the third person. Unlike Kyūkei jikan, sections are not physically separated by a blank line. Across the thirty-three paragraphs written without breaks, the narrator switches his/her focalizing character from Mamoru to Manfred, Manfred to Michael, Michael to Mamoru, and so on, several times, always in the same order. The text begins with Mamoru, a young man teaching Japanese at a university in Berlin, waking up at nine am to eat his breakfast. Longing for his boyfriend Manfred, who has gone to New York, Mamoru goes to university and later that afternoon attends a lecture on “The Iraq War and Changes in Languages in the Media.” However, once in the entrance hall, he finds himself being investigated by the police because of a “sashimi knife” he had bought the previous week and forgotten to take out of his bag when leaving his apartment that morning. Meanwhile, Manfred, a young man teaching German in New York, wakes up at six am after having had a dream in which he was about to be attacked by a boatman. He begins to think of Michael, apparently his new boyfriend who has settled in Tokyo. He gives him a call, so that they can go to the gym “together,” despite the time difference between New York and Tokyo. After exercising, he gives a lecture at university. However, after having lunch and going to a meeting, he suddenly loses consciousness in his office.

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As for Michael, an English teacher in Tokyo, he receives Manfred’s call and then goes to the gym in the early evening, despite feeling unmotivated, and thinks about Mamoru, whom he recently met. After the gym, he goes to at an outdoor noodle stand and meets a lady who had earlier interviewed him and who now edits her own manga magazine. They continue drinking at a bar, where Michael calls Mamoru and invites him to make a toast with him over the phone. However, in the taxi on his way home he feels sick and asks the driver to stop the car. The episode in which Manfred loses consciousness is recounted after this scene and constitutes the final paragraph of the text. Since at first glance the three narratives do not seem to influence each other directly, readers are prompted to search for a hidden—untold— broader narrative that could link them. In his essay on this short story, Ishihara Chiaki demonstrates this by emphasizing the role that readers can take regarding this blank. Indeed, reading carefully, we can see a kind of narrative plot in which Michael’s infidelity with Mamoru drives Manfred—who still loves Michael—to lose consciousness. Given that the text does not specify whether or not Manfred knows about Michael’s infidelity, Ishihara emphasizes the role of readers who postulate this unwritten causal link between Michael’s infidelity and Manfred’s loss of consciousness. “The relationship between Manfred, Michael and Mamoru is not a so-called ‘triangle’ (sankaku kankei), for Manfred does not know that Michael and Mamoru have met. The accidental encounter of Michael with Mamoru [seems to] bring Manfred to misfortune, but this is a ‘story’ that only readers construct. The reader alone imagines [behind the three narratives] the ‘triangle’ between the three protagonists.” 8 In other words, Ishihara suggests that the final episode—Manfred’s losing consciousness—is the ultimate consequence of the interaction between the three narratives, which is invisible in the text but potentially perceived by readers. In this sense, it should be noted that Ishihara’s analysis appears to follow (or be limited to) the linear model of temporality, although his emphasis on the reader’s task of searching for an untold broader narrative is convincing. However, the text of Jisa does not seem to be structured by a causality of why and how it comes to end with Manfred’s suddenly losing consciousness. Indeed, while Mamoru still thinks about Manfred, who has gone to New York, he apparently feels a physical attraction to Michael. 9 In other words, whereas Manfred and Michael are breaking up with their partners—respectively, Mamoru and Manfred—in order to pursue new lovers, Mamoru is obviously attracted to two men at the same time, namely, Michael and Manfred. My point is to develop a reading framework that emphasizes Mamoru’s ambivalence rather than Manfred’s loss of consciousness. It is precisely in this context that I would like to consider how this short story seems to be based on a strong preoccupation with the idea of simultaneity, as suggested by its title, Jisa (Time Differences).

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This preoccupation with simultaneity is clearly visible in the three protagonists’ obsession with doing something “together,” despite the time differences separating them. As I previously summarized, both Manfred and Michael place calls to their lovers in an attempt to feel their mutual existence (Manfred calls Michael so that they can go to the gym “together,” while Michael calls Mamoru and suggests making a toast “together”). Simultaneity—visible in Mamoru’s ambivalent romantic feelings and also in Manfred and Michael’s actions—thus appears to be a common topic linking the three protagonists’ narratives. The obsession with simultaneity can be seen in a more symbolic manner in the narrator’s mention of a “siren” (sairen no oto) three times in the text: in the first paragraph, where Mamoru imagines Manfred dreaming; in the second paragraph, where the narrator describes Manfred sleeping; and in the final paragraph of the text, where Manfred loses consciousness while hearing a “siren” and significantly, this characterizes the end of the novel: Manfred grabbed at the sill of his office window and breathed in and out. There’s nothing wrong, you’re in perfect health, the weather is great, everything outside is like always—the words went through his mind clear as day, but he could feel his consciousness slipping away. There wasn’t any reason for him to feel faint, but he was aware he was on the verge of passing out. A moment later, he’d be on the floor. His chest was heavy, full of stone, and his legs were growing thinner and thinner. His breath stuck in his throat. He wanted to call out. He caught a glimpse of the telephone out of the corner of his eye, but if he reached out to it, he’d lose his balance. He thought about yelling, but he could not muster his voice. Had his vocal chords disappeared? He heard a siren in the distance. He thought, there was no way it could be coming for me. Or perhaps, just perhaps, could someone out there have already called it for me? 10

Ishihara links this “siren” to the one that appears in the first sentence of the second paragraph (the fifth paragraph in the English translation), where Manfred’s narrative begins: The wail of the siren trailed off into the distance, marking what, by coincidence, turned out to be nearly an hour of unbroken silence, but eventually the drunk lying on the side of the road woke up and resumed shouting his monologue, starting up where he had left off yesterday. 11

Focusing on the link between these two “sirens,” a plotline becomes visible in which Manfred’s loss of consciousness, which closes the narrative, is announced in the form of a dream at the beginning. As Ishihara states, understanding the narrative in this way becomes the task of readers who are allegorically referred to in the earlier excerpt as “someone out there” (mirai ni iru dareka, literally “someone who is in the future”). Neverthe-

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less, I would like to draw attention to the fact that this “siren” is found not only in Manfred’s narrative, but also in the opening paragraph of the text, where the narrator describes Mamoru thinking about Manfred dreaming: Maybe he was snoring his usual cat-purr snore. Mamoru wondered if Manhattan at three a.m. was still alive with wailing sirens and the laughter of people walking down the street. 12

Here, Mamoru imagines the “wailing sirens” that his lover Manfred in New York might hear while asleep at the same moment that he is longing for him. As Ishihara stresses, it might be on the readers to make sense of the link between the “sirens” mentioned in the text. On the other hand, reading this quote, it is as if Mamoru made the narrator describe “sirens” in the narrative, and it might therefore be possible to provide another interpretation for the three mentions of “sirens” in the text. The “siren” Mamoru imagines in Berlin is textually linked to the next one wailing while Manfred is dreaming in his bed in New York, and finally reaches Manfred as he loses consciousness. In other words, the wailing siren might not necessarily be considered only within Manfred’s narrative; it also concerns Mamoru. Accordingly, when reading with a particular focus on the three wailing sirens, the narrative unfolds as if Mamoru prepared the final episode of Manfred’s losing consciousness. What exactly can we read in this if we consider my assumption that simultaneity is one of the characteristics of spherical time, which is also, as I mentioned when analyzing Kyūkei jikan, a temporality linked to dreams? It is probable that by imagining Manfred’s loss of consciousness without knowing it, Mamoru is not trying to provoke Manfred’s symbolic death in narrative but rather to bring his lover back into the moment of the dream which he made the narrator describe in the second paragraph of the text. In short, he uses the wailing siren as an attempt to meet his distant (ex)lover once again. Mamoru’s longing clearly has sexual overtones, as the narrator describes in the following words: Once, while asleep, Mamoru had buried his nose in the curly, light brown hair on Manfred’s arm, and the tickle inside his nostrils woke him up. Manfred would sometimes flop over in bed in the middle of the night. At those moments, he might knock Mamoru on the cheek, and Mamoru would wake up with a groan. Half-asleep, Manfred would lift up a little and mutter, “What? Someone hit you?” Then, with eyes still closed, he’d lie on top of Mamoru. His weight seemed less like that of a human body than that of a mass of inorganic matter, like a sandbag. “You’re crushing me,” Mamoru would say, unable to get out from under him. His parts were feeling numb and distant, yet there was a flow of blood that made him hard. Was Manfred moving his hands in his sleep? 13

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And as if in correspondence to Mamoru’s thoughts, the dream Manfred has in his bed at the same time is described as follows: In his dream, Manfred was lying face down, buck naked, on a wet floor, which seemed to be the deck of a ship. His wrists and ankles were tied up in a fishnet, and he couldn’t move. The boatman approached. He leaned down and with his knife poked at the tensed muscles of Manfred’s buttocks. He seemed to be checking if Manfred was dead or alive. If he realized Manfred was alive, he’d jam the knife up Manfred’s rectum, killing him on the spot. 14

The “boatman” who attacks Manfred with his “knife” is probably Mamoru, since the “knife” can be connected to Mamoru’s “sashimi knife,” mentioned in the novel’s opening paragraph. In other words, Manfred’s dream is about being attacked by Mamoru. A first possible interpretation might be that this dream is about Manfred and his hidden thoughts regarding his ex-lover, since it is Manfred himself who has the dream. But at the same time, according to my assumption, we can also argue that it is Mamoru who came into Manfred’s dream. The three separate narratives are not only unfolding toward the final episode of Manfred’s symbolic death, which constitutes the end point of the temporal sequence of various narrative events, they also point to another fictional temporality—simultaneity—that holds them together in the same time-space: the globe. Thus, with a special focus on the protagonists’ obsession with simultaneity we can read behind the three narratives another narrative, which is the dream written according to Mamoru’s desire. In fact, in another paragraph, the narrator evokes his “secret desire to write a book.” 15 Besides being a protagonist in the novel, Mamoru is also linked to the act of writing, and external to the narrative. Mamoru is a protagonist who resists the linear model of temporality. In this sense, the “book” he wishes to write might be a narrative based on spherical temporality. Could it be that the character of Mamoru is an allegorical representation of the author Tawada, who seemingly provides spherical temporality as a framework for reading her work? THE FUTURE AS GLOBE My final example is Kentōshi, which describes a dystopian post-3.11 Japan. Unlike my two previous examples, the concept of spherical temporality is not visible in the novel’s title, which is in fact a neologism by the author meaning “ambassador of light.” This neologism is based on its homonym written in different Chinese characters (遣唐使) and meaning “Japanese missions to Tang,” a historical term referring to the envoys sent to China from the seventh to the ninth century in order to assimilate its culture and civilization. This novel, however, is set in a near-future Japan that has been closed off to the outside world since the triple disas-

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ters of 3.11. Moreover, contrary to readers’ expectations, the text does not make any clear link between the two homonyms. Rather, it appears to be based on an opaque—virtually estranged—relationship between them. This ambiguity is visible metaphorically in various surprising characters and narrative settings, such as Yoshirō’s inability to die; the half animal, half human appearance of Mumei; his transgender identity, all of which seemingly result from radioactive contamination in the wake of the 3.11 disasters. Furthermore, this ambiguity clearly influences the narrative organization of the novel. The text is composed of twenty-one sections of various lengths, each separated by a blank line, none of which has a title or a number. In terms of its narrative content, the text can be divided into two parts: one spanning nearly 140 pages and another just fourteen. The first part covers several hours of “a Tuesday morning” as experienced by an eight-yearold boy called Mumei, who lives with his great-grandfather Yoshirō in a temporary evacuation house in a western suburb of Tokyo. Mumei wakes up, eats his breakfast, and changes his clothes to go to school, where he loses consciousness while looking at a map of the world with his classmates and classroom teacher Yonatani. In the second part, the narrative fast-forwards eight years. Mumei is now fifteen and has been selected to travel to India as an “emissary.” But one night, after “the moon came back” 16 following a long absence caused by the treatment of “contaminated earth,” 17 Mumei wakes up and realizes that he has metamorphosed into a girl. He goes out at dawn and meets Suiren, a girl who used to live next to Mumei and Yoshirō in the same evacuation housing and has also been named an emissary. They go down to the beach together but Mumei suddenly feels his heart stop beating, at which point the novel ends. Even though the narrative plot appears to show a clearly linear continuity, readers can perceive that the narration mainly follows Yoshirō’s reviewing of various past events from his life with his family, particularly with Mumei, rather than this particular “Tuesday morning.” What is more, Yoshirō’s recollections are not organized in chronological order, since the narrator does not specify any dates. Indeed, the narrator describes Yoshirō’s inner feelings about the past in the following words: Stumbling as he took his shoes off, Yoshiro rested a hand on the wooden pillar to steady himself, feeling the grain of the wood under his fingers. The years are recorded in rings inside the trunk of a tree, but how was time recorded in his own body? Time didn’t spread out gradually, ring after ring, nor was it lined up neatly in a row; could it just be a disorderly pile, like the inside of a drawer no one ever bothers to straighten? The thought made him stumble again; this time he put his left foot down to steady himself. 18

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On the other hand, each of the novel’s parts ends with Mumei losing consciousness, which suggests some kind of consistency between the various sections. In other words, it is Mumei’s symbolic death that interrupts Yoshirō’s fragmented recollections and brings them to an end. Of course, it might be possible to see the narrative function of Yoshirō’s recollections as explaining Mumei’s weakened state of health since the events of 3.11. Yet at the same time, there seems to be no clear narrative causality between Yoshirō’s recollections and Mumei’s losing consciousness. On the contrary, the text suggests, albeit allusively, that the blood ties between the two protagonists could be in doubt. At one point, Yoshirō recalls a conversation with his grandson Tomo: “Don’t you love your own child?” Yoshiro had blurted out, soon after Mumei’s birth—a corny thing to say, really, but Tomo had startled him by firing back, “How do you know he’s mine?” He had immediately consigned this remark to the furnace of oblivion, doubting he’d find the truth in the middle of an argument, but as time passed, he heard a voice, whispering from the ashes. Tomo himself didn’t know whether or not he was Mumei’s father. 19

In the two previously discussed examples, it is precisely in this ambiguous relationship between narratives coexisting in the same text-space that we can discern another narrative based on the idea of spherical temporality. But where can we find this in Kentōshi? A close reading reveals that spherical objects are not completely absent in this novel, as the narrator explicitly mentions the planet Earth, especially in relation to Mumei, who believes that Earth is inside him. The narrator describes Yoshirō recalling a conversation between Mumei and his dentist as follows: Mumei’s mouth apparently won’t open all by itself, for when the dentist says, “Open wide!” his eyes and mouth respond simultaneously. Once, when his mouth opened so wide he nearly dislocated his jaw, he quickly shut it, then closed both eyes and said, “The earth is in the back of my throat,” before opening his mouth and eyes again, as wide as before. He had mentioned “the earth” once before, during his physical at the pediatric clinic. After rolling up his undershirt to stick out his chest, so thin every rib showed, he calmly announced, “The earth is inside this chest.” Turning away to hide his surprise, Yoshiro had looked up, pretending he was observing the trees outside, and grinned. 20

While Mumei claims several times that the Earth is inside him, the final episode of the first section, in which Mumei loses consciousness while looking at a map of the world, provides a more explicit link between Mumei and the Earth. Indeed, this final episode begins by Yonatani showing Mumei and his classmates a map of the world drawn on paper in order to explain how “the last big earthquake left a deep crevice in the

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seabed, pushing our [Japanese] archipelago much farther away.” 21 It is precisely while looking at this flat representation of the world that Mumei points out that the Earth is round, prompting a lively discussion among students who don’t believe it and leading to Mumei’s losing consciousness. Readers come to understand that the safety level of the planet influences the consciousness of the young protagonist. Here, it is interesting to draw attention to the fact that the Earth as a narrative motif with a powerful influence over Mumei’s consciousness is also linked to “The Emissary Association,” whose primary mission is to send abroad young people like Mumei. Although the novel takes its name from it, the Emissary Association is mentioned only obliquely in the text using a symbolic and strangely quantified expressions: “a candle of five centimeters in diameter and ten centimeters in height,” 22 which appears four times (three times in the first section and once in the second). This candle is lit by members “when they enter[ed] the darkness before beginning their day’s work.” 23 Towards the end of the novel, the narrator finally explains the role of the association: It was during this conversation that Mumei first heard the word emissary. In hushed tone, Yonatani explained that even though it couldn’t be made public, the plan to send emissaries abroad was not so forbidden as to be considered a crime, so he shouldn’t let it scare him. People caught stowing away on ships sometimes spent several days in custody, but so far, none had actually been punished. Officially, the purpose of the isolation policy was to suppress any attempt to sway the public toward opening the country, not to place legal restrictions on individual travel. Even if this was true, however, government policy could change overnight. A person might be sentenced to life in prison next week for doing something no one would even notice today. That was why members of the “Emissary Association” Yonatani belonged to were determined to find a suitable candidate and send him or her abroad now, before the government changed its mind. This would make it possible to thoroughly research the state of Japanese children’s health, yielding information that would prove useful if similar phenomena began to appear in other countries. It was clearly necessary to think of the future along the curved lines of our round earth. 24

Through Yonatani’s explanation to Mumei, the narrator reveals that the Emissary Association considers the “round earth” to be a model of the future’s temporality. Accordingly, it could also mean that “spherical time” is still to come and that the present time (of the narrative) experienced by Yoshirō and Mumei is not based on these “curved lines of our round earth.” Analyzing how the two protagonists live in the present time might enable us to picture a future based on the globe, in short, spherical temporality. Yoshirō is here, in post-3.11 Japan, described as one of the old people who have lost the ability to die. However, I would like to emphasize that

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Yoshirō is also described as a writer, or to be more precise, a writer who is unable to write a narrative. The narrator mentions several episodes related to this. Indeed, he/she reveals that Yoshirō has failed to finish several books, one a “children’s book” 25 and another a novel describing the current state of Narita Airport, which Yoshirō was unable to publish for fear of being arrested for revealing state secrets. 26 The narrator also recounts Yoshirō’s failed attempt to write a historical novel on the Japanese missions to Tang China. 27 And it should be noted that he/she also reveals that Yoshirō can no longer feel the roundness of the globe: Yoshiro wanted to visit Hildegard in Germany, just once, but the routes from Japan to all foreign countries had been cut off. Perhaps that was why he no longer felt the roundness of the earth beneath his feet. The round earth he could travel across existed only in his head… and there was nothing to do but follow that curve in his mind to the other side of the world. 28

Being unable to write a narrative, Yoshirō does not feel the roundness of the earth. Shaped in this way, the character Yoshirō illustrates, albeit implicitly, a strange and unrealistic relationship between narrative writing and an awareness of the earth being round. Accordingly, readers become aware that Yoshirō and Mumei are living within the absence of spherical temporality. It is worth mentioning that Yonatani, Mumei’s classroom teacher and a member of the Emissary Association, attaches great importance to language education for children. Given this, it is possible to argue that Mumei’s mission as an emissary is to produce narratives based on spherical temporality. Indeed, the narrator describes the final scene of the novel, where Mumei loses consciousness again, in the following words: Thrusting first his left shoulder out, then his right, he tried to get up. Suiren was already in a sitting position, her back straight. Her face blotted out Mumei’s sky. There was a space between her eyes. Her right eye, her left eye. They blurred, spreading out into blotches. The two big spots side by side weren’t eyes but a pair of lungs. No, not lungs, they were two huge broad beans. No, not beans, but human faces. The one on the left was Mr. Yonatani; Great-grandpa was on the right. Both faces were twisted with worry. He wanted to say, “I’m all right. I just had a really nice dream,” but his tongue wouldn’t move. If only he could smile at least, to reassure them. That’s what he was thinking when darkness, wearing a glove, reached for the back of his head to take hold of his brains, and Mumei fell into the pitch-black depths of the strait. 29

Going inside Mumei, the narrator focuses his/her description on Suiren’s eyes, which appear first as lungs, then beans, and finally Yoshirō and Yonatani’s faces making Mumei want to consider his life a “dream.” This retrospective thought, characterized as a “dream” that Mumei fails to

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describe, might be a narrative whose temporality is shaped in the form of a globe, the roundness of which has disappeared in the post-3.11 context but which Mumei believes to be inside him. Tawada’s novel suggests that spherical temporality is necessary to tell stories, as I hope my argument thus far makes clear. CONCLUSION When reading Tawada’s fiction, we cannot help but feel, at times, that the narrative does not completely end, despite the text physically coming to a close. Each of the three examples I discussed here suddenly ends for no apparent reason, drawing our attention to the fact that the end of the text does not always coincide with the end of the narrative. As I outlined in the introduction, the temporal gap between narrative and text as the literary graphical representation of narration is dominant for novels, and, generally speaking, the ending of a novel’s text helps readers to recognize it as an organized duration and to see the contents as a meaningful and interesting narrative recounting a specific event. Nevertheless, Tawada’s fiction is written in an intriguing and experimental way that does not seem to adhere completely to this reading perspective, showing a puzzling relationship between narrative and text (or narration). My point is to suggest that the concept of spherical temporality can be introduced as another reading framework that may help us to make sense of these relationships. The protagonists’ sudden loss of consciousness in Jisa and Kentōshi, or Namiko’s impulsive act of burning her classmates’ pictures, can hardly be seen as narrative necessities, or as a narrative consequence. None of the three texts is written in a way that fits into a reading framework based on the linear model of temporality. In this sense, it is possible to see this as resulting from a deconstruction of fiction writing. Still, Tawada’s fictions seem to go further. It is the concept of spherical temporality that is readable here and there in texts, sometimes in titles, sometimes in the narrative organization, sometimes in characters. Spherical temporality is not always visible in the ending of the text. As I have mentioned, it is linked to dreams, illusions or delusions that suddenly appear in the middle of the narrative. They provoke—or are provoked by—Tawada’s key writing devices, such as wordplay and the resulting shifts in meaning often related to the translation process, which sometimes lead narration to an ambiguous, accidental or unexpected direction. As readers of Tawada’s fiction are well aware, these surreal impressions feature frequently in her work. From this perspective, the idea of spherical temporality, although mentioned only allusively, might be more involved than readers imagine. As I emphasized, spherical temporality is also linked to the negotiation between several different narratives. Just as in epistolary novels,

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what readers hold in their hands are several narratives that may or may not seem to influence each other. Accordingly, the act of reading naturally tends to find a broader narrative that is not always written in the text but can bring together different and independent narratives. In the case of classical epistolary novels, this non-written narrative is expected to reveal virtually (in readers’ minds) a great event with a beginning and an end that provides an organized duration. What is striking in the case of Tawada’s fictions is that the non-written narrative does not appear to restore the original chronological sequence of events. Rather, it disarranges it and, instead, constructs a reading and narrative mode that questions the very foundations of an assumed linear temporality. In this sense, spherical temporality might possibly be this specific non-written narrative 30 that Tawada’s readers are invited to keep in their minds and write, as I have attempted to do here. NOTES 1. Gérard Genette, for example, is one of the premier theorists who tackled this temporal difference and its literary effects in fiction. See Gérard Genette, “Discours du récit”, in Figure III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 65-182. 2. Using the image of a ticking clock which goes tick-tock even though physically identical sounds are heard, the British literary critic Frank Kermode (1919–2010) argues that the temporality of fiction is based on an organized duration that is structured by a fictional difference we make between the two identical sounds: tick for a beginning and tock for an end. Thus, Kermode says, “The interval between the two sounds, between tick and tock is now charged with significant duration. The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form.” (Kermode, 45) 3. Tawada, Kyūkei jikan, 56. 4. Tawada, Kyūkei jikan, 171. 5. Tawada, Kyūkei jikan, 166–167. My translation. 6. Tawada, Kyūkei jikan, 170–171. My translation. 7. Tawada, Kyūkei jikan, 171. My translation. 8. Ishihara, 240. My translation. 9. Tawada, Jisa, 26–27 and 28; Time Differences, 27 and 28–29. 10. Tawada, Jisa, 41–42; Time Differences, 40. My emphasis. 11. Tawada, Jisa, 12; Time Differences, 13–14. My emphasis. 12. Tawada, Jisa, 10; Time Differences, 12. My emphasis. 13. Tawada, Jisa, 11; Time Differences, 12–13. 14. Tawada, Jisa, 12; Time Differences, 14. 15. Tawada, Jisa, 29; Time Differences, 29. 16. Tawada, Kentōshi, 147; The Emissary, 126. 17. Tawada, Kentōshi, 147; The Emissary, 125. 18. Tawada, Kentōshi, 11-12; The Emissary, 6. 19. Tawada, Kentōshi, 119; The Emissary, 102–103. 20. Tawada, Kentōshi, 26; The Emissary, 19. 21. Tawada, Kentōshi, 141; The Emissary, 120. 22. Tawada, Kentōshi, 17, 41, 96, 152. My translation. 23. Tawada, Kentōshi, 152; The Emissary, 131. 24. Tawada, Kentōshi, 151–152; The Emissary, 130. My emphasis except for the italics in the opening sentence.

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25. Tawada, Kentōshi, 22; The Emissary, 16. 26. Tawada, Kentōshi, 37; The Emissary, 27. 27. Tawada, Kentōshi, 46–47; The Emissary, 35. 28. Tawada, Kentōshi, 33; The Emissary, 25. In the novel, the narrator mentions kentōshi as historical term (遣唐使), just once, and only in this episode. 29. Tawada, Kentōshi, 159–160; The Emissary, 137-138. 30. Or “the illegible” as Bettina Brandt suggests when discussing the possibilities of surrealism in analysing Tawada’s fictions. See Brandt (2007).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brandt, Bettina, “The Unknown Character: Traces of the Surreal in Yoko Tawada’s Writings,” in Doug Slaymaker (ed.), Voices from Everywhere (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 111–124. Genette, Gérard, Figure III (Paris: Seuil, 1972). Ishihara Chiaki, “Kami no ue no dekigoto (An event on paper),” in Ano sakka no kakureta meisaku (Little known masterpieces of these authors) (Tokyo: PHP Kenkyūsho, 2009), 225–242. Kermode, Frank, The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). Tawada Yōko, Jisa, in Umi ni otoshita namae (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2006), 7–42. Translated by Jeffrey Angles as Time Differences (Norwich: Strangers Press, 2017). ———, Kentōshi, in Kentōshi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2014), 7–160. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani as The Emissary (New York: New Directions, 2018). ———, Kyūkei jikan (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2002).

ELEVEN From the Linguistic Mother to the Salt Water Mother Poetics of Catastrophe in Tawada Yōko’s Ecocritical Writing Annegret Märten

After the triple catastrophe of the Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and the subsequent nuclear reactor meltdown in Fukushima in March 2011, Tawada Yōko’s work has increasingly featured themes of environmental catastrophe. 1 It is in this context that this essay offers a Deleuzian reading of a central poetological principle in her work: the “linguistic mother.” Identified by Yasemin Yildiz as a central figuration in the author’s oeuvre, we first encounter the linguistic mother in the literary essay “Von der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter” [“From the mother tongue to the linguistic mother”] from the Talisman (1996) collection. In it, the central speaker casts a Roman alphabet typewriter on her desk as a “weibliche Maschine, die mir eine Sprache schenkte” [“a female machine that gifted me with a language”]. 2 Yildiz finds that the bilingual understanding of the world which is articulated in the figuration of the linguistic mother allows Tawada to undo historically-emerged processes of oppression through structural power: “Tawada’s writing is directed against inclusion into the monolingual paradigm and the mother tongue structure.” 3 My essay argues that in the author’s recent writing this mode of playfully reworking exclusionary principles has found a new iteration in the form of the “salt water mother.” In the short, ecocritical literary essay “Meine Salzwassermutter. Von Minamata zu Fukushima” [“My salt water moth163

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er. From Minamata to Fukushima”] (2017), Tawada uses this new type of linguistic mother to gauge the other forms of naturalized inclusion and exclusion mechanisms operating on a much wider, planetary perspective and relate them to consumerism. My reading of “Meine Salzwassermutter” traces strategies that the author employs, foremost among them being the maternal motifs and intertextuality of poetic and theoretical influences. I will show how Tawada’s “salt water mother” in this text constitutes what I will call a “monstrous maternal textual figuration” as new way of writing about ecocritical concerns. I contend that, in more general terms, the presence of monsters in “monstrous textual figurations” allows for textual strategies that go beyond employing the monster as a metaphorical device in order to subvert and destabilize the ways in which humans establish meaning. In this specific example, some of the causes of natural exploitation, such as hermetic concepts of human subjectivity and long-established knowledge about the natural world, are poetically shaken up and reshaped in an encounter with the sea as an ambiguous and threatening non-human presence. While, as Margaret Littler has pointed out, Yildiz’ reading of the linguistic mother does not explicitly engage with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s critique of the concept of the mother tongue, my essay demonstrates how Tawada’s recent negotiation of human subjectivity via the figuration of the salt water mother can be put into productive conversation with the Deleuzian framework. 4 A SITE OF ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS: TAWADA AS A READER OF ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE I will begin by visiting one of the maritime sites of catastrophe to which Tawada’s text refers via an intertext by Japanese writer Ishimure Michiko. In 1932, the chemical company Chisso began diverting wastewater into the sea at Minamata Bay in the southwest of Japan. The sludge that formed at the bottom of the sea contained high levels of mercury, a metal used in the industrial production of plastics. What ensued is one of the most well-known and devastating environmental disasters in modern times. Unaware of the danger for a significant period, people in the local fishing communities consumed highly poisonous fish and seafood from the bay. This resulted in the severe methylmercury poisoning of the human population, especially in the mid-1950s. Thousands of people were affected by what came to be called Minamata disease. Many died, and thousands more continue to live with the debilitating neurotoxic effects of ingesting high concentrations of mercury. 5 In 1969, Ishimure, who is from the affected area, published a collection of texts about the Minamata disaster in the volume Kugai Jōdo , translated into English as Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow. A semi-fictionalized account

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of the events in Minamata, the chapters in the book document the time between 1954, when the first patients showed symptoms, and 1968, when the Japanese government finally named Chisso responsible for the disaster. The work includes victim testimonies, newspaper cuttings, scientific research, and autopsy results; additionally, it explores the lives and struggles of the local community and those directly affected by the poisoning. Until her death in early 2018, Ishimure, who participated in many protests and sit-ins, was a committed activist who left no doubt about her position toward the injustices in Minamata. Prior to the disaster, as well as during the time that the victims were trying to lay claim to compensation, Chisso was seen by many locals as a source for much-needed modernization and economic development. Ishimure heavily criticizes Chisso’s prioritization of profit over health of the local community, the collusion of scientific institutions in covering up the contamination, and the slow reaction of the government in helping those affected. Yet, the book is subtitled “Our Minamata Disease,” and the placing of the communal pronoun “our” allows for the reading that affected communities also need to acknowledge their own responsibility for the disaster. Critic Kurahashi Yuko argues that Ishimure’s text “is about the suffering of those specific victims in Minamata who endure chronic diseases, but it is also about all subaltern people. Ishimure’s literary work thus transcends medical discourse and helps to create a tapestry depicting the voices and voicelessness of all subaltern.” 6 The subaltern, a term originally coined by Antonio Gramsci to describe the proletariat subjected to hegemonic oppression, has taken on further significance in postcolonial thought. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak employed the term to describe marginalized communities who do not have their own voice and are not afforded subject status. One of the ways in which Ishimure constructs a voice for these communities is found in the interview-style insertions of victim accounts. Crucially, Ishimure’s narrator does not only speak about, but also to, the victims and their families. The first-person perspective is repeatedly intercut with the victim’s narratives and other types of documentation of the crisis. The ecocritical language found here thus articulates the subaltern suffering rather than seeking to represent it objectively or detach it from the subjective experiences of the Minamata locals. Rather than taking direct inspiration from these social justice discourses manifested in Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow , however, I argue that Tawada finds inspiration in those aspects of Ishimure’s text in which another type of suffering—that of non-human life—becomes visible and audible. For example, the following interview extract in Ishimure’s book, conducted with someone affected by Minamata disease, is especially striking because of how human and non-human spheres converge in a painful encounter. Through direct speech, a figure called Yuki recounts:

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Chapter 11 “While I was at the University Hospital I had to have an abortion. After the abortion I started acting funny again. “It was already dark outside. The nurse came in, placed the tray with my meal on the small bed-table and left immediately. That day we had fish for supper. The fish on the tray immediately attracted my attention. As I stared at it vacantly, I suddenly saw it turn into a child. I gasped in horror, convinced that the fish on the tray was the baby the doctors had pulled out of my womb a few hours before. [ . . . ] “I took up the plate, and tried to pick up the fish with my chopsticks. I was so tense, that my convulsions became violent again. [ . . . ] Instead of putting the fish in my mouth, I sent it flying to the floor. “I called to the fish in as sweet a voice as possible: “Come here, darling. Don’t run away from your own mama . . . [ . . . ] “Clutching the fish as tight as I could, I gulped it down fast, smearing it all over my mouth. The fish was sticky and tasted awful. Minamata Disease patients can’t taste anything, but they have a sharp nose. As I ate the fish, I kept thinking I was devouring my own child. It was a sickening sensation.” 7

This vision of cannibalistic horror vividly renders the connection between a mother’s ability to give life, the culturally inscribed life-sustaining function of fish in the local fishing community, and the consumption of mercury-poisoned fish that ultimately destroys life. The implication of “I had to have an abortion” is that, because of the long exposure to the mercury, Yuki’s body, whose convulsions are symptoms of the Minamata disease, had been physically incapable of sustaining the fetus in her womb. In the patient’s hallucination, the fish on her dinner plate metamorphoses into her aborted human child and she is simultaneously repelled and attracted. The convulsions are said to be the cause of the fish falling off the plate, yet the sentence “[i]nstead of putting the fish in my mouth, I sent it flying to the floor” can be read as a particularly dark Fort/ Da moment of dealing with atrocity. 8 Like the mother and the wooden bobbin with string in Freud’s famous example of repetitive compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), the dead child and the object of the dead fish form an entangled unit. Ishimure’s rendering of the patient’s account shows a deeply paradoxical relationship between nature and humans. Yuki’s desire to reintegrate the lost child into her body by eating the fetus is in tension with her awareness that the fish onto whose dead body the child is superimposed might be poisonous. When Yuki eventually gets hold of and then devours the elusive fish, the process of the selfpoisoning of the Minamata locals is symbolically repeated, and the abortion is directly linked to the “awful” tasting fish. There appears to be no escape from the cycle of life-giving and death-bringing consumption. While the section clearly evokes the crisis of the mental disintegration of the sufferer, clear-cut borders between humans and the natural world they consume also become blurred. The material presence of the fish as nutritious food, hazardous poison, and culturally-inscribed signifier of

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communal belonging emerges vividly. Japanologist Karen Thornber rightly considers Ishimure’s writings “significant contributions to global ecocriticism.” 9 However, as Livia Monnet, translator of Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow , points out, Ishimure’s text consistently presents the Minamata victims and the poor fishing families as pure and dignified, in stark contrast to the management of Chisso who are responsible for the poisoning, or the governmental agencies which delayed interventions into the disaster. 10 The victims’ lives prior to catastrophe are alleged to be more in keeping with a pristine, deified natural order; they are portrayed as in touch with original myths betrayed by modernity, and they come across as Buddha-like in their acceptance of their fate. 11 Ishimure’s approach to ecocritical writing ennobles the victims by establishing a clear binary between poor fishing folk and rich industrialists. Yet, in the recent discourse around environmental crisis, a new challenge has been raised by the dawn of the Anthropocene: Does the biosphere also have a type of language that registers within the parameters of human experience? Contemporary ecocriticism faces a challenge when it attempts to give voice to non-human life on Earth and when it tries to offer a perspective from which to speak. The strategy of ennobling and imbuing the biosphere with a Gaia-like soul has already proven futile because it so heavily relies on the sparse resource of human empathy. I argue that Tawada’s recent experimental work is aware of the pitfalls of speaking for an Other which cannot speak. Specifically, in “Meine Salzwassermutter. Von Minamata zu Fukushima,” Tawada engages with, and ultimately resists, the construction of the sea as the mythological, ecological Other. Instead, her text uses monstrous imagery and the central speaker’s self-fashioning as a reader of Ishimure in order to suggest a new form of writing about, and reflecting on, catastrophe. 12 The monstrous textual figuration illustrates how neoliberal progress has introduced into language a dissociation between humans and what they term “nature.” Furthermore, it explores new knowledge and creative language patterns that ripple with the implications of the radically different spaces and speeds on which the humans and non-human spheres operate. This new mode of writing stems from a resistance to reduce disaster to a fatalistic thanato-political event. Instead, it aims to reintroduce materialist frames in order to understand crisis as a historically-contingent effect which needs rethinking in terms of co-entanglement with the biosphere. What emerges, I argue, is a new type of ecocritical writing not solely based around social justice but around human-nonhuman entanglement. OF SEA MONSTERS AND HUMANS “Meine Salzwassermutter” confronts the patterns of human exploitation of the sea that reveal themselves within human language. Consider the

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following monster from the text which reflects on how the sea has become fixed in a passive object position. The sea is a monster with a strong wind and the human is a monster baby with a dirty diaper. The excrement from the factories, which the humans and their partially developed brains have built, is dangerous for the sea because they change the chemical composition of the water. The monster baby expects the mother sea to always wash the diapers clean. The sea is being used as an oversized washing machine. The monster baby’s dirt takes on scary dimensions and it promptly comes up with a neat word for that: catastrophe. The word relieves us from the fright, so no one has to stay frightened. Those always shouting the word “catastrophe” don’t necessarily take the situation seriously. 13

This extract figures a critical positioning toward the commodification of the biosphere. This central monster metaphor should not simply be equated with the catastrophe in the context of which it appears. Rather, the monster opens up interfaces to challenge and transform how humans might relate to those catastrophes. The text, by means of its monstrous textual figuration, sets out to shift and transform the human relationship with nature. Through the figure of the monster-human consumption and human insistence on linear economic growth become connected to questions of agency and responsible action. The damning assessment that humans possess only “partially developed brains” challenges the popular understanding of humans as the pinnacle of evolutionary development. This Darwinian idea forms a powerful modern founding myth which underpins human thinking about the natural pecking order. The word rendered here as “factories,” “Fabriken,” refers to actual pollution practices by such factories, and it also acts as a metonymical stand-in for the capitalist mode of production that endangers humans, wildlife, and, most emphatically, the sea itself (“gefährlich für das Meer”). In the poetic monster image, the human is not pitched against the monster; it is itself monstrous offspring. It is diminished and small and not yet come of age. The playfulness of the “Wind”/“Windel” [“wind”/“diaper”] combination is undermined by the notion that the mother, i.e. the sea, has to absorb its own baby’s excrement. Yet, the self-soiling humans are underdeveloped and implicitly unviable life forms; it is the immaturity of the human that proves the most horrifying. In their entanglement, both the sea and the humans are aesthetically figured in terms of monstrosity. The sea has become stuck in between its organic reality and the function of a mechanical cleaning device that has been imposed upon it. As with Ishimure’s character Yuki, there is no refuge from crisis, nor is there any generous reciprocity when sea and human remain separate entities with one serving as a resource and object of difference to the other.

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Initially, “Meine Salzwassermutter” introduces the sea in etymological terms and probes how associated meanings shift when it is considered through languages as different as Japanese and French. The text then goes on to detail specific East Asian folklore and more personal reflections and memories of the speaker relating to the sea. In its account of how humans currently relate to the non-human sea via the uses they make of it, Tawada puts particular emphasis on material relations of biological life, matter, and economic exchange. In many human myths, the sea serves as a reflective surface for human actions during their life on Earth: “In Ancient East-Asian times there was this idea of paradise not in the heavens but above or below the sea.” 14 The sea is further used as a supplier of food. As if reading off a menu—“Oysters with the North Sea and, for the main course, Mediterranean Sea with wine” — the geographic determination of certain areas of the sea become neatly packaged items that can be randomly combined for human consumption. 15 In its further function as a tourist destination—“For us, the sea is either blue—that’s when the holiday is agreeable—or grey”—the sea is merely a background for human respite. 16 The uses of the sea for food and holiday follow a logic of extracting pleasure from a silent resource. That this anthropogenic use has consequences for the sea is most visible in its function as an accidental waste disposal ground—“When I stood at the beach in Fukushima in 2013 I was told that the seabed would likely look like a car scrap yard.” 17 These compartmentalized ways of referring to the sea are later contested and contrasted with interconnected and porous forms of kinship between humans and non-humans. As a result, established forms of knowledge and patterns of consumption that have become ingrained within the social imaginary become blurred. In its middle section, the text draws parallels between the danger suffered by coastal communities affected by the Minamata mercury poisoning in the 1950s and the fallout after the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown in 2011. It details efforts in the aftermath of the Tōhoku earthquake to gauge the damage done to the surrounding maritime wildlife. Scientists from the area worked with local fishing families that now found themselves in the turbulent region between human habitation and maritime space. These families are particularly affected by the intensified, anthropogenic exploitation of the sea. After making reference to other nuclear catastrophes, the ecologically volatile fish is imagined as, quite literally, constitutive of these communities’ cultural identity: “It is not protein but a fish that they are eating. The fish swims through the human.” 18 The text now rejects the commodified use of fish it described initially by presenting it not simply as fueling protein, but as a being passing through the bodies of the people in ideological, mythical, and historical terms. The third part of the text puts explicit emphasis on the speaker’s engagement with historical catastrophe. It is at this stage that Tawada introduces Ishimure’s writings into her own literary essay. Throughout, the

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text implicitly outlines the journey of this first-person speaker who moves from the place of self-assured adult consumer—“I usually belong to the boring species of tourists”—to a recognition of her own immaturity—“As a small child.” The speaker then develops a firm kinship with the non-human sea when confronted with the aftermath of Fukushima. Like Ishimure who inserts a version of herself as a writer campaigning for the rights of the Minamata victims into her narratives, who speaks about the experiences of the victims, and also specifically writes for them, Tawada also inserts a speaker into her text who presumably shares aspects of the author’s own experience: “In the autobiographical part of her [Ishimure’s] writing I got to know a girl who liked roaming nature by herself.” 19 Initially, “Meine Salzwassermutter” includes a biographical description of the text’s speaker as a little girl gazing at the ungraspable sea. In her reflection on Ishimure’s writing, Tawada’s speaker encounters a character who has adopted for herself other aquatic “parents,” “whose bodies carry horns, scales, and wings”; about Ishimure she claims: “She does not believe that one human can understand another because they are both human” and “Once she wrote that as a child she was very ashamed to be human.” 20 This indicates that the speaker in Tawada’s text updates Ishimure’s ecocritical commentary found in Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow. She reads herself through Ishimure’s character and glimpses a transformed way of relating to the world. By underlining the yearning for a close non-filial connection to non-human life and the disgust that Ishimure feels towards exploitative human actions, Tawada’s text unearths posthumanist aspects of Ishimure’s writing which expand her argument beyond human-focused social justice. Writing in the Anthropocene, Tawada’s engagement with Ishimure’s text foregrounds the contradictory politics of sustainable use and consumption, explicitly food, and how such politics are produced as effects of human subjectivity. 21 In its rich reflection on specific contemporary and past ecological crises, the text addresses today’s cultural fault lines, such as the arrogant notion that a species with such underdeveloped awareness of the impact of its own actions would be able to implement meaningful measures toward environmental protection. While there are normative dimensions to Tawada’s exploration of the Minamata catastrophe in that the pain is consistently characterized as avoidable, her ecocriticism is not solely constructed around ideas of social justice or assumptions about universal human principles of empathy. The text instead explores reverberating patterns of pain that might engender a “transmutation of values” in which sustainability is based on shared kinship—sustaining together, not simply sustaining nature as a resource for some humans under the exclusion of ecological Others. 22

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MATERNAL FIGURATIONS AND ECOCIDAL HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY I suggest that, by building on maternal motifs and strategies from her own previous oeuvre and explicit engagement with psychoanalytic theory, Tawada moves the central first-person speaker in “Meine Salzwassermutter” from an essentialized subject—as conceived in this theory—toward what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s have famously termed a “becoming.” 23 In A Thousand Plateaus they write: “Flows of intensity, their fluids, their fibers, their continuums and conjunctions of affects, the wind, fine segmentation, microperceptions, have replaced the world of the subject.” 24 Becomings enable a radical reconceptualization of subjectivity by forging symbiotic or transforming connectivities between elements that were previously contained within other structures. This is what Tawada’s salt water mother ultimately attempts—listening in and forging new ways of how humans might be able to relate to “nature.” By returning to the central maternal figuration of the linguistic mother, I will now consider how the use of maternal motifs allows Tawada to challenge the hermetic conceptualization of human subjectivity that currently prevents an alternative integration of humans into the biosphere. In the 1996 text, the mechanically mediated linguistic mother adopts the speaker of the foreign language then gives her a new language and also an opportunity to learn and grow up anew: “When you have a new linguistic mother, you are able to live through a second childhood.” 25 The encounter with the linguistic mother then allows the speaker to gain surprising insights into German grammar. The speaker observes how grammatical gender allows for the animation of inanimate objects such as pencils, or the tendency of the German pronoun “Es” to act as a subject within a sentence: “ Ohne ‘es’ wü rde n ä mlich das Subjekt des Satzes fehlen und das ginge auf keinen Fall, denn das Subjekt müsse sein” [“Without ‘it’ the subject of the sentence would be missing and that would be forbidden, the subject has to exist”]. 26 This once humorously framed critique of the insistence on the subject within the German language comes under much sharper scrutiny in the 2017 text. The monstrous poetological figuration of the “salt water mother,” which follows on from the linguistic mother figuration, offers a qualitative shift in understanding the relationships between humans and non-humans by questioning the constitution of the human subject itself. Initially, the text mounts its performative textual challenge to capitalist exploitation of natural resources as grounded within established notions of human subjectivity through a close engagement with the ideogram 海 (Chinese, Hǎi; Japanese umi/kai), which translates to “sea.” Describing the visual characteristics of the ideogram the text conceptualizes the sea as a beautiful mother in a protective home: “On the right sits a mother with a roof over her head. The mother wears decoration in her

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black hair.” Yet, by commodifying the sea, the relationship for Tawada between humans and sea has become monstrously distorted. The commodification of the sea results in a one-sided exchange of pleasure for pain: “But is it always a good thing for the sea to be blue? Blue is the color of the bruise.” 27 In the original German, Tawada here uses the phrase “blauer Fleck”; literally translating to “blue spot,” this expression means “bruise,” but is here used to introduce ambiguity when evoking the beautiful blue color of the sea. The figuratively-bruised sea is cast as a maternal, life-giving entity: “Das Meer ist die Mutter aller Lebewesen” [“The sea is the mother of all living beings”]. Through mobilizing the meaning of the ideogram 海 , the instances of exploitation shift the focus in the human perception of the sea/mother from having beautiful, decorated black hair, to the danger it poses for humans: “but at some point the mothers’ milk boils over and the mother gets mad.” 28 The maternal body, glimpsed in the ideogram, is found to be lacking its nourishing function and forms a threatening presence. Humans here implicitly stand charged of initiating the later transformation of the mother into the monster. Her multilingual pun in German and French on “Das Meer und die Mutter. La mèr[e] und la mer” [“The sea and the mother. The mother and the sea”] in the first paragraph of “Meine Salzwassermutter” is a literalizing chiasma that highlights how in some European alphabetic languages the caring function of the mother has become superimposed onto the sea. “One cannot miss the similarity between the two in the French language, more precisely I cannot hear the difference between the sea and the mother.” By noting this lack of audible difference between mother and sea in the French homonym, the text allows for a slowed down deliberation and prepares the reader for the undoing of the notion of Mother Earth as mythical self-regulating organism. 29 The text destroys this myth by foregrounding aspects and effects of the violence done to the natural world. As such, it claims a poetic space to write another, contemporary meaning into the ideogram, allowing for deliberation of new ways of relating to nature. It also signals the speaking subject’s ability to open up the previously closed-off complexities associated with the sea during times of crises. “Meine Salzwassermutter” builds on the creative interplay of the maternal, language, and world already present in Tawada’s previous writing. The short piece “Sieben Geschichten der sieben Mütter,” also from the Talisman collection, assembles a menagerie of maternal figurations. 30 One of these, “Muttererde,” seems to anticipate the negotiation between human and non-human realms: Humans are excretions of mother earth: they are spat out by her and swallowed up again. A craftsman, an American woman, a child, a lamp, a pear, a hare, a bug, a book, a cat, a tree: they all are made from

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the same mother earth and thus are exchangeable. Only language divides them. 31

Here humans themselves are said to be excretions of the Earth. The Earth is accorded with agency and characterized as a blind material force that produces different animated life forms and non-animated objects. The composite German noun “Muttererde” means fertile topsoil but also plays on the notion of “Mother Earth,” which in the short segment is gendered female (“von ihr”). Pointing out the potency of poetic language to undo cultural hierarchies, language itself is placed in an ambiguous position in the above section: “Nur die Sprache trennt sie voneinander” [“Only language separates them from one another”] but it is unclear to whom the pronoun “sie” refers precisely. Are mother earth’s creations separate from one another, or is it mother earth who exists apart from her creations? Tawada’s writing mediates at the interface of this linguistic separation of the realms. In “Meine Salzwassermutter” this intersection of language, world and human subjectivity is explored through striking imagery around the role of the maternal within the intellectual history of critical theory, specifically in psychoanalysis: Fear about the mother’s silent hatred forces people to work diligently and act morally once they are grown-ups. A form of compensation. This is the Ajase complex thesis by Heisaku Kosawa, who studied in Vienna in the 1930s and who presented his thesis to Sigmund Freud. In contrast to the father in the theory of the Oedipus complex, the mother does not punish her child. She tolerates its misdeeds, even those that badly injure her own body. 32

Here Tawada engages with the ways that subjectivity is constituted within language and society. She seems to suggest that a model of subjectivity that places the unified human ego at its center underpins these politics of resource use. The text enables humans to glimpse how an ingrained consumerist discourse attempts to erase the physical and bodily implications of its resource use. Kosawa Heisaku, who worked during the 1930s and spent four months studying in Vienna under Freud and his disciple Richard Sterba, is considered the founding father of Japanese psychoanalysis. During that period, Japan, having largely opened up to Western ideas after centuries of isolation, was going through rapidly accelerating industrial change. 33 Kosawa’s two main influences were Freud himself and the thirteenth-century Buddhist Shinran, upon whose teaching Jōdo Shinsh ū is based. 34 This sect forms the second-largest Buddhist denomination in Japan, and, incidentally, is also the one that has the largest following in the Kumamoto prefecture in which Minamata is located. Kosawa, who believed his theories to be superior to those of Freud, based his psychoanalytic consideration of guilt on the Buddhist story in which the young Prince Ajase imprisons his father and almost kills his mother out of wrath

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because she tries to feed the captured father. 35 The theory focusses on the ambivalence toward the mother and the guilt after being forgiven the near-matricide. Tawada here invites a parallel between the aggressive behavior of Prince Ajase in the Buddhist source material and the contemporary consumer; both are in a position to be able to hurt the mother’s body. The author also places the different human uses of the sea (e.g., when she writes “Nature is on a menu”) into close textual proximity to the bruised sea/mother. By placing a monstrous maternal metaphor at the center of the reframing of ecocritical concerns, Tawada’s theoretical engagement with psychoanalysis at first appears to affirm the concept of human subjectivity underpinned by the Ajase complex. The guilt felt toward the polluted earth is that which reinforces virtuous action and, as such, in Tawada’s phrasing, “forces humans” to act morally and practice environmental protection. 36 At the end of the text, however, the speaker muses: “But perhaps I am too bound up in the Ajase complex if I feel guilty towards mother Nature.” 37 How can the speaker’s ambivalence towards a principle that would lead to environmentally conscious behavior be explained? It is at this stage that Tawada suggests leaving conventional ecocritical reasoning behind, and she plays to her strength as a manipulator and transformer of language in order to effect this change. Instead of an outright attack on the erratic financial system of capitalism, she carefully directs her intervention here toward the possible transformation of how critical theory conceives of human subjectivity. In most Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the mother initially serves as the primary object of desire. The experience of desire in the early stage of the mother-child bond does not know any regulating borders or any distinction between the subject and world; the separation of subject and mother has not yet taken place. The split from the mother marks an incisive moment in the development and constitution of the autonomous subject. Following the split, the patriarchal symbolic order attempts to cover up and fill the lack produced in this moment by continually offering and circulating new objects of desire which the subject can latch onto. The restriction of desires in Western understanding is regulated via the function of the patriarchal for fear of punishment. In addition, the worldwide circulation of desirable objects is a prime motor of late-capitalist society. 38 Under patriarchal capitalism, which draws on the two main symbolic parameters of punishment and of exploitation of desire through an eternal delay of contentedness, humanity is its own threatening presence. The resulting ecologically unaware consumerism is a violence-producing, human pathology which demands undoing. In psychoanalytic terms, Tawada’s text illustrates how the ecological Other of the sea has traditionally acted either as a wholesome myth, a source of guilt and fear, or as initiator of lack. The textual intervention

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rejects this functional view of the sea and refashions nature as a material, monstrous maternal in order to dislodge it from its object position. The Japanese psychoanalytic theoretical framework offers a first step in that approach: “in Jōdo Shinshū it is precisely at the moment of realizing one’s weakness and guilt that one is forgiven, accepted and saved by a mother figure and by a broader Other experienced as a maternal force.” 39 In Kosawa’s conception, the mother is not in the place of desire. The function of the maternal to forgive destructive acts is already part of the pathology and precisely the source of guilt. As such, by introducing the Ajase complex and shifting the focus from the punishing father to the mother figure, Tawada’s text does not solely make out the root of exploitation and pain in an amorphous economic system which would structurally be difficult to transform. By resisting the capture of Western psychoanalytic discourse and laying down an alternative—but still faulty—concept of subjectivity in which the speaker is trapped (“zu sehr gefangen”), Tawada’s text here seems to signal toward the possibility of transforming hermetic human subjectivity. CULTIVATION OF THE LINGUISTIC MOTHER: TRANSFORMING SUBJECTIVITY What do the new perspectives on the relationship with the sea that emerge in Tawada’s work look like? What new constellations of human kinships with non-human life can be forged? To answer this question, I will draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, which marks a theoretical milestone in undoing the psychoanalytically enforced pathology of the essentializ ed, consuming ego. In L’Anti-Oedipe (Anti-Oedipus, 1972), they suggest that society can be understood as “a global system of desire and destiny that organizes the productions of production, the productions of recording and the productions of consumption.” 40 The Deleuzian counter-model for refashioning human subjectivity means, as Rosi Braidotti notes, that the “non-unitary subject thus constituted inhabits a time that is the active tense of continuous becoming.” 41 Becomings describe the adding up, or assemblage, of events, forces, desires, and flows to a commonly shared intensity. Flows and desires can also be halted by regressive interventions or captured by institutions such as the state. The aim of Deleuze and Guattari’s intervention is to make the world “maximally susceptible to change” and their theory offers a radically different vocabulary to describe the organization and flows of matter within the world. 42 They, like Tawada Yōko, are interested in undoing the fixing of meaning onto signifiers. Tawada’s corresponding interest in a reassessment of the factors and flows that shape human subjectivity in particular is illustrated vividly by the allusions to non-human family

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members of octopi and sea cucumbers in the very first paragraph of “Meine Salzwassermutter”: We humans too originate in the sea and that is why seafood is the best kind of food for us, say the Japanese without hesitation, as if they had been born just yesterday and were only very recently swimming in the ocean as single-cell organisms. The memory of their birth as single-cell organisms is very fresh, and of their early childhood too in which they looked like an octopus, a star fish or a sea cucumber. I myself cannot imagine sitting next to an ape in the evolutionary family tree. Dolphins and [Ockerwale] 43 are much closer to me. I am much more capable of imagining an octopus as my uncle than an orangutan. 44

While in Tawada’s earlier literary essay “Von der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter” the speaker was adopted by the foreign language, allowing the speaker to formulate surprising insights about the surrounding world, in “Meine Salzwassermutter,” however, a different adoption process takes place with the speaker claiming proximity of humans to sea life forms such as dolphins and octopuses. Not only are the creatures cited not human, in the established scientific taxonomy they also inhabit different phyla within the animal kingdom classification. The filiation described here is not organized via an evolutionary genealogy but via a shared maritime living space. As such the organisms are grouped in what Deleuze and Guattari have termed a “stratum,” a topological but organically expressed arrangement that intentionally crosses the axes of established knowledge. 45 Tawada establishes a pre-Oedipal bond with the maternal sea matter as a literary countermyth to evolutionary theory. The speaker contests the imaginative potential of Darwin’s primate tree by taking the image literally and stating she finds it hard to believe. This suggests to the reader that the organization of life could also be imagined radically differently. The depiction of humans as both “Einzeller”—i.e., single cell organism from the ocean—and as offspring of a monstrous mother suggests a refashioning of these established forms of knowledge. Further, processes of growing up and maturing, both as an individual and as a species, are projected away from experiences of individual human life and instead are said to be interwoven with the non-human. Tawada’s line about the human phylogenic lineage being entirely based within the maritime world is stated in a factual tone, whereas the concomitant logical fallacy—that food from the ocean is therefore the best for humans—is condemned as naive with the subjunctive “als wären sie erst vor Kurzem geboren” [“as if they had been born just yesterday.”]. The catastrophic poisoning of maritime life by humans, as in Minamata and in the wake of Fukushima, already lurks ominously in this opaque remark about unsafe food, and later in the text becomes a concrete context from which the author draws.

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With the counter-intuitive move of the speaker releasing the self toward the stratum of the suppressed, here specifically maritime life, Tawada’s intervention attempts to break the biosphere out of its appropriation by humans. In its search for proximity with maritime life, Tawada Yōko’s new figuring of the linguistic mother is indicative of the experimental and creative potential of what Deleuze and Guattari term “becomingminoritarian.” In minor literature, as Deleuze and Guattari have articulated it, meaning and sense are said to undergo a deterritorialization, a spatial and intellectual unmooring from established power centers. This becoming-minoritarian is a crucial step that all, especially those in majoritarian contexts of power, must undergo in order to affect transformation. Crucially, deterritorialization is a process that aims to open up radical political and personal horizons from the contradicting futilities in which modern subjectivities are entangled. 46 The result of reframing relationships between human existences and their desires, between non-human life and flows of animate and inanimate matter in such a way, is that it allows a previously invisible “chain of connections which can best be described as an eco-philosophy of non-unitary, embodied subjects” to emerge. 47 As a result, human subjectivity can be thought of as no longer fixed, but as an ever-emergent effect of our condition as material beings. Take the following excerpt from “Meine Salzwassermutter” which, in its reference to poisoned cats—cats in Minamata being the first to register the mercury poisoning with their “dancing”—draws on the historical context of the Minamata disaster. It tests out the implication of becomingminoritarian with regards to currently still unvalued biological life and pain: A cat is lying inside the computer screen, her belly is a stormy sea, one wave follows the next. The cat repeatedly tries to get up but keeps falling to the ground. Her legs are trembling. I put my hand into the screen and softly stroke the cat’s fur. The cat’s breathing finds its own rhythm and she slowly gets up. I withdraw my hand and cannot put it back into the virtual world when the cat begins with its grotesque dance. Her ears and tail jiggle as if she were a robot animal in the window of a shopping center, dancing for the summer sale. A hasty departure towards death. The battery fails, she falls to the ground and the screen goes dark. In 1956 no one was aware that cats could be man’ s mirror image. 48

I read this encounter between human and non-human as a poetic staging of a stimulus that can trigger a deterritorialization and to create new lines of flight; I also understand it to suggest alternative becomings. In particular, it reframes notions of pain and empathy in moments of crisis. The image evoked is of the human speaker witnessing the effects of neurotoxic poisoning on a non-human organism. In a dark reimagining of the YouTube phenomenon of “cute cat videos” with which humans pass

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time while working in front of computers, the extract describes how the speaker watches a video of a cat suffering from mercury poisoning. When it first occurred in Minamata Bay in Japan, the phenomenon was called “dancing cats disease” by the locals as it affected the cats first and, this is the grim punchline of the extract, shortly after the humans who were consuming the same fish as the smaller mammals. 49 The endangered life, permeated by the poisonous mercury, undergoes a series of transformations toward liquefication in the extract. It starts out as already affected by what has been unwittingly consumed. The convulsions resulting from neurological damage provoke an initial comparison of the body to the sea, but the maritime frame of description “ihr Bauch ist ein st ü rmisches Meer, eine Welle folgt der anderen” [“her belly is a stormy sea, one wave follows the next”] is soon overcome by another, more disturbing image of the animal as a juddering and grotesquely contorting body (“Beine zittern”, “Schwanz wackeln” [“legs are trembling,” “ears and tail jiggle”]). This points again at the contradiction between the soothing and the threatening sea. The speaker tries to establish a connection with the creature and calm it by reaching into the screen and stroking it. Eventually, and thrice transformed, the animal does not benefit from the merely virtual act of the human; the connection breaks—a spent becoming-sea. The simile that the speaker finds for the final state of the cat “a robot animal in the window of a shopping center dancing for the summer sale” shows that the transformation of the animal toward the robot is not one of upgraded cyborg enhancement, but a degraded life controlled by the necropolitical logic of consumerism. The metaphor of a battery failing inside the robot cat, in particular, forces recognition that the exploitation and use of the maritime area as a waste ground has led the creature and, by extension, the human community around it, into an exhaustible and replaceable life. Their lives have been literally put up for sale. I have argued that there is a continuation between the poetological principle of the linguistic mother and the monstrous textual figuration of the salt water mother. This is further demonstrated in the way both explore, as Yasemin Yildiz puts it, “alternative modes of kinship based on technologically enabled affiliation.” 50 The enfleshed becoming-sea of the cat, first wave-like then contorted, is an aborted one that ends in the death of the organism (“Eine hastige Abreise zum Tod” [“A hasty departure towards death”]). Yet this violently shut-down becoming has sparked a brief connection with the speaker who, later on, goes on to seek transformation for herself. Technology, so crucial in ecocritical sciencefiction narratives, takes on a central role in the preparation of this change. The linguistic mother was already latently technophilic in its original production mode as a typewriter translating linguistic difference into manifest material. Here, in its newer incarnation, the techno-scientific dimension of the linguistic mother is expanded and made more explic-

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it. 51 The connection between human and cat is technologically mediated via a screen as a semi-permeable surface. Penetrable from both sides— skin on screen on fur—the computer screen is part of the assemblage that turns the human skin porous and potentially into a receptacle. As a quasi-uterine cavity which can temporarily house the cat, the depth of the computer screen also enacts traits of a maternal body which helps facilitate the encounter between speaker and the twitching and morphologically twisted animal body. The central speaker, who has witnessed the aborted becoming-sea of the cat, can be considered a mirrored version of Tawada herself, who has, I argue, started conceiving of her own writing as a liquifying process of becoming-sea monster. 52 MONSTROUS SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND HUMAN ACCOUNTABILITY Tawada’s linguistic mother takes on a new shape in “Meine Salzwassermutter,” monstrously distorted and embraced as “my” but with its productiveness queered as non-familial. It allows new kinships and differently mediated connections to be established which break through the territorializing ordering processes. Yet, Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak has famously raised the concern that non-linear becomings such as the ones I have outlined risk appropriating the oppressed, or minoritarian, experience. 53 Her charge is that the Deleuzian theory constitutes a romanticization and appropriation of the material realities of suppressed women, the working classes, queer communities, and nomad lives. Spivak seems to imply that the focus in critical work, and this is what I consider Tawada’s intervention to be, should be on fashioning strategic, if temporary, forms of identity in order to allow the subaltern to formulate agency. 54 However, as a female writer of East-Asian origin, Tawada Yōko already occupies a non-majoritarian subject position and is able to initiate emphatic lines of becoming to unfold new kinships. Rejecting a psychoanalytic description of human subjectivity and the forms of identity politics it might yield, Tawada’s exploration of subjectivity suggests a monstrous becoming-sea of humans as a strategy of transformation and a way of entangling with the Earth. In addition, in the search for new figurations to transform society, Tawada’s new monstrous linguistic mother also addresses this issue in the theoretical framework put forward by Deleuze and Guattari. In Metamorphoses (2002), Rosi Braidotti flags the theorists’ often-criticized disregard for material sexual difference. Braidotti goes on to argue for its reintroduction as a crucial constituent of transformative becomings: “The perspective opened by sexual difference allows for notions of genderized becoming, or gender-specific forms of transcendence. These contrast sharply with the sexually undifferentiated patterns of becoming that are

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advocated by philosophers of difference, like Deleuze.” 55 While it was specifically Tawada’s “bilingual gaze” that allowed the linguistic mother to point out “the ways in which gender is inscribed into language,” it is the reaffirmation of sexual difference in the monstrous textual figuration of the salt water mother, as maternal but not necessarily nurturing, which unmasks the naturalization of consumerist attitudes towards the sea. 56 The text challenges the colloquial frames that humans have established to refer both to catastrophe and the sea. Instead of a language of catastrophe which causes us to isolate natural events from human activity, it claims a space for a transformed relationship with the sea to emerge in which humans, and the central speaker of the text, are accountable to, but not responsible for, nature. The monster in the text is not a stand-in for the catastrophe itself, but it serves as a figuration to engender strategies of action and lines of flight out of the territorialized system which has brought about the crisis. The monstrous figuration of the text allows for a re-evaluation of human interaction with non-human presences so as to recognize the human immaturity in these encounters. As such, Tawada’s text forms part of the attempt to unravel the idea of the human subject with the world as its object as the leading paradigm to describe ecological exchanges with the non-human companions on our planet. The text forms a deliberation on how the creative and generative logic of the linguistic mother, disentangled from the hegemony of national languages, reveals a fertile ground for the biosphere to find a type of language and from which a radical mode of human accountability might be formulated. It is this text, with the sea as a mother and her human monster baby, that explores a nuance of the maternal not exclusively tied to human language, but one committed to thinking in planetary terms. NOTES 1. Since Fukushima, the author has turned to decidedly ecocritical themes. These include the future dystopian vision of a radioactively-poisoned Japan in “The Island of Eternal Life” (2012), the post-nuclear fallout story The Emissary (2018), as well as Etüden im Schnee [Memoirs of a Polar Bear] (2014) which stages unusual encounters at the human-animal interface. 2. Tawada Yōko, “Meine Salzwassermutter. Von Minamata zu Fukushima” (Unpublished manuscript, 2017). In September 2017 Tawada presented her unpublished three-part text as part of a reading at the Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin. http:// literaturfestival.com/ablage-en/program-en/reading-the-currents/yoko-tawada-japangermany-and-anna-katharina-hornidge-germany-discuss-meine-salzwassermuttervon-minamata-zu-fukushima. This text remains unpublished. 3. Yasemin Yildiz. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 127. 4. Margaret Littler, “Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition by Yasemin Yildiz (Review),” Cultural Critique 87, no. 1 (16 July 2014): 215–220. See also Áine McMurtry, “Sea Journeys to Fortress Europe: Lyric Deterritorializations in Texts by Caroline Bergvall and José F. Olivar,” Modern Language Review Volume 113, Part 4 (October 2018), 817 (footnote 37).

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5. Joshua Sokol, “Something in the Water: Life after Mercury Poisoning,” JSTOR Daily, July 3, 2018, https://daily.jstor.org/life-after-mercury-poisoning/. A UN treaty setting out an environmentally protective stance on the industrial use of mercury, called the Minamata Convention on Mercury, now underwritten by 98 nations, was first signed in 2013 and came into force only in August 2017. Even so, the Minamata community remains in crisis. 6. Yuko Kurahashi, “Creating a Tapestry of Voice and Silence in Michiko Ishimure’s ‘Kugai Jōdo (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow)’,” Journal of Narrative Theory 33, no. 3 (2003): 318. 7. Michiko Ishimure, Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow , trans. Livia Monnet (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 148f. 8. Sigmund Freud, “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” in Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch geordnet. Vol. 13. (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1976), 12–13. 9. Karen Thornber, “Ishimure Michiko and Global Ecocriticism,” The Asia-Pacific Journal 14, no. 13 (July 2016): 6. 10. Livia Monnet, “Translator’s Introduction. ‘A Book for the Future’: Kugai jōdo and the Minamata Protest Movement,” in Ishimure, Paradise, vii–xxxivi. 11. C.f. Ishimure, Paradise, 197–199. 12. Tawada Yōko, “Meine Salzwassermutter.” 13. Tawada Yōko, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 2. The quoted text is from the unpublished manuscript from September 2017. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 14. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 3. 15. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 2. 16. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 1. 17. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 4. 18. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 6. 19. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 8. 20. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 8–9. 21. The “Anthropocene” is a contested term in itself. I use it here to denote a general moment within critical and public debate that is concerned with the human impact on the biosphere. To emphasise the effect that capitalism as a financial system has had in this, Jason W. Moore suggests “Capitolocene” instead. Donna Haraway, in order to decenter the way in which the term Anthropocene reinforces humanity’s exceptionalism, offers the more monstrous “Chthulucene.” What unites all these concepts is the epochal scope they invoke in their discussion of human and non-human relations. 22. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity in association with Blackwell, 2002), 135 and 145–146. 23. C.f. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “1730: Becoming-Intense, BecomingAnimal, Becoming Imperceptible . . . ,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 232–309. 24. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 162. 25. Tawada, Talisman, 13. 26. Tawada, Talisman, 14. 27. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 2. 28. In order to mobilize historically-manifested notions of guilt, Tawada here echoes a well-known allegoric figuration of a notorious atrocity by employing the phrase of “black milk” in the description of the central monster image (“aber irgendwann kocht die Muttermilch über und die Mutter ärgert sich schwarz wie Milch” [“but at some point the mothers’ milk boils over and the mother gets mad”]). In the original German, the wordplay on the expression for getting mad, “sich schwarz ärgern,” literally means to turn black with anger, which is then extended by Tawada towards the imposed maternal function of the sea through the use of the word milk, so that it becomes “to get mad like black milk.” The signifier “black milk” connotates the non-nourishing or poisoning function of its referent and also constitutes a historicallycharged poetic phrase that gestures towards Paul Celan’s paradigmatic Holocaust

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poem Todesfuge. Celan’s poetic work reverberates with many references from the Old Testament, Jewish mysticism and German cultural history. 29. Cf. James Lovelock’s New Age environmentalist bible Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Lovelock’s later books (2006, 2014) argue that humanity’s only chance of survival together with Gaia consist in the furtherance in nuclear energy. 30. With its positioning between life and death, the maternal presents an indeterminate but productive potential. There are other examples which reflect the ambiguous understanding of the maternal in Tawada’s previous work. For example, in Talisman, the “Gebärmutter” [“uterus”] entry—a word which in German translates literally into “birthing mother”—relates specifically to the creative writing process. In the collection Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte [Language Police and Playpolyglots] (2007), she reads Celan’s poems “Mohn und Gedächtnis” [“Poppy and Memory”] and “Schwarzerde” [“Blackearth”] as hinting at the potential for mother earth and soil to be deadly: “der Ann ä herungsversuch an die namenlose Mutter [hat] einen viel direkteren, körperlichen und daher auch gefährlicheren Charakter” [“the attempt of approaching the nameless mother is much more direct and bodily and thus holds a more dangerous risk”]. 31. Tawada Yōko, Talisman, (Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2015), 107. 32. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 2. 33. Cf. Christopher Goto-Jones, Modern Japan. A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 34. Christopher Harding, “Japanese Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: The Making of a Relationship,” History of Psychiatry 25, no. 2 (1 June 2014): 156. 35. Keigo Okonogi, “Japanese Psychoanalysis and the Ajase Complex (Kosawa),” Psychotherapy & Psychosomatics Vol. 31, no. 1–4 (1979), 353. 36. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 2. 37. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 9. 38. Jacques Lacan, who builds on Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, has argued that capitalism itself, like language, functions as a symbolic order and that it shapes human subjectivity and human relations to the Other. In particular Freud’s thoughts about the lost object in Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905) echo in Lacan’s concept of object petit a. Capitalism is Lacan’s fifth type of discourse. “For example, in our contemporary Western consumption culture, discontent is often deemed the upshot of having not yet obtained the right object and suggests that a state of subjective satisfaction will be reached once this object is obtained.” Stijn Vanheule, “Capitalist Discourse, Subjectivity and Lacanian Psychoanalysis,” Frontiers in Psychology 7, (9 December 2016), 7. 39. Harding, “Japanese Psychoanalysis,” 163. 40. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 162. 41. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 62. 42. Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 56. 43. There appears to be no translation for “Ockerwale”; the author might be referring to “Buckelwale” or “Orcas.” 44. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 2. 45. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?),” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 39–74, esp. 62–67. 46. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 71. 47. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 134. 48. Tawada, “Meine Salzwassermutter,” 6. 49. Sokol, “Something in the Water.” 50. Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 131. 51. Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 129.

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52. C.f. Tawada Yōko and Ortrud Gutjahr, “‘In meinen Poetikvorlesungen werde ich viel über das Wasser spechen, und der Tsunami kommt auch vor’,” in Tawada Yōko and Ortrud Gutjahr, Fremde Wasser Vorlesungen und wissenschaftliche Beiträge; Hamburger Gastprofessur für interkulturelle Poetik, edited by Ortrud Gutjahr (Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2012), 17–49. 53. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 66–111. 54. Sarah Bracke, “Is the Subaltern Resilient? Notes on Agency and Neoliberal Subjects,” Cultural Studies 30, no. 5 (2 September 2016): 839–855. 55. Braidotti, Metamorphoses, 164. 56. Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue, 126.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bracke, Sarah. “Is the Subaltern Resilient? Notes on Agency and Neoliberal Subjects.” Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 5 (2 September 2016): 839–855. Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity in association with Blackwell, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Freud, Sigmund. Gesammelte Werke: Chronologisch geordnet. Vol. 13. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1976. Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. 2016. Harding, Christopher. “Japanese Psychoanalysis and Buddhism: The Making of a Relationship.” History of Psychiatry 25, no. 2 (1 June 2014): 154–170. Ishimure, Michiko. Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow. Translated by Livia Monnet. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003. Kurahashi, Yuko. “Creating a Tapestry of Voice and Silence in Michiko Ishimure’s “Kugai Jōdo (Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow).” Journal of Narrative Theory 33, no. 3 (2003): 315–334. Littler, Margaret. “Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition by Yasemin Yildiz (Review).” Cultural Critique 87, no. 1 (16 July 2014): 215–220. Maurer, Kathrin. “Translating Catastrophes: Yōko Tawada’s Poetic Responses to the 2011 Tōhoku Earthquake, the Tsunami, and Fukushima.” New German Critique 43, no. 1 (127) (1 February 2016): 171–194. McMurtry, Áine. “Sea Journeys to Fortress Europe: Lyric Deterritorializations in Texts by Caroline Bergvall and José F. Olivar.” Modern Language Review Volume 113, Part 4 (October 2018): 811–844. Moore, Jason W, ed. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press. 2016. Okonogi, Keigo. “Japanese Psychoanalysis and the Ajase Complex (Kosawa).” Psychotherapy & Psychosomatics, vol. 31, no. 1–4 (1979): 350–356. Sokol, Joshua. “Something in the Water: Life after Mercury Poisoning.” JSTOR Daily, July 3, 2018.https://daily.jstor.org/life-after-mercury-poisoning/. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–111. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Tawada Yōko and Ortrud Gutjahr. “‘In meinen Poetikvorlesungen werde ich viel über das Wasser spechen, und der Tsunami kommt auch vor’.” In Fremde Wasser Vorlesungen und wissenschaftliche Beiträge; Hamburger Gastprofessur für interkulturelle Poetik, edited by Ortrud Gutjahr, 17-49. Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2012.

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Tawada, Yōko. Etüden im Schnee. Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2014. ———. “Meine Salzwassermutter.” Unpublished Manuscript, 2017. ———. Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2007. ———. Talisman. Tübingen: konkursbuch, 1996. ———. Überseezungen. Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2013. ———. Verwandlungen: Tübinger Poetik-Vorlesung. Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2001. Thornber, Karen. “Ishimure Michiko and Global Ecocriticism.” The Asia-Pacific Journal 14, no. 13 (July 2016): 1–23. Weigel, Sigrid. “Suche nach dem E-Mail für japanische Geister. Yōko Tawadas Poetik am Übergang verschiedener Schriftsysteme.” In Fremde Wasser Vorlesungen und wissenschaftliche Beiträge; Hamburger Gastprofessur für interkulturelle Poetik, edited by Ortrud Gutjahr, 127-143. Tübingen: konkursbuch, 2012. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.

TWELVE The Destruction and Recreation of Japanese Mythology through Yoko Tawada’s Literature Sachiyo Taniguchi

INTRODUCTION The cycle of destruction and recreation of works of the literary canon, works that have been read over generations, is a theme frequently encountered in Yoko Tawada’s literature. For example, Pulverschrift Berlin (Powderletter Berlin）is a play that uses the canonical writer Ogai Mori’s Dai Hakken (Great Discovery) as material, but through wordplay and the creation of a new image by Ogai, the play frees its audience from stereotypical conceptions and leads them to new discoveries. 1 Similarly, in Seijo Densetsu (Legend of a Holy Woman), Tawada cites the Bible—a book that has influenced myriad literary works and is considered to have literary characteristics itself. However, in contrast to the Bible that depicts man as a saint, Tawada conceives the image of a holy woman who exposes and prosecutes the violence that pervades the world through the spread of religion and culture that coerce uniform values. 2 This paper discusses the literary rereading of myths in Tawada’s works and examines a series of works with similar themes. In an earlier study regarding this aspect of Tawada’s work, Ivanovic examined the literature’s critical insights into European mythology, including Greek mythology. 3 In contrast, this paper will examine Tawada’s works related to Japanese mythology. The reception of Japanese mythology in Tawada’s literature is an important research theme that should not be overlooked. For example, in Nusumiyomi (Reading Surreptitiously), the first185

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person narrator, Watashi (I), a female traveler, is accosted by male passers-by. They harass and degrade her and impose gender-stereotypes on her. In order to defend herself from such verbal violence, she shouts, momo! (peach!) and kushi! 4 (comb!) as she runs away. This could be viewed as an example of Tawada’s allusion to Japanese mythology because, in antiquity, peaches and combs were believed to have magical powers. 5 Moreover, the lines appear to have derived from a passage in the Kojiki (Record of Ancient Matters), a compilation of Japanese mythology written in the eighth century, in which the male god Izanagi visits the Yomi no kuni (the netherworld) and throws three peaches and a comb behind him to ward off pursuers as he escapes. The distinctiveness of Tawada’s literature exists in her choice to activate the lively power of words by throwing in words such as momo! and kushi! rather than the actual objects, as it was in the Kojiki, apparently because it is more adequate as a means to combat the male strangers’ verbal violence. In discussing the reception of Japanese mythology in Tawada’s literature, this paper will focus on the reception of the motif of “child of god forsaken as deviator.” The “forsaken child of god” refers to Hiruko who was abandoned by the Izanagi and Izanami at the time of kuni-umi (the birth of the land of Japan) recounted in the Kojiki. I consider that Tawada’s works reflect the variations of this motif through the characterization of “a forsaken child of god” not merely as a deviator but as a social reformer and an innovator, as I will explicate in this paper. I will explore the ways this motif is delineated in Orpheus oder Izanagi (Orpheus or Izanagi, Kentōshi (The Emissary), and Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete (Scattered on the earth). I will then describe variations of this motif and how it is developed throughout Tawada’s body of work. ORPHEUS ODER IZANAGI: THE BIRTH OF CHILD OF GOD FORSAKEN AS DEVIATOR The first work to examine is Orpheus oder Izanagi: Die Rückkehr aus dem Reich der Toten (Orpheus or Izanagi: The return from the realm of the dead), a radio drama first aired in 1997 by Norddeutscher Rundfunk (North Germany broadcast) and Süddeutscher Rundfunkt (South Germany broadcast) under the direction of Hans-Gerd Krogmann. Later, it was broadcast in 2010 on Südwestrundfunk2 (South-west Germany broadcast2) to celebrate Hans-Gerd Krogmann’s seventy-fifth birthday. I consider this as the first work in which the motif of “child of god forsaken as deviator” appears in Tawada’s literature. The work is situated in an intersection of myths of the East and West: its male character, Ogi, is a grandson of Izanagi from Japanese mythology and Orpheus from Greek mythology, and Ogi’s wife, Inake, who is a granddaughter of Izanami from Japanese mythology and Eurydice from

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Greek mythology. In the Japanese myth, recorded in the Kojiki, Izanagi visits Yomi no kuni to see his wife Izanami, while in the Greek myth, Orpheus visits Hades to see his wife Eurydice. In this way, Ogi is a grandson of two husbands who visited the underworld to meet their dead wives, who broke taboos by looking at them, and then returned alone. Moreover, Inake is a granddaughter of those wives. In addition, Ogi and Inake trace their grandparents’ paths: after Inake dies, Ogi visits the land of the dead to see her. Therefore, this work, a radio drama, unfolds as it transforms the stories of visits to the land of the dead—a similarity shared in the mythologies of both the East and West that seems to bypass cultural differences. The motif of “child of god forsaken as deviator” can also be comprehended as something which Ogi and Inake inherited from their grandparents’ episodes in mythology which was then transformed. First, let us confirm how the work describes the children of Ogi and Inake, such as in a dialogue between fishermen: FIRST FISHERMAN: And birth is no easier for the gods than for us. The first child of Inake and Ogi had three eyes. That’s why Ogi threw it into the sea. With the third eye you can see the misery of humanity. Ogi did not want his politics later criticized by his own child. One’s own child is always the most dangerous revolutionary in the guide for rulers. 6

The first fisherman tells a story about the first child—that it had three eyes, that the third eye foresaw the misfortunes of mankind, that Ogi did not wish to have his governance criticized by that child, and so he cast the child into the sea. When asked about the second child by the second fisherman, the first fisherman answers that the second child had two mouths, one in the front and one in the back, and that Ogi abandoned it in the mountains because it did not say the things that his father wished to hear. As such, the dialogue between the two fishermen conveys that the two children born between Ogi and Inake were born with deformities, be they in the eyes or the mouths, and both children were forsaken by their father because those deformities did not comform to his standards of desirable children. In addition, the second fisherman points out that Inake said “YA”(YES) and Ogi said “NEIN”(NO) prior to conceiving, and added that Inake had dropped Ogi into the sea, expressing a view that such a female-initiated conception was a major cause for giving birth to “keine nützlichen Kinder” (useless children). 7 The images of the children born to Ogi and Inake and the cause of their births, as narrated by the fishermen, can be understood as an alteration of the Japanese Creation Myth, a myth about the genesis of the land of Japan. Kojiki, an eighth-century body of writing of Japan’s mythology, tells a story of how, after the creation of Heaven and Earth, Izanagi and

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Izanami—Ogi and Inake’s grandparents—gave birth to “Awajinohonosawakenoshima” (Awajishima), “Iyonofutananoshima” (Shikoku), “Okinomitsugonoshima” (Okinoshima), “Tsukushinoshima” (Kyushu), “Ikinoshima,” “Tsushima,” “Sadonoshima” (Sadogashima), and “Oyamatotoyoakijushima” (Honshu), and how these islands became the archipelago of Japan. The story also explains that there were failures prior to the birth of those islands. Izanami, who is a goddess, speaks first in the encounter with Izanagi. Izanagi rebukes her, saying that it is not good for the woman to speak first. However, the two copulate. As a result, “Hiruko” is born, and they place him in a reed boat for the current to take away. Moreover, neither do they count “Awashima,” who is born next, as a legitimate child. 8 There are various theories regarding what Hiruko symbolizes here. The most widely favored interpretation is drawn from the Nihonshoki and is supported by an annotation of the eighteenth-century Japanese classical scholar Norinaga Motoori. 9 This interpretation sees that the myth as comparing something not firm enough to be an island to a leech by calling it “Hiruko” (literally, leech child). In the Nihonshoki, which also records the Japanese Creation Myth, Hiruko is born not as the first child but the third. In addition, the name “Hiruko” is written with different characters (蛭児 in Nihonshoki 10 and 水蛭子 in Kojiki 11). Despite such inconsistencies with the Kojiki, this version also says that Hiruko was sent off in a boat; however, the explanation here is that it was because the child could not stand up even after turning three years old. To look beyond Izanagi and Izanami in the Japanese Creation Myth, there is also a story in Greek mythology in which the goddess Hera gives birth to a child whose legs are disabled and she throws it from Mount Olympus into the sea. In addition to these stories, other traditions around the world also have stories of the origin of mankind that include the element of giving birth to a child who is an anomaly. 12 As such, by having them repeat their grandparents’ deeds, Tawada links Ogi and Inake with traditions that are similar to each other and to those scattered across the world. Having examined the origin issue above, let us consider how Tawada’s work is unique in relation to its Japanese mythology background. We notice that while the Kojiki and the Nihonshoki do not reveal much detail about the two children, the fishermen in Orpheus oder Izanagi provide more information about Ogi and Inake’s children. As noted earlier, the first child was endowed with the ability to foresee the misfortunes of humankind and to criticize the way that Ogi governs. Similarly, the second child was described as having abilities and being given to say things that Ogi did not want to hear. Considering how the first child’s ability was to be able to criticize Ogi’s governance, the words that Ogi did not want to hear were most likely words of defiance. In that case, we could

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consider the special abilities of Ogi and Inake’s first and second children as talents for questioning authority and established ideas. In the radio drama, waves, flowers, and such non-living things as numbers also voice words. But only after considering the first and second children’s abilities can we understand the meaning of some lines spoken by a flower in the work. For example, Flower 3 says to Ogi, “your wife Inake … gave birth to children with superhuman abilities” 13 and relates the superhuman abilities of the children that Inake birthed, going on to claim that it is precisely such children that are needed: “Children with three eyes. Children with two mouths. We need these children.” 14 Thus, the two children are misfits with deformed appearances, and they are discriminated against for that reason; however, they have latent abilities to criticize Ogi as a governor, and the flower sees potential in those abilities. The work does not tell us what happens to Ogi and Inake’s children afterwards. But as mentioned earlier, the Japanese Creation Myth includes the story of Izanagi and Izanami’s childbirth in which gods give birth to islands and those islands become the nation now known as Japan, and Hiruko and Awashima are described as beings who were unable to be islands constituting that nation. In that sense, in Orpheus oder Izanagi, Tawada overturns the value system of Japanese mythology that supports, “the ideology of the founding of the nation and the unbroken imperial line,” 15 recreating the beings that were marginalized and persecuted in mythology into ones embodying the abilities to destroy the ideology and fiction that constitute Nation itself. KENTŌSHI: THE CHILD AS BEARER OF LIGHT Let us now examine Kentōshi (The Emissary 16). This novel may be considered one which further develops the motif of Orpheus oder Izanagi discussed above, namely the motif of forsaken child as deviator who has the potential to destroy the ideology and fiction that constitute a nation. The child in the work is named “Mumei” (literally, “no name”). The novel repeatedly illustrates scenes in which this child faces obstacles in everyday life activities. For example, he lacks “the ability to take in calcium,” 17 making his “teeth brittle, so he must dip bread into liquid, in order to eat it.” 18 In addition, the way that he walks during his elementary school years is described as “moving forward as he takes each step by spreading out bird-like legs that bend inward from the knees,” 19 going on to inform us that, “as he grew up, it became more and more difficult to move the legs, making it impossible for him to even stand for a long time.” 20 He is depicted using a wheelchair when he is fifteen years old. As such, the novel narrates a straight decline of the character’s ability to walk.

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Thus, in the sense that he is a child with severe physical limitations, Mumei may be considered as a next stage in the development of the image of the children in Orpheus oder Izanagi. The character’s physical characteristics are accompanied by a walking difficulty that compares him to an “octopus” 21 in the novel; this image corresponds to that of Hiruko who could not stand up even after turning three as described in Nihonshoki. 22 The novel does not explain the cause of Mumei’s infirmities. However, it does suggest that it is because he lives continuously exposed to a composite environmental contamination in the world following some kind of a catastrophe. The work does not give details about the exact nature of the catastrophe; it could possibly include natural disasters such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods, or man-made disasters such as war or armed disputes. However, as Numano points out, it is difficult not to associate it with the East Japan Earthquake and Japan after the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster; thus, this work is considered as one among a series of Tawada’s works depicting the post3.11 world as well as one among the genre sometimes called in Japan, “the post-earthquake literature.” 23 Mumei’s health condition is depicted as a problem not limited to Mumei individually but to the entire young generation living in the same environment. Regarding this, Tawada herself has observed, “Children’s cells split at a faster rate; so, it is said that they have a greater risk of incurring terrible illnesses compared to the elderly when exposed to radiation.” 24 From this statement, we understand that the fictional settings are partly based on an assumption related to the degree to which children are affected by exposure to radiation. As such, while the two children born to Ogi and Inake were specific individuals burdened with physical conditions that were different from ordinary people, Kentōshi depicts physical deformity as a characteristic of an entire generation of young people living in the same environment. These characters form the “new humankind (shinjinrui)” 25 who have transformed into something different from the humankind that came before due to the impact of the catastrophe; therefore, we are compelled to think about the nuclear power plant disaster. Mumei appears in the story as just one of such a generation of young people. Thus, Kentōshi depicts a terrifying world in which all children belonging to the “new humankind” are deviating from “normal existence,” according to the perspectives of the generations preceding them. Along with the consideration of the above as one aspect of the nature of the development from Orpheus oder Izanagi to Kentōshi, another has to do with the nature of the potential with which those characters are endowed due to their status as misfits. Ogi and Inake’s children have the potential to destroy the ideology and founding myths of the nation. The character Mumei, too, is created as a being who conceals special poten-

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tials. This has to do with the character being chosen in the story as a “kentōshi,” the eponym of the work’s Japanese title. Tawada’s Kentōshi employs a play on words: emissaries sent from Japan to Tang dynasty China—i.e., from the seventh to the ninth centuries–is written 遣唐使 in kanji. Tawada, however, uses a different kanji expression—献灯使)—for Kentōshi. Although they are homophones, “献 灯使,” coined by Tawada, implies “lantern bearers.” It is defined in the novel as “a top-secret private-sector project in which exceptional children are chosen and sent overseas as emissaries.” 26 Specifically, it is said that the children are sent to an international medical research laboratory in Madras, India, to provide data regarding their health status. It is thus a project contributing to medical research for the good of the world’s countries and regions. Therefore, this work and its title designate a character who accomplishes a difficult task and makes contributions to pathological research for the world to be one who will provide the beginning of a solution to an otherwise hopeless situation. Thus, to consider Mumei’s physical disabilities, which also represent his generation, as something caused by the catastrophe which suggests to the reader a nuclear power plant disaster, further suggests the potential that the story places in Mumei. That solution would be for Mumei to be the solution to this threat, somehow able to ameliorate the impact of catastrophe on the human body. As such, we can say that the development of the motif of “forsaken child as deviator” in this work lies in the way that both the cause of health threatening societal condition and its expected solution are concerned with the consequences of catastrophe. However, Mumei’s great-grandfather Yoshiro refers to Mumei as a “special” child equipped with “mysterious wisdom” that would eventually allow Mumei to become the creator of “a new civilization.” 27 Seeing Yoshiro stagger on one leg, Mumei asks him, “Great-grandpa, do you want to be a crane?” 28 Additionally, upon hearing Yoshiro explain at the hospital that a milk tooth dropped off, Mumei recalls a homophone word of “entrance examination (入試)” for “milk tooth (乳歯)” and interprets it as a failure in the entrance examination; 29 consequently, this (he?) tries to open up a world through a play on words that ties one thing to something entirely unrelated through similarity of pronunciation, bypassing the chains of meaning. Mumei’s attitude should be recognized as one that would not be limited to a mere contribution to the field of medicine; rather, it is one which will open up new horizons of thought without being trapped by stereotype or order that rests on regulation. The conditions under which one is chosen as an emissary also indicate this perspective. The text points out that Mumei is assessed as “a perfect candidate,” 30 meeting all criteria, and he is chosen as the kentōshi. Those criteria are outlined as follows:

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Chapter 12 Even if children are quick thinkers, those who try to use that ability just for themselves will be disqualified. Even if children have a strong sense of responsibility, they will be disqualified if they do not have excellent linguistic capabilities. Even if children are eloquent, those who get carried away with their own talk will be disqualified. Even if children feel other children’s pain with sympathy, those that immediately become sentimental or too emotional will be disqualified. Even if children have a strong will, those that quickly want to create cliques of subordinates and factions will be disqualified. Neither children who cannot stand being together with other people, nor children who cannot bear to be alone will be qualified. Neither children who do not have courage to overturn established values, nor those who defy everything will be qualified. Opportunists and those who are emotionally unstable are disqualified as well. 31

None of these abilities are directly related to physical things, nor are any of them superhuman abilities like those possessed by the children of Ogi and Inake. These criteria enumerate what kind of a being is desired in the world of Kentōshi. Acts such as pursuing one’s own self-interest and developing organizations to maintain power and established order are disqualifiers here. Thus, we understand that the criteria for the role of emissary include being independent of power apparatuses that maintain established systems or ideologies. In the world depicted in Kentoshi, words such as “regulation (kisei),” “standard (kijun),” “conformity (tekigo),” “countermeasures (taisaku),” “investigation (chosa),” and “discretion (shincho)” 32 pervade the news media, and freedom of speech is suppressed. The work depicts a social situation in which information is systematically controlled. The kentōshi is a being that is expected to destroy such a closed social situation. This work ends before Mumei’s actual dispatch as a kentōshi, leaving the rest of the story to the reader’s imagination. However, it does suggest, in the form of a child called Mumei, a possibility of a being that might sail from an island nation that is in a closed and hopeless situation, cross the sea, and kindle the light of hope. This is indicated in Tawada’s creative spelling of Kentōshi as 献灯使. This provides a stark contrast to the Japanese myth in which the misfit child is merely sent away on a current. CHIKYUU NI CHIRIBAMERARETE: CREATING A NEW LANGUAGE Finally, let us take a look at Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete (Scattered on the Earth). By naming its protagonist “H i r u k o”—derived from Hiruko in the myth—this novel maintains a continuity with Orpheus oder Izanagi, which was set in a mythical world. An alphabetic transliteration of the myth’s Hiruko, the gender of which was unclear in the original tale, is adopted as a woman’s name in this novel. We can confirm that the name “H i r u k o” derives from the Hiruko in the myth because Tawada has

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commented that she used alphabet letters with the intention to free the character from its roots, discouraging its direct association with Kojiki. 33 At the same time, the novel departs from the settings of the world of mythology to a modern-day world in which migrants travel, thereby exhibiting a new development arising from Orpheus oder Izanagi. The name, “H i r u k o,” along with “S u s a n ō”—the name of a character who is from the same “archipelago (retto; i.e. Japan)” 34 as “H i r u k o” and is also namesake of a god that appears in Japanese mythology—is written in full-width alphabet letters within the text of the work written in Japanese. In this way, Tawada gives us characters that are linguistic and cultural strangers in Europe. This technique seems to express how the two main characters—who are from the “homeland” (which we understand to be Japan, a culture in which their names had been represented according to the writing systems of kanji and kana)—are wandering in other cultures that use the alphabet system. In addition, the work depicts “H i r u k o” as a being who is forced, like Mumei, to depart from her homeland for a reason related to a catastrophe which occurred there. In this way, Tawada maintains continuity with Kentōshi; at the same time, Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete exhibits a new development. While Kentōshi ends at the point where Mumei is about to be sent out as a kentōshi, Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete places focus on the creativity that “H i r u k o” pursues after her departure: she has already been “sent.” To look at this in more detail, we find that “H i r u k o” has lost her “homeland”—an “archipelago” which, although not clearly stated, brings Japan to mind—due to some kind of widespread tragedy. The details of the tragedy are not made clear in the work. However, some events in the “homeland” are mentioned in the form of a recollection. One is the industrial disaster, associable with the Minamata disease, in Kumamoto. Another is a movement opposing the construction of a nuclear power plant in Fukui. Thus, the work hints that “H i r u k o” is from a country that incurred devastating damage due to a man-made disaster. As such, a point in common between the novels is that “H i r u k o” and Mumei are both from an “archipelago” that suffered from a catastrophe. It is mentioned in the work that “H i r u k o” has graduated from college. Thus, she is older than Mumei, as well as Ogi and Inake’s children who were forsaken soon after birth. That being said, actual age is not an important matter in this work; in fact, the work inconspicuously suggests that a different time runs in her body than the social time running in the foreign lands where “H i r u k o” wanders. There is a passage in which “H i r u k o” recalls the connection between her name and the myth—she calls to mind the correspondence between her name and Hiruko in Japanese mythology. In the passage, she says, “my eponymous god, Hiruko, is Susanō’s much elder sister. Hiruko is Izanami and Izanagi’s firstborn and should have been blessed

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by them, but she did not meet the standards of their idea of a healthy child, and so she was put on a boat made of reed and taken by the current.” 35 Here, “H i r u k o” reminds us that Hiruko was a misfit in myths that were compiled according to the “Nation’s orthodox view of historical legend.” The work thus indicates that “H i r u k o” herself is a being that deviates from the myth that is the fiction of national territory, national language, and nation itself. 36 As for physical conditions constituting the image of “H i r u k o” as a “deviator,” there is only a single a passage that suggests that she has a “chronic illness (jibyō).” 37 Rather, the work emphasizes her aspect as a wanderer in exile. As such, the author superimposes the image of the Hiruko that is sent adrift on the sea in the myth. The details of “H i r u k o”’s wanderings are as follows: She went to Europe to attend the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Having finished the term of overseas studies there, she tried to go back to her home country. However, that became impossible because the “archipelago” vanished due to the unspecified circumstances outlined above. For this reason, she stayed in Trondheim, Norway, then moved to Odense, Denmark, and had thereafter been overseas wandering from place to place. Thus, “H i r u k o” inherits the approach of Kentōshi, as she is a character who is given no choice but to wander in exile due to devastating circumstances in the “archipelago” that were caused by an unprecedented tragedy. A period of study abroad was the starting point of the wandering. As a measure to form Japan into a modernized nation, the former legitimate goal for studying abroad would have been to go abroad, study, and return as a useful human resource for the “Nation.” However, “H i r u k o”’s experience was nothing like that, even in the beginning. Moreover, she is delineated as a character that deviates from the original plan and wanders. “H i r u k o” cannot return to her country because it has ceased to exist, nor are there any “countrymen (dokyōnin)” 38 around her who speak the same language. Thus, “H i r u k o” is isolated from the community of people who communicate in her “mother tongue (bogo).” She is given no choice but to live outside of said “mother tongue” So she then goes on a journey in search of other speakers of her “mother tongue.” However, the version spoken by a “countryman” she meets along the way has a heavy mix of dialect; it is a tongue that deviates from the language that is systemized as a “national language.” 39 That dialect also involves wordplay. For example, in the novel, we encounter the phrase “tsurutsuru-ippai.” There it reflects the Fukui dialect, and it is used to refer to a state in which liquid is filling a vessel up to its brim and about to overflow. The dialect re-purposes the word to express psychological states, forming expressions such as, “my heart is tsurutsuru-ippai with expectation (kitai de mune ga turuturu-ippai).” 40 “H i r u k o”‘s journey here is not a process of enhancing the value system of the “mother tongue” or “national lan-

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guage.” Rather, it heads in the direction of destroying it and becoming creative. As such, in Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete, the naming of “H i r u k o” in full-width English letters symbolizes the role of one that deviates from the myth that is the Nation, national language, and such sources of nationalism associated with her “mother tongue.” By choosing to write her name in alphabet, the author also depicts “H i r u k o” as a modern migrant who is compelled to relinquish ties with any particular country or culture and to wander as one engaged in creative activities. Moreover, the work gives substance to the latent potential implied by the motif of “forsaken child of god as deviator.” The work equips “H i r u k o” with the potential to create a new linguistic culture, as “H i r u k o” creates her own new language. Her “handmade language (tezukuri-gengo)” 41 is a language she created by mixing the languages of the lands in which she has stayed since going to Europe—a mixture of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish, which “H i r u k o” describes in the novel as an artificial language that is “almost understandable for any Scandinavian.” 42 “H i r u k o” calls this language “Pansca,” 43 a combination of “pan,” meaning “across,” and “sca,” from “Scandinavia.” In order to represent Pansca in a work written in Japanese, the novel seems to employ strategies that depart from norms, including combinations of correct words or grammar. For example, the sense of seeing a personal value in something is expressed as “diamond to me.” 44 This exemplifies Tawada’s preference in Pansca such an expression that is direct, concise, and, at times, appealing to visual imagery. Pansca, as such, reflects “H i r u k o” being in the situation of one who cannot settle in any single-language place and is assumed to be a congealment of the difficult circumstances of migrants. In the respect that it is not quite Swedish, Norwegian, nor Danish, it is a language that departs from the myth of “national language” or “mother tongue” and from the ideologies attached to that myth. At the same time, it is a practical language devised to enable communication with speakers of those respective languages. Furthermore, it reflects a body that is constantly on the move, making it a stimulating language that departs not only from linguistic norms, such as correct grammar, but also from invariability. The work shows the capability of Pansca as a language through its effect on the tone of the lines spoken by Knut, a linguist who uses Danish as his “mother tongue.” Before hearing the sound of Pansca, Knut’s tone was “lazy and lacking in variety,” as represented by the use of monotonous repetitions of sounds. In contrast, a line of his after hearing Pansca is, “My heart is the rapid beat of the drum. My feelings are going through the roof like a street performer when the spectators begin to gather.” 45 The sound of Pansca thus is described in the novel as a stimulator that induces Knut, a native Danish and a linguist, to enliven his tone with rich figurative expressions. Moreover, “H i r u k o” makes picture-story

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shows of fairytales and old tales and reads them in Pansca to immigrant children from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, among other places. This activity of hers signifies a transmission of the possibilities of a new linguistic culture to children immigrated from various linguacultural regions. Thus, unlike either the migrant’s “mother tongue” or the host countries’ languages, Pansca is described as a new language that uses original ideas and sounds to make cracks in the myth of “mother tongue” or “national language.” Pansca is thus introduced in the novel as a new language that leads speakers of both the “mother tongues” of the host countries and the foreign languages of immigrants to new discoveries, contributing to the creation of an “Earth culture (chikyū bunka).” 46 As such, through “H i r u k o,” this novel poses the possibility that those who do not belong to a nation, and who have therefore lost their “mother tongue,” can still contribute to such creative activity by choosing not to confine themselves to said “mother tongue.” CONCLUSION We have looked at three works: Orpheus oder Izanagi, Kentōshi, and Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete to trace the process by which the author delineates variations of the motif of the “forsaken child that is deemed a deviator” and a disqualified person in the context of the Japanese creation myth. Tawada offers a fresh inversion of the image of a character that is branded as a deviator in the context of Japanese mythology. She depicts the deviator as a creator of new values. In so doing, Tawada destroys the ideology of the Nation and indigenous ethnic culture that rests on myths; through literature, she poses the possibility of a capability held only by one who has crossed the borders of language and culture and who has departed from the framework of “Nation-State” to create a new culture. That is Tawada’s literary destruction and recreation of Japanese mythology. We can look forward to a continuation and further development of this motif in the near future of Tawada literature in Hoshi ni honomekasarete (Hinted at the Stars), a new novel following the theme of Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete. Its serial publication began in the January 2019 issue of Gunzō. NOTES 1. Taniguchi, Sachiyo. 2008. “Alphabet ‘O’ no warai.” Ningenbunkakenkyū 9:155–68. 2. Taniguchi, Sachiyo, 2011. “Tawada Yoko no Choruigaku.” In Hankyo suru Bungaku, edited by Masahiko Tsuchiya Tokyo: Fūbaisha. 154–177. 3. Ivanovic, Christine.2008.”Aneignung und Kritik: Yoko Tawada und der Mythos Europa.” Études Germaniques 249: 131–152. 4. Tawada, Kikari to Gelatin no Leipzig, 20. 5. Wang, Momo no minzokushi, 99–103.

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6. Tawada, Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort: Theaterstücke, 59. 7. Tawada, Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort: Theaterstücke, 60. 8. Ono, Kojiki.Vol.1, 30–41. 9. Motoori, Kojikiden, Vol.1, 246. 10. Toneri shinno, Nihonshoki, 34. 11. Ono, Kojiki, 34. 12. Harada, Shinichi. 1994. “Hiruko shinwa ronkō.” Komawazadaigaku bungakubu Kenkyukiyo 52: 147–194. 13. Tawada, Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort: Theaterstücke, 64. 14. Tawada, Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort: Theaterstücke, 64. 15. Tsuda, Sokichi.1946.” Kenkoku no jijyo to banseikkei no shiso.” Sekai, 4:29–54. 16. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani (Tawada 2018b). 17. Tawada. Kentōshi, 24. All translations from Kentōshi are mine unless otherwise noted. 18. Tawada. Kentōshi, 21. 19. Tawada. Kentōshi, 125. 20. Tawada. Kentōshi, 148. 21. Tawada. Kentōshi, 20. 22. Toneri shinno, Nihonshoki, 36. 23. Kimura, Saeko. 2013. Shinsaigobungakuron:atarashii nihonbungaku no tameni. Seidosha. 24. Tawada, Yoko, and Robert Campbell. 2015.” Yagate ‘Kibou’ wa modoru: Tabidatsu kentōshitachi.” Gunzo, 70–71: 216. 25. Tawada. Kentōshi,79. 26. Ibid., 101. 27. Ibid., 48. 28. Ibid., 12. 29. Ibid., 23. 30. Ibid., 101. 31. Ibid., 101. 32. Ibid., 53. 33. Tawada,Yoko. 2018c. “Numa no naka kara saku hasu no hana noyouni.” 1. 34. Tawada, Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete, 9. All translations of this work are mine, unless otherwise noted. 35. Tawada, Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete. 272. 36. Regarding this point, it should also be noted that Tawada commented about “H i r u k o,” describing her as “a figure that wandered out of national myths,” and “less a hero within a myth than a character that tends to spill out from it.”(Tawada . 2018d. “Moshimo kotoba ga ichimai no kyodai na ami naraba.” Interview. Gunzo 73 (7): 90. 37. Tawada, Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete, 11. 38. Ibid., 262. 39. Ibid., 20. 40. Ibid., 231. 41. Ibid., 10. 42. Ibid., 11. 43. Ibid., 37. 44. Ibid., 18. 45. Tawada, Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete, 11. 46. Tawada, Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete, 40.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Harada, Shinichi. 1994. “Hiruko shinwa ronko.” Komawazadaigaku bungakubu Kenkyukiyo 52: 147–194.

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Ivanovic, Christine. 2008. “Aneignung und Kritik: Yoko Tawada und der Mythos Europa.” Études Germaniques 249: 131–152. Kimura, Saeko. 2013. Shinsaigobungakuron:atarashii nihonbungaku no tameni. Tokyo: Seidosha. Motoori, Norinaga. 1980. Kojikiden. Vol. 1. Annotated by Kenji Kurano. Tokyo: Iwanami-shoten. Numano, Mitsuyoshi. 2014, July 29. “Bungei jihyō.” Tokyo Shimbun 5. Taniguchi, Sachiyo. 2008. “Alphabet ‘O’ no warai.” Ningenbunkakenkyū 9: 155–168. ———. 2011. “Tawada Yoko no Choruigaku.” In Hankyo suru Bungaku, edited by Masahiko Tsuchiya, 154–177. Tokyo: Fūbaisha. Tawada, Yoko. 1996. Seizyo densetsu. Tokyo: Ota shuppan. ———. 2000. “Nusumi yomi.” In Hikari to Gelatin no Leipzig.” Tokyo: Kodansha. ———. 2013a. “Orpheus oder Izanagi:- Die Rückkehr aus dem Reich der Toten.” In Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort: Theaterstücke. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 57–76. ———. 2013b. “Pulverschrift Berlin.” In Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort: Theaterstücke. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 57-76. ———. 2014. “Kentōshi.” In Kentōshi, 8–160. Tokyo: Kodansha. ———. 2018a. Chikyuu ni chiribamerarete. Tokyo: Kodansha. ———. 2018b. The Emissary. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani, New York: New Directions. ———. 2018c. “Numa no naka kara saku hasu no hana noyouni.” Interview. Shukan dokushojin 3239: 1. ———. 2018d. “Moshimo kotoba ga ichimai no kyodai na ami naraba.” Interview. Gunzo 73(7): 82–96. ———. 2019. “Hoshi ni honomekasarete.” In Gunzo 74(1): 80–97. Tawada, Yoko and Robert Campbell. 2015. “Yagate ‘Kibou’ wa modoru: Tabidatsu kentōshitachi.” Gunzo, 70–71: 213–224. Tsuda, Sokichi. 1946. “Kenkoku no jijyo to banseikkei no shiso.” Sekai, 4: 29–54. Toneri shinno, et al. 1994. Nihon shoki. Vol. 1. Annotated by Kojima Noriyuki et al. Tokyo: Shogakugan. Ono, Yasumaro. 1997. Kojiki. Vol.1. Annotated by Yamaguchi, Yoshinori, and Konoshi, Takamitsu, Tokyo: Shogakukan Wang, Hsiu-Wen. 2003. Momo no Minzokushi. Tokyo: Hoyushoten. Wang, Xiu Wen. 2003. Momo no minzokushi. Kyoto: Hoyushoten.

THIRTEEN Words That I Swallowed Whole The Linguistic Edibility of Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Writings Tingting Hui

FOREIGNNESS INGESTED In her interview with Yoko Tawada, Bettina Brandt asked her to elaborate on the metaphors she used in Overseas-Tongues [Überseezungen], in which Tawada compared her mother tongue to her “exterior skin,” referring to a foreign tongue as something she “swallowed whole” and that “has been sitting in [her] stomach ever since.” 1 Moreover, Tawada linked the experience of speaking a foreign language to that of eating and digesting food: These foreign words, though, can also slowly transform themselves and become meat and then, ultimately, they can become my flesh. Although sometimes this process does not work and then the foreign words remains something in between, in between my own body and the foreign body. But, in any case, foreign words are consciously consumed much later on: we are not born with these words. 2

When her mouth is cracked open to foreign words, as Tawada phrases it, it fuses two types of oral activities: eating and speaking. Such a fusion is not simply a matter of borrowing the vocabulary related to eating to that of speaking. Figural and symbolic readings fail to comprehend the bleak rupture of the body and the wrinkled surface of the text. Here it is rather about words becoming flesh, about expressions being turned inside out, and bodies being impressed with shapes and sensations of foreign ob199

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jects. Neither the speaker nor the language stands self-evident one to the other. Words enter and accommodate themselves in the mouth, where they, with their voluptuous yet wild shapes, challenge the speaking tongue by refusing to have their traces of passage buried and smoothed out. “In my own case, this bodily image is also quite concretely linked to the feeling that I get when I pronounce words in a foreign language,” says Tawada, “Then I am working with my tongue, just like when I am eating.” 3 By taking on a concrete yet invisible body, the foreign language requires that the tongue “taste” the curves and contours of words and to adjust itself to these particularities. Correspondingly, one has to move the mouth and the tongue, chew and swallow the words vigorously, so that the flesh of words can be transformed into the flesh of the body. Doesn’t this intense contact and transformation between body and language invite us to re-imagine the mouth not as a ready-made space where words are produced by vocal organs, but as a transformative space inhabited by these two bodies and constantly reshaped by their interaction? This sensory impression of the tongue, Tawada seems to imply, pertains to any languages but one’s mother tongue. For Tawada, one inhabits the mother tongue in the same way that one remains inside one’s skin. This metaphor recognizes the mother tongue not only as an organic part of the body, which is by nature inedible and cannot be consumed, but also as a perspective through which the speaking body is able to be distinguished from its background. That being said, the mother tongue does not offer up the speaking body to the speaker as a visible and complete field of vision and comprehension. Fragmentary in sight and undivided in imagination, it constitutes the surface of the body and remains unchallenged until the moment that foreign languages parade through the body, unearthing what is beneath the skin and what can be otherwise. Foreignness is to be digested, consumed, and incorporated. Sometimes, however, as Tawada suggests, it may sit inside, alien and still, like a pebble, reinforcing the division and incompatibility from within. Even worse, this odd sensation is contagious; on such occasions, the body undoes its surface image of familiarity and begins to taste its own bittersweet uncanniness. I propose that this image of someone who begins to take in a foreign tongue and lets it bloom into literary sensibility constitutes a literary figure, which derives its force and creativity from the trope of eating and speaking. This figure has literature look into the primitive opening of the mouth head-on: how it chews, smells, digests, and fails to digest, before words salute the bottomless depth of the body and are sublimated to the misty surface of the page. At issue is foreignness: language is alien to the speaking body, as orality is to literature; consumption and absorption are barely imagined in relation to expression, as literary creativity is rarely thought to be crafted from a foreign tongue. If the metaphor of swal-

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lowed words and ingested foreignness affirms a linguistic apprenticeship (if not indecency and primitivity), how could this figure convey the authenticity and originality of the author? Is the disorder of “I am to be devoured and expressed” compatible to the law of “I eat, I express, I create”? THE EXOPHONIC “Yoko Tawada is an example of a type of writer we can call ‘exophonic,’” writes Chantal Wright in the introduction to her experimental translation of Tawada’s Portrait of a Tongue. 4 Wright continues to describe “exophony” as “the phenomenon where a writer adopts a literary language other than his or her mother tongue, entirely replacing or complementing his or her native language as a vehicle of literary expression.” 5 Defined in a way that emphasizes the linguistic and literary non-nativeness of a writer, exophonic literature, as it implies here, overlaps with migrant and bilingual writings on the grounds that its narrators and authors often journey through languages and move back and forth among cultures in a quest for literary voice. As a critical concept, the term “exophonic” has been widely used and vigorously theorized by scholars after the publication of Tawada’s book of essays Exusophoni: bogo no soto e deru tabi (Exophony: Traveling Outward from One’s Mother Tongue) (2003). 6 For Tawada, “exophony” is a concept that crystallizes the metamorphosis of a speaking tongue when confronted with a foreign language: how the speaker divests a mothertongued body and becomes re-imprinted with the contour of a foreign language, searching for daily and artistic expressions in the gap between body and language, between thoughts and words, and between the mother tongue and a foreign language. Whereas Wright’s definition emphasizes the matter-of-fact status of the author being a non-native speaker and the creative act of writing in a foreign tongue, I propose that the exophonic, especially in the case of Yoko Tawada, be understood as a literary concept that nourishes the image of a speaking body and of an eating tongue in writing and, therefore, advances the return of a redoubled orality in literature. I understand the exophonic primarily in terms of a literary style instead of as a plain fact. The foreigner status is not necessary for a writer to be qualified as exophonic. Writers such as Proust and Kafka, for example, would be considered, in this definition, to be exophonic insofar as they are able, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “[t]o be a foreigner, but in one’s own language, and not simply as someone who speaks in a language other than his or her own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in a single and same language, without even dialect or patois.” 7 Foreignness, in this sense, refers to a state of mind and an approach to language. It requires that the speaker is ready to give up a

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ready-made approach to language that lacks reflection and contestation, to wrestle with the tyranny of meaning, and to move beyond an imagined unity and consistency. In order to write, in short, one has to be exophonic even in one’s mother tongue. “Literary language is in any case never the mother tongue,” writes Tawada. “The way I write in Japanese never equates to the Japanese which I speak, or the Japanese language which I learnt as a child. When one has separated from the language of daily use, this is the moment at which literary language arises, and this is in any case a foreign language.” 8 For Tawada, literature does not speak through a mother tongue. One has to consciously unsettle one’s relation to his or her language and text, insistently searching for the odd vision and revelation of a foreigner who fails to recognize the obvious and cannot take things for granted. To be exophonic entails one speaking to literature in an untamed voice and with an unsatiated appetite, re-invoking the ghostly other of literature— be it the original opening of the mouth or the doomed return of the oral instinct. The question follows: How do Tawada’s exophonic writings mobilize the interplay of eating and speaking, consumption and expression, surface and depth, in the very domain of literature? Tawada speaks of pain and delight, confusion and creativity, as the foreign tongue consumes words as if they were food. 9 Her literary style is a natural extension of a foreigner’s situation that is marked by ignorance and innocence: as Wright observes, the foreign gaze is ubiquitous in Tawada’s texts; it is a vision that blends the anthropological with the fictitious, which leads to a narrative tone that is both curious and factual, hesitating and poised. 10 Wright further points it out that “[c]entral features of Tawada’s style in this broader sense are the defamiliarizing techniques that the reader encounters in her texts and the texts’ tendency to foreground structures and properties of language itself, achieved via metalinguistic reflection.” 11 Tawada implants in her writings a powerful image of someone who is possessed by a mania for words as food and one who chews and consumes words in voracity and naivety. The ingested words are transformed into a sensibility to language and an expressivity tinted with the memory of eating. Tawada’s narrators and characters are often hyper-aware of the visual and acoustic qualities of language, especially since the sustainability of their bodies seems to rely on how well they have digested the language in question. In “Canned Foreign,” the narrator arrived in Hamburg without knowing the letters of the alphabet. The city was as unintelligible and veiled as the letters that “lacked both moisture and flesh.” 12 People were uneasy because the language of her face was not readable for them. She bought a little can with the image of a Japanese woman on the wrapping paper, but found a piece of tuna fish inside. The image and the content were completely mismatched. “Every foreign sound, every foreign

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glance, every foreign taste struck my body as disagreeable until my body changed. The Ö sounds, for example, stabbed too deeply into my ears and the R sounds scratched my throat.” 13 Masked and unveiled, the enigma of being outside the protective skin of the mother tongue is embodied in sound, glance, taste. The art of vanishing (to be as invisible as the skin) is the privilege of the ordinary; the foreign stands out in its entirety, leaving intense and even overwhelming sensations on the speaking body. At the same time, the narrator could not bear the idea of being wrapped up seamlessly in one language—“Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.” 14 Listen, what a horror: with the native tongue, thoughts are poured out, smooth and bare, as if the language had no need of the speaking body, but mastered it, or bypassed it. Does the narrator exile her tongue to a state of inexpressivity and alienness so as to avoid the horror of being numb and unreflective with one’s language? The narrators of Tawada’s other stories—like the one in “A Guest” who was haunted by a voice from the tape recorder, 15 or the one in “The Bath” who was a translator and later lost her tongue and voice during a meal— they all have to deal with the penetration of words into the body. 16 “The narrator of Tawada’s essay is but one of many possessed by words and driven to the edge of madness,” comments Douglas Slaymaker. 17 The clash between language and body is concrete and curious, real and fantastic. The literary style of Tawada captures the fleeting sparks of such a clash; the unfolding of various events, strange and unjustified as they might appear, is done by a narrator who is constantly suspended in the process of speaking and lost in the mixture of words and bodies, and thus is incapable of comprehending the events in a language of logics and causality. The beauty of Tawada’s stumbling and struggling tongue is that it is so simple that it leaves intact the strangeness of things and events, whose relation to language remains mysterious and unfathomable. Because of their apprenticeship to the foreign tongue, the narrators of Tawada’s stories seem protected from common sense. Their narrative tones are shot through with the innocence of being, the mystery of otherness, and the self-assurance of interpretation—all of which are further dramatized by the anonymity of the narrators and their obviously contestable relation to the linguistic and cultural situations they are in. For example, in Tawada’s short story “The Talisman,” the narrator was searching for meanings of different symbols sincerely, but always in wrong—or at least uninvited—places. “In this city there are a great many women who wear bits of metal on their ears,” we read very early in the story. 18 This everyday scene, ordinary and invisible, becomes obtrusive and hilarious when being pondered as if it were a great mystery and taboo. Intuitively, the narrator interpreted those bits of metal as talismans

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of some sort. When her friend Gilda explained to her that the earring was a piece of jewelry and had no meaning at all, she interpreted it as reluctance to reveal a secret. What could it be? She thought of the rite of circumcision. Could it be that the sexual organ was substituted by the ears? Fissures of interpretations slipped in, which underlined the fragility of signs and symbols. At the end of the story, the narrator said, “[t]he piece of metal on her ear heavier and colder than before. I swallowed the words I’d meant to say to her, for she seemed to me, all at once, like a stranger who—although I lived in her language—couldn’t have understood me.” 19 So she swallowed the words; they were too private and to provoke any kind of resonance. Partially digested and poured onto pages, Tawada’s exophonic writings point to a literary expressivity that congeals and clashes with reality instead of illuminating and representing it. Words are like mad stones flung against named things. “At a flea market,” says the narrator in Tawada’s short story “A Guest,” “no one tries to hide the traces hidden in an object. The stuffed animals with their somewhat squashed faces observed me ironically, furiously or disdainfully. Paperback novelettes with faded covers still bore coffee stains and greasy fingerprints from their first readers.” 20 The exophonic writer, likewise, speaks and writes in a language found in the flea market. Words are indexed with old memories and uneasy intimacy from the previous owners. However, this is not yet madness—since no words are without the traces of other speakers. Curiosity gives way to madness only when the proximity of things is translated into an imperative which forces one to guess at their relations. “An iron and a candlestick stood side by side, as though there were some relation between them,” says the narrator. “I was even able to think how this proximity might be deciphered: the iron produces heat and the candlestick light. Each takes the place of the sun, which from the underground passage is never visible.” 21 Aren’t the foreign words initially bundles of objects traded at the flea market, whose relations are not at all obvious? Tawada, like the narrator in her story, half playfully and half sincerely, lavishes superficial structures upon these words, which—as she makes herself believe—measures up to the weird arrangements of these words. Mad, mad, mad. Later the narrator goes to see the ear doctor because she suspects that there is a flea in her ear. “You are pregnant,” the doctor says to her after checking the ear. “Please look again to be sure if I’m really pregnant; it really isn’t possible. Could you have confused a flea with an embryo?” 22 What is the relation between a flea and an embryo? The solution to this puzzle is hard to contrive—or, at least not obvious. Yet, if we think that foreignness is the embryo of madness, maybe there is indeed a flea living in the ears of the narrator, who mishears the tone and confuses a doctor’s routine question with a statement. In fact, the chaotic world of the flea market is what Tawada discovered when she first tried out her German tongue. In the essay titled

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“From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother,” Tawada recounts that the gender system of German, which has neither explicit bearing on the referred objects nor well-ordered rules among the words themselves, does not constitute a natural way of perceiving for her. “Whenever I saw a fountain pen, for instance,” says Tawada, “I really tried to perceive it as a male object—not in my head, but with my senses. I would take it in my hand and stare it for a long time, murmuring all the while, ‘Masculine, masculine, masculine.’ The magic words gradually gave me a new way of looking at things.” 23 At such moments, Tawada as a writer becomes the narrator of her story, standing in front of the flea market, wondering at the possible connections of the objects lying bewilderingly and curiously close-by. As the relations between objects and words are re-discovered and redefined, Tawada begins to experience herself anew in relation to the German language. What she has discovered is a female object—the typewriter, die Schreibmaschine—that has “a large, broad body tattooed with all the letters of the alphabet.” 24 “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother” is, for Tawada, a passage from language as a natural encapsulation of the body to language as a symbolized mechanical body of a typewriter, whose keys, when tapped correctly, can change the letters of the alphabet into the inky life of words. To be adopted by the Linguistic Mother, for Tawada, entails that one accepts and repeats its terms and principles, toying with them insofar as one complies with this superimposed condition. If such a formulation reminds one of what Lacan says about the symbolic order, there is a major difference: whereas the symbolic order conveys the other of language in the name of the Father, the figure of law, which, consequently, subjects the speaker to a primary linguistic vulnerability and an open wound marked by language, Tawada’s typewriter, while promising a second childhood which is primarily associated with playfulness and creativity, mobilizes the imagination of the relation between language and body by shifting the related vocabulary and metaphor from an organic one to a mechanical one. 25 ÜBERSETZUNGEN/ÜBERSEEZUNGEN: WRITING WITH TONGUE IN CHEEK Becoming mad, becoming the child. The exophonic does not become mad without growing childlike. Inhabiting the border between languages, Tawada stretches the art of writing in multiple directions: perversion and naivety, real passions and light-hearted blunders, pain and pleasure, suffering and indulgence. Such is the in-betweenness of the exophonic: it is torn between madness and innocence; it bespeaks the pleasure of eating as well as the primitivity of speaking. At the same time, the foreign tongue makes the division between expression and consumption a very

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thin one; literary creativity may spring from the mouth where the desire of speaking is mediated and meliorated in relation to the eating impulse. Words are taken in as if they are food: chewed, consumed, some are indigestible and may cause a stomachache. 26 For the exophonic, words are not only like food, they are food. “Are there some words that have wombs in their bodies,” asks Tawada in her essay “Speech Police and Polyglot Play.” 27 In this essay, with determined obstinacy, Tawada continues confusing words with food and things until the questions tie her tongue into a knot: Is there a particular taste when I place a woman-word on my own tongue? How does a chocolate bar (eine Tafel Schokolade) taste as a word? You say you’d like to have a chocolate bar. Do you actually want to have a bar or a chocolate? [ . . . ] Nevertheless the appetite knows no end. Most edible things are uncountable: honey, noodles, vegetables. They will be measured with a spoon, a cup, or a scale. 28

Here the conflation of words and food can easily slide into the paranoid and phantasmatic life of the schizophrenic. A chocolate bar: the economy of words is organized in terms of taste and appetite. A spoon of honey or a long piece of spaghetti: conversely, the disordered integrity of food is measured by chunks of words which sit close by one each other. Don’t words exhibit a sort of oral regression? Isn’t the act of speaking a way of biting into the organless body of food? “A word waits secretly to be taken apart,” says Tawada. “Not only when the line ends, but when, for example, one remembers a certain woman. If someone thinks of Monica, a Monica jumps out of his Mundharmonica (“mouth-harmonica”), and the word is divided in two: Mundhar (mouth-hair) and Monica.” 29 If a word is too long, it is better to do it one bite after another. Mundharmonica. First bite from the bottom, a beautiful girl is named. Another bite with good intention—ugh, gross, where does the mouth-hair come from? This manner of eating words is not without risk. Tawada is well aware of it: “What is separated and what must stay together is decreed by particular decrees. ‘Rules must exist,’ declare, not the policemen but your friends.” 30 However, the problem is the tongue, which is used to defy good intentions and sensible rules. “If you have a short tongue and say the word Spielregel (“rule of the game”) very fast,” Tawada continues, “it sounds like Spiegel (“mirror”).” 31 What can you do with a short tongue? Can you eat words decently without stretching your tongue too much to observe the rules? Indeed, if you have a short tongue, you may turn the rule of the game into a mirror. As the short tongue is physically unable to match the length of Spielregel, the image of the speaking body, which is largely forgotten in the mother tongue, is intruded into the foreign language. Speaking and writing, therefore, become dramas of the tongue, whose paradoxes are unresolvable but provoking, problematic yet laughable.

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Tawada, as an exophonic writer, is undoubtedly under the spell of the tongue. She once sketched a textual portrait of a tongue that belongs to her friend called P, who lives in the US but speaks German as a foreign language. “P pronounced the word erklären in a heavy, dragging fashion not typical of her,” writes Tawada. “The word bore regret and tears under its skin. ‘Ich erkläre Dir das.’ Because it sounded unexpectedly guilty, I reacted quickly: ‘No, no, you don’t have to explain anything.’” 32 On closer inspection, the foreign tongue becomes for Tawada the place where the body is closely and incongruously knit to a language. While the meaning of a word becomes tangible via divorce from a singular vocalizing mouth and through a process of historical sediment, Tawada turns to the tongue to see how the speaking body might add a style to language. This corporeal style, whose register in language is manifested by virtue of what we usually call the accent, is not only something that intensifies or distorts prescribed meanings. It is also, for Tawada, the thing that helps one to survive the foreign tongue: P said to me that she could never reach the same level she had in English in another language. But whereas in English she had an accent, she had no accent in French. Her French friends confirmed this. In French she didn’t need to speak with an accent. An accent preserves the memories of one’s mother tongue. Without an accent you could be swallowed up by the present of a foreign tongue. 33

If the intrusion of the tongue into language opens up a schizophrenic abyss, the presence of an accent, as Tawada implies, checks the consuming impulse of language; and the very rhetoric of the exophonic—“I am to be expressed, I am to be eaten”—relies on the accent to release and survive the oral regression of literature. The essay mentioned above is called “Porträt einer Zunge” (“Portrait of a Tongue”), which originally appears a collection of essays by Tawada entitled Überseezungen. As Wright observes: The word Übersetzungen in German means “translation.” Überseezungen, however, is a neologism, a compound noun meaning “overseas tongues” [ . . . ] Seezunge, which occurs in the middle of Überseezungen, literally translates as “sea-tongue” and refers to the type of fish known as sole in English. Seezunge accurately describes the appearance of the fish, which is flat and wide, rather like a swimming tongue, and which suggests the ability to cross the oceans, both physically and linguistically. 34

This neologism überseezungen, when read against the backdrop of Tawada’s literary fascination with the body of language, can be seen as a textual manifestation of accent rendered by an inept short tongue, stuck in between the linguistic and bodily translation of the mother tongue into a foreign language. Although the correlation among translation, tongue, and sole is accidental in this case, it is not without consequence. By intro-

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ducing a fallible tongue into translation, the meaning of the word übersetzungen is mobilized, displaced, and extended all at once. Aren’t the tongue and the fish ideal metaphors for the practice of translation, which entails the traveling of meaning from one language to another, from one tongue to another? Isn’t meaning a fragile thing that can be altered or destroyed by the whims of the tongue? Indeed, if the act of speaking is equivalent to the translation of body into language, no original, as Tawada suggests in another essay titled “Storytellers without Souls,” can be properly and unequivocally traced to render any tongues essentially delinquent: The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various it’s difficult to believe they are all translating a single, shared text. And perhaps it isn’t really a single, shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate that this text is really many texts at once. The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. 35

Listening to überseezungen with overtones of übersetzungen, Tawada appears to be democratizing or leveling up all foreign tongues to the point where the very idea of the original is deflated into one among many. However, the drama of speaking, for Tawada, is fully displayed when the corporeal translation brings about the primitive and regressive impulse of eating, capturing the speaking tongue in a paradox of excess and lack. Tawada’s short story “The Bath” can be read allegorically as an elaborated version of her wordplay with überseezungen/übersetzungen, in which Tawada extensively engages with the implications of translation and tongue in relation to speaking. The narrator of the story is a Japanese woman who has been learning to speak German. Throughout the story, the narrator retells the story several times and keeps revising her profession (model, interpreter, typist) and the profession of her lover Xander (photographer, German teacher, carpenter). In one of the typical moments of rephrasing, she says, “I wasn’t really a model, I was only a simultaneous interpreter who was uncertified and thus got very few assignments.” 36 This sentence structure “ . . . wasn’t . . . was . . . ” is very characteristic in this story and serves to push forward a leap of the narrative. Another example comes after the narrator loses her tongue and falls mute: “Xander wasn’t really a photographer at all, he was my German teacher.” 37 Here the loss of her tongue leads to an incredible revision of the story which intensifies the sense of anxiety; because of the change of his profession, her inability to speak becomes a betrayal of his language. In a broader sense, I interpret the oscillation suggested in the sentence pattern “was/wasn’t” as an embodiment of the narrator’s paradoxical relation to the tongue, which exists hauntingly with a past that is under

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revision from time to time, whose metamorphoses depend on newly found situations and circumstances. In the scenario of the narrator being an interpreter, the story takes place at a restaurant where she is supposed to do interpretation for a group of Japanese businessmen and their German clients. The narrator says that she always orders sole when she goes to a restaurant because the word reminds her of “soul, sol, solid, delicious sole of my soul; the sole reason I don’t lose my soul, and my soles stand on a solid footing still . . . ” “When I eat sole, I’m never at a loss for words with which to translate,” comments the narrator. 38 Sole, seezunge in German, whose literal translation is “sea-tongue,” is consumed to moisten and nourish the tongue before it has to twist itself to find the right words in translation. The proliferation of words is dependent on the metonymic digestion of the tongue beforehand. However, that day she couldn’t order sole because a large fish is already ordered for the whole group. The chef comes with his assistant to cut the fish in front of them. “The open mouth had no tongue in it,” the narrator notices. 39 Later the luncheon begins and her mouth starts to be stuffed with smelly words mixed with undigested chunks of fish: When jaw muscles relax, the atmosphere becomes relaxed as well. People’s mouths fell open like trash bags, and garbage spilled out. I had to chew the garbage, swallow it, and spit it back out in different words. Some of the words stank of nicotine. Some smelled like hair tonic. The conversation became animated. Everyone began to talk, using my mouth. Their words bolted into my stomach and then back out again, footsteps resounding up to my brain. The chunk of fish in my stomach was having a bad time of it and began to protest. My stomach muscles clenched up and I began to stutter. It felt good to stutter. “Tha, tha, tha, that,” I said. The skin of my stomach grew taut like a bagpipe and I bellowed, “That ha, ha, ha, has, has.” I didn’t know myself whether I was laughing or stuttering, but it felt agreeable. The words scattered and rose fluttering into the air. 40

This scene of translation gives off the bad smell of food. The linguistic metamorphosis of words is obviously corrupted by the unchecked opening of the mouth. Übersetzungen is haunted by its illegitimate double, the überseezungen. Translation regresses into an open rehearsal of the dancing tongue (“Tha, tha, tha, that”), orchestrated by the clenched stomach that drowns words in depth. Words are dizzy. She stutters. She stutters agreeably. The juggling of the tongue ends abruptly, however. “Something wet and soft was touching my lips from the outside,” says the narrator, “The sole came slipping into my mouth and played with my tongue, gently at first, then with more force. Finally the sole gripped my tongue between its teeth and ate it up.” 41 Here the intrusion of the overseas-tongue (überseezungen) in the order of translation (übersetzungen) suggests an

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oversupply of corporeality in speaking a foreign language; and the metaphor of the swimming sole (seezunge) points to the danger of translation. Since the foreign language is a tongueless fish and a soulful flesh-eater, the tongue in translation would either craft a style of cohabitation for language and body, or become lost and swallowed, dormant in silence. Tawada’s wordplay with überseezungen/übersetzungen is, without doubt, largely unnatural and contrived. So are the jumping plots that characterize her stories. Words are usually not invoked to fill up the gap between thoughts and language; instead, her narratives are meant to enrich the chance encounters among words across different languages. Tawada’s literary playground is essentially a flea market of words, where the accent is overheard as an unwitting comment on the largely contrived connection of words created by their accidental proximity: People say my sentences in German are very clear and easy to hear, but still they are “not ordinary” and deviant in some ways. No wonder, because they are the results of the sound that I as an individual body have absorbed and accumulated by living through this multilingual world. It is of no use if I tried to delete my accents or remove my habits in utterance. Today a human subject is a place where different languages coexist by mutually transforming each other and it is meaningless to cancel their cohabitation and suppress the resulting distortion. Rather, to pursue one’s accents and what they bring about may begin to matter for one’s literary creation. 42

The accent, for Tawada, can be a corporeal translation of a language, a literary style mobilized by the speaking tongue, a defensive mechanism against the eating impulse of language. It is the accent that brings forth the oral regression of exophonic writings, whose soft, fallible tongue stands out unexpectedly with an uncommon choice of words or a chunk of ungrammatical thought. If the order of expression and consumption is stretched to all directions with exophonic writings, the accent, at least, makes sure that the monster of the language machine spits out bones of the devoured flesh, which, when nourished with care, can bloom into what we might not object to call literature. NOTES 1. Yoko Tawada and Bettina Brandt, “Ein Wort, ein Ort, or How Words Create Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada,” Women in German Yearbook, Vol. 21 (2005): 4. 2. Tawada and Brandt, “Ein Wort,” 4–5. 3. Tawada and Brandt, “Ein Wort,” 5. 4. Chantal Wright, “Introduction: Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Texts,” Yoko Tawada’s Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright, trans. Chantal Wright (University of Ottawa Press, 2013), 2. In an earlier article, Wright examined the limits of the terms such as “axial,” “postnational,” “postcolonial,” “hyphenated,” and “non-native,” terms that are being used to categorize writers whose literary language is not their mother tongue. Wright proposes that “exophonic” is a more appropriate

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term, at least in the German context, to discuss the linguistic status and the stylistic features of non-native writers. See Chantal Wright, “Writing in the ‘Grey Zone’: Exophonic Literature in Contemporary Germany,” German as a Foreign Language, Issue 3 (2008): 26–42. 5. Chantal Wright, “Introduction,” 2. 6. Yoko Tawada, Ekusophonii: bogo no soto e deru tabi (Tokyo:Iwanami Shoten, 2003), qtd. in Keijirō Suga, “Translation, Exophony, Omniphony,” Yō ko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lexington Books, 2007), 21-34. Chantal Wright writes that “Tawada first heard the term ‘exophony’ at a conference held in Senegal in 2002 entitled ‘Afrika-Europa. Transporte des Literarischen’ (personal correspondence). Tawada reports that the non-native-speaker French writers at the conference were given the well-known label ‘francophone,’ the German writers ‘germanophone,’ and that the collective label used for the various non-native-speaker writers from different countries were ‘exophone.’ Tawada’s collection of essays bearing the title “Exophonie” was published the year after the conference and in 2007 the co-organizers of the Senegal conference brought out an edited volume, also entitled Exophonie (Arndt et al. 2007), the proceedings of a 2005 colloquium of the same name.” See Chantal Wright, “Writing in the ‘Grey Zone’: Exophonic Literature in Contemporary Germany,” German as a Foreign Language, Issue 3 (2008): 39. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Fé lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Continuum, 1987), 98. 8. Taylor Institution Library, “‘Von der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter’: Yoko Tawada’s Creative Multilingualism,” accessed March 15, 2018, http://blogs.bodleian. ox.ac.uk/taylorian/2017/02/15/von-der-muttersprache-zur-sprachmutter-yokotawadas-creative-multilingualism/. 9. Tawada and Brandt, “Ein Wort,” 4-5. 10. Chantal Wright, “Introduction,” 5. 11. Chantal Wright, “Introduction,” 4. 12. Yoko Tawada, “Canned Foreign,” Where Europe Begins, trans. Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden (New York: New Directions Book, 2007), 86. 13. Tawada, “Canned Foreign,” 87. 14. Tawada, “Canned Foreign,” 87–88. 15. Yoko Tawada, “A Guest,” Where Europe Begins, trans. Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden (New York: New Directions Book, 2007), 147–208. 16. Yoko Tawada, “The Bath,” Where Europe Begins, trans. Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden (New York: New Directions Book, 2007), 1–55. 17. Douglas Slaymaker, “Introduction: Yō ko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere,” Yō ko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, edited by Douglas Slaymaker (Lexington Books, 2007), 6. 18. Yoko Tawada, “The Talisman,” Where Europe Begins, trans. Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden (New York: New Directions Book, 2007), 91. 19. Yoko Tawada, “The Talisman,” 95–96. 20. Yoko Tawada, “A Guest,” 152. 21. Yoko Tawada, “A Guest,” 152–153. 22. Yoko Tawada, “A Guest,” 157–158. 23. Yoko Tawada, “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother,” trans. Rachel Mcnichol, Manoa, Vol. 18.1 (2006): 141. 24. Yoko Tawada, “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother,” 141. 25. For Tawada, the experience of learning to speak a foreign language may bring back the bygone childhood, providing the speaker insights into how a child perceives and relates to a language. Tawada writes, “Whenever I typed a character, it stood out on the paper straightaway: black on white and, at the same time, full of mystery. If you have a new linguistic mother, you can experience a second childhood. As a child, you take language literally. Consequently, every word acquires a life that is independent of its meaning within a sentence. There are even words that are so alive that, like

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mythical figures, they can develop biographies.” See Yoko Tawada, “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother,” 141. 26. Tawada and Brandt, “Ein Wort,” 4. 27. Yoko Tawada, “Speech Police and Polyglot Play,” trans. Marjorie Perloff, accessed March 16, 2018, http://marjorieperloff.com/essays/tawada-translation/. 28. Tawada, “Speech Police.” 29. Tawada, “Speech Police.” 30. Tawada, “Speech Police.” 31. Tawada, “Speech Police.” 32. Yoko Tawada, Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue, 74. 33. Yoko Tawada, Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue, 91. 34. Chantal Wright, “Introduction,” 18. 35. Yoko Tawada, “Storytellers without Souls,” Where Europe Begins, 104. 36. Yoko Tawada, “The Bath,” Where Europe Begins, 13. 37. Yoko Tawada, “The Bath,” Where Europe Begins, 27. 38. Yoko Tawada, “The Bath,” Where Europe Begins, 14. 39. Yoko Tawada, “The Bath,” Where Europe Begins, 16. 40. Yoko Tawada, “The Bath,” Where Europe Begins, 17. 41. Yoko Tawada, “The Bath,” Where Europe Begins, 29. 42. Yoko Tawada, Ekusophonii: bogo no soto e deru tabi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003), qtd. in Keijirō Suga, “Translation, Exophony, Omniphony,” Yō ko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Douglas Slaymaker (Lexington Books, 2007), 28.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Deleuze, Gilles, and Fé lix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 1987. Douglas Slaymaker, “Introduction: Yō ko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere.” In Yō koTawada: Voices from Everywhere, edited by Douglas Slaymaker, 1–12. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Suga, Keijirō . “Translation, Exophony, Omniphony.” In Yō ko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, edited by Douglas Slaymaker, 21–34. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Tawada, Yoko. “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother,” translated by Rachel McNichol. Manoa, Vol. 18.1(2006): 139–143. ———. “Speech Police and Polyglot Play,” translated by Marjorie Perloff, accessed March 16, 2018, http://marjorieperloff.com/essays/tawada-translation/ ———. Where Europe Begins. Translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden. New York: New Directions Book, 2007. Tawada, Yoko, and Bettina Brandt. “Ein Wort, ein Ort, or How Words Create Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada.” Women in German Yearbook, Vol. 21 (2005): 1–15. Taylor Institution Library. “‘Von der Muttersprache zur Sprachmutter’: Yoko Tawada’s Creative Multilingualism,” accessed March 15, 2018. http://blogs.bodleian.ox. ac.uk/taylorian/2017/02/15/von-der-muttersprache-zur-sprachmutter-yokotawadas-creative-multilingualism/. Wright, Chantal. “Introduction: Yoko Tawada’s Exophonic Texts.” In Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright, translated by Chantal Wright, 1–33. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2013. ———. “Writing in the ‘Grey Zone’: Exophonic Literature in Contemporary Germany.” German as a Foreign Language, Issue 3 (2008): 26–42.

FOURTEEN Transmigration and Cultural Memory in Yoko Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee Suzuko Mousel Knott

Yoko Tawada read from her 2014 novel, Etüden im Schnee, next to the preserved body of polar bear Knut, on January 21st, 2015 at the Natural History Museum in Berlin. 1 Situating herself and her reading next to the bear and in the museum, Tawada invites us to consider the animal’s relationship to the archive and to the construction and mediation of cultural memory. Knut, arguably the most famous animal star of recent German popular culture, was moved from the living collection of the Berlin Zoo to a glass vitrine in the museum after his death in 2011. The curators of the museum—a form of archive —selected, preserved, and made accessible in perpetuity the zoo’s late ursine inhabitant. Derivations of Knut still circulate as buyable, collectible objects: in the museum gift shop you can buy polar bear tchotchkes and, for a time, even Tawada’s book, Etüden im Schnee. One could argue that the conceit of the book in fact relies on the continued circulation and recognition of “Knut” as part of recent German cultural memory, even as Tawada projects new meanings and thereby makes possible new interpretations of his life and the lives of his ancestors in the novel. As we imagine Tawada reading aloud in the museum space next to Knut’s body, we can begin to draw connections between Tawada’s novel and Aleida Assmann’s definition of the formative processes of cultural memory, wherein “[l]iving memory . . . gives way to a cultural memory that is underpinned by media—by material carriers such as memorials, monuments, museums and archives.” 2 Similar to the glass vitrine that enshrines the lifeless body of Knut, Tawada’s novel Etüden im Schnee 213

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houses distinct forms of memory, both individual and collective, living and transgenerational, which I will read here as “arc.” According to Aleida Assmann, an arc is a place of memory, “mobile and strictly confined.” 3 I argue that Tawada writes Etüden im Schnee with Assmann’s Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory in mind in order to level a metatextual critique of the persistent dichotomous view of histories and cultures as either primitive (oral) or civilized (written) and further as an attempt to decolonize history by making visible the processes of legitimization, delegitimization, and distinction through the narrated lives of polar bears. Cultural memory, a type of collective memory, plays an integral role in forming and maintaining national identities when they are institutionalized and sanctioned by the state—archived, as I mean it here. Thus Knut’s inclusion in the museum legitimizes him as the subject of a German story, even as his appropriated, foreign body is made an object of scientific inquiry. 4 Knut’s body and the novel’s three narrative threads seek to reclaim his polar bear history and function as sites of tension between the ethnologists’ binaries—primitive and civilized—to a politicized discourse on inclusion—denizen to citizen. 5 Similar to current debates concerning the provenance of appropriated indigenous cultural artifacts and the ethics of exhibiting the art objects and remains of colonized peoples from the holdings of German museums and institutions of higher learning, Knut’s body simultaneously symbolizes the exhibition of indigenous peoples and cultures and Tawada’s own critically self-aware appropriation of indigenous myths. My analysis in this essay centers on questions of inclusion and exclusion in the wider context of citizenship and cultural memory. Together with Ruth Lister’s work on female citizenship and Aleida Assmann’s work on cultural memory, I will first consider the role of migration in Tawada’s novel in order to ask, who is migrating and under what conditions? How do memory and migration intersect in the text? I will then turn to the representations of functional and storage memories in the conditions of migration. Through close analysis I will unpack Knut’s memory boxes to reveal Tawada’s embedded intertexual references to Assmann’s work and the work of twentieth-century British novelist E. M. Forster, which taken together result in a metatextual critique of a persistent ethnological binary of savage and civilized, through Knut’s coming of age in contemporary Berlin. There was a time several years ago at which if you had searched for Yoko Tawada in Wikipedia you would have found something like an origin myth. Yoko Tawada had, according to these early and now deleted entries, arrived to Europe from Japan via the Trans-Siberian Railway to begin writing and publishing in German. These bio-blurbs highlighted the perceived importance of her earliest border crossings and their relationship to new forms of writing, while simultaneously over-emphasizing and even fetishizing Tawada’s so-called outsider view of Europe.

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Underlying this Germany/Japan dichotomy is the “myth of nations,” an “articulation of nation with culture and ‘race,’” that imagines nationstates as ethnically or culturally homogenous, a myth of something that never was. 6 These biographies also highlighted an often too literal interpretation or decontextualized oversimplification of Tawada’s assertion of seeing Europe through “eine Japanische Brille” (Japanese glasses). 7 Put back into its original context, she in fact warns that writing about a Europe viewed through a Japanese filter could only result in an inversion of Orientalism. Nevertheless this playful and subversive mode of cultural analysis, this “fiktive Ethnologie” that Tawada has cultivated, is a way of countering and calling into question the western archive of knowledge that comprises the European intellectual and scientific histories that make up what Assmann terms the “cultural memory” that defines fundamental parameters of western European civilization and by extension, European citizenship and national identities. 8 The conspiratorial tone of Tawada’s oft-cited quote, “Europe does not exist” suggests an expert insider’s understanding of this place and the authority to question its very existence. Therefore, a productive approach to what are Tawada’s earliest interrogations of “Europe” as mythic concept is to examine the ways in which this multilingual author has chosen to problematize Europe—as place (where does it begin?) and as myth (does it even exist?)— and to subvert the perceived primacy of its scientific and intellectual histories through protagonists who question, willfully misunderstand, and even willfully resist participation in European citizenship. 9 A particularly salient metaphor that has emerged from critical citizenship theory is the idea of a “Fortress Europe.” 10 Tawada’s protagonists operate within what Ruth Lister remarks are its “symbiotic processes of inclusion and exclusion, which form the kernel of citizenship as a concept and practice.” 11 Lister unsurprisingly notes that “[t]he patterns of inclusion / exclusion . . . are gendered and racialised,” and “generate differential opportunities for and constraints upon the exercise of agency.” 12 In “Fortress Europe” the fluid interior borders of the Schengen Agreement and the hard exterior border controls of restricted immigration and refugee quotas function to exclude the racialized other. The result of relaxed borders within the EU, Lister argues, has actually resulted in intensified controls “through the use of identity cards and passport checks,” and increased racial profiling. 13 For “those who ‘carry their passports on their faces,’” these checks increase irrespective of actual citizenship, thereby compromising, “their substantive citizenship rights and their status as citizens or legitimate residents.” 14 “Fortress Europe” systematically erodes the citizenship rights of people of color. Yoko Tawada’s protagonists find themselves irregular immigrants, undocumented and transient, in a “Fortress Europe.” They arrive to the Federal Republic of Germany prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and experience the transition from life in a communist regime and must to

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negotiate a new existence in an increasingly neoliberal capitalist nationstate. Absurdly, Tawada’s polar bear protagonists in Etüden im Schnee are also subject to these checks. The humans around them reflect on the polar bears’ country of origin, even as they plot to trick the immigration system: “The Russian politicians would never notice, that the polar bear comes from Canada and not the Soviet Union.” 15 The question of polar bear nationality is an incongruity, of which the reader is swiftly reminded: National identity has always been foreign to polar bears. It was customary for them to get pregnant in Greenland, to bear the children in Canada and to raise them in the Soviet Union. They had no citizenship, no passport. They never went into exile, they crossed the borders without getting themselves a visa. 16

Not only do polar bears lack a national identity, but Tawada’s oblique use of “fremd” (foreign) in the first sentence also suggests the proximity of foreignness to them, even as they range freely across Danish, Canadian, and Soviet borders and make their homes and families in the circumpolar region. The incongruity of national identity and nomadism, coupled with a persistent notions of the “foreign,” sets the stage for Tawada’s migrating bears, whose experiences in migration stand in for the lived experiences of nomadic and semi-nomadic circumpolar peoples. Tawada presents the reader with three discrete narrative threads that tell the lived experiences of three generations of polar bear: an unnamed, writing grandmother; her daughter Toska, a performing circus bear; and Toska’s media star off-spring, Knut. Their individual stories span geographically and chronologically across the northern Atlantic from Sovietera Russia to West Berlin, Canada to the German Democratic Republic, and finally, to the Berliner Zoo in post-reunification Berlin. These individual stories form the genealogy of a polar bear family while simultaneously re-creating a history of migration. Tawada playfully positions her protagonists as polar bears “mit Migrationshintergrund” (with migration background). Polar bears are a migratory species that generally live alone in an area of the Arctic Circle commonly referred to as the “arctic ring of life,” and their migratory range includes territories belonging to Denmark, Norway, Canada, the United States, and Russia. 17 Animal migration is motivated primarily by access to food, mating practices, and, increasingly, human effects on habitats that exert a negative impact on these patterns. While termed “migration,” polar bear movement within habitats is in practice a form of nomadism. Individual bears never truly settle in one place, and the hunt for food sources motivates their constant mobility. Tawada’s polar bears live the majority of their lives in captivity and are raised by humans. They are captive nomads. The polar bears of Etüden im Schnee are subject to the Foucauldian dynamics of power and

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discipline through their socialization with and as humans. They are imprisoned and their bodies are regulated and controlled through physical violence, trained and transported for the entertainment of others, first in the cruel caravan of the circus and ultimately in the unheimliche simulacrum of the zoo. Framed in this way, it is difficult to divorce the image of the captive but personified polar bears of Tawada’s novel from dehumanized and exhibited colonized peoples, a practice that was most widely established in Germany by Carl Hagenbeck and Heinrich Leutemann in the late 1800s. 18 Hagenbeck was one of the first showmen to bring semi-nomadic circumpolar peoples to Europe, and as I will demonstrate here, there are several ways Tawada’s polar bears connect to Hagenbeck’s exhibition business. 19 Before I move to specific examples, I will first establish the relationship of exhibited peoples to exhibited animals in order to show the historical relationship between the two. In Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo, Nigel Rothfels provides a detailed account of Hagenbeck’s acquisition and exhibition of a “caravan” of Sami families, who became the objects of Hagenbeck’s first human show, the “Lapland exhibit.” 20 The Sami, a semi-nomadic people related to the Inuit of Greenland and other circumpolar peoples, were invited to Europe as “guests.” Rothfels reports from his reading of personal letters that Hagenbeck’s “guests from the north had no idea of presenting a show.” Instead, they were housed on the Neue Pferdemarkt behind Hagenbeck’s business, “without artistic pieces of scenery or backdrop.” Hagenbeck further touted that the indigenous peoples he exhibited were “the real thing” and “natural in their behavior.” 21 The families demonstrated various activities from their everyday lives, demonstrations that were in fact a type of performance. Rothfels notes, “by the end of the 1870s, the performers in the Hagenbeck people shows were normally contractually obligated to present their dances, crafts, songs, and the like,” an indication that their lives abroad were anything but the real thing. 22 Paradoxically their contact with Europe and Hagenbeck’s agents’ neglect to vaccinate them resulted in the death of all members of the 1878 “Eskimo” group after contracting smallpox. Hagenbeck’s “guests” did not migrate to Europe, although they did travel throughout Germany and other parts of the European continent. And while they were afforded some freedoms to interact with their host cultures, their presentation fulfilled a very specific colonial purpose. Rothfels argues, “at the base of all the shows was an assumption that as objects of exhibition, the subjects of the exhibits were at the disposal of those who wanted, in whatever possible way, to study them.” 23 Similar to the ethnological museums that were collecting and exhibiting newly won “possessions” from colonial sites abroad, exhibited peoples formed a collection used both for scientific inquiry and popular entertainment as well as for the legitimization of the colonial project.

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A similar space used to house living collections for both scientific inquiry and popular entertainment is the zoo. Reminiscing about his human spectacle, Hagenbeck wrote: “‘Where are you all, you Africans, Indians, you red sons of the wilderness, you Eskimos and Laplanders, who trusted yourselves to my leadership in the land of those remarkable Whites, who gazed at you in crowds as if you were fabulous animals?’” 24 Rothfels draws a clear connection between animal and human exhibition and arrives at the following conclusion: [I]t was Hagenbeck’s experience with exhibiting people, his success in creating exhibits that made people believe what they saw before them was nothing less than nature up close [ . . . ] Hagenbeck’s world of animals would soon come to resemble deeply the carefully constructed and reassuring exhibits that he had created for his indigenous peoples. 25

Rothfels makes visible the bridge from human exhibition to animal exhibition in the zoological garden. This transition includes a discussion of Franz Kafka’s “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie,” a short story in which Kafka explores the limits of human freedom through a personified ape named “Rotpeter.” 26 Rotpeter is shot and captured by Hagenbeck’s agents but avoids the zoo by learning to be human. The ape surmises through his experience that there is no such thing as human freedom and that the closest approximation for him is an “Ausweg” (exit). 27 He learns to perform the human through dress, and joins the Varieté in order to escape Hagenbeck’s “Kiste” (box). 28 In Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee Kafka’s story functions as an intertext against which her polar bears test the limits of their creative freedoms and mobility, and ultimately search for an “Ausweg” through performance. Knut’s writing Grandmother first learns of Kafka’s work in a West Berlin bookstore and reports: “I bought myself the volume and read ‘A Report to an Academy’ first.” 29 The bear reads the story with interest, but finds it infuriating. The more I read, the more uncontrollable my anger grew, and I couldn’t stop reading. The monkey was tropical in nature, so reason enough why monkey literature didn’t suit me. It seemed too apish to me to want to become human while also telling of your human becoming. 30

The text prompts a negative, physical reaction in the bear, tied to her realization that her readers may draw parallels between her autobiography and the ape’s tale. It made me sick to remember how as a child I had learned to walk on two legs. I didn’t just learn it, I even wrote a text about it and published it. My readers probably thought I wanted to support the evolution theory with my apish personal report. If I had read the ape’s report first, I would have written my autobiography completely different. 31

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Couched in both Tawada’s and Kafka’s texts are questions of mimicry, or “nachäffen,” and Erich Haeckel’s biogenetic law in which, “during the course of its ontogeny . . . an organism re-capitulate[s] its ‘phylogeny.” 32 Indigenous peoples, “primitive peoples,” were perceived as a key to understanding evolutionary human development just as the study of animals was viewed as a way to uncover the “missing link” between apes and humans. The unnamed writing grandmother, her dancing daughter, Toska, and ultimately the child, polar bear star Knut each recount the development of their performance skills in the face of exploitation as captive labor. Each faces contingencies placed on their varying degrees of freedom and abilities to engage in and develop their respective artistic medium. Theirs is a different evolution. As the German title of Tawada’s novel suggests, we can read the chapters of the book as “musical exercises in the snow.” Etüden—or etudes, are short, challenging musical compositions serially devised in order to develop a particular technique and to thereby enhance performance skills. This meaning is mirrored, but then also slightly shifted, to connote a snow apprentice in the Japanese title to Tawada’s “partner text” Yuki no renshūsei. 33 We discover in each of the narratives a performer honing his or her craft, and at the same time engaging in techniques of memory with the intention to create, hold fast to, or disavow identities in the form of autobiography, biography, and forgetting—what Assmann terms “distinction” in the category of functional memory. 34 In the first chapter, “Evolutionstheorie der Großmutter,” Knut’s grandmother recounts her childhood training as a dancing circus bear in the Soviet Union, a training that while brutal is tinged with a certain sentimentality for the thrill of performance and the complicated relationship to her trainer and ersatz family, Iwan. The bear’s first-person narrative also depicts her subsequent development as a writer working on her autobiography. A knee injury derails her stage career and results in a reassignment of duties within the circus: “I was useless for the circus. Normally they would have shot me, but luckily they moved me into administration as an office worker.” 35 We hear echoes of Rotpeter’s narrative in the polar bear’s remark and, as is often characteristic of Tawada’s writing, a re-imagination and extension of Kafka’s original tale. 36 As part of her administrative work, the unnamed bear attends industry conferences, which she treats as just another performance space. The focus of the narrative toggles back and forth between the bear’s recollections of her childhood training as a circus performer and her present reinvention from office worker to author, and ultimately to author in exile. Shorter blocks of text that comment or reflect on past-time events punctuate these shifts in time and space, while also creating a sustained through line in the narrative that interrogates the nature of individual memory and memory in migration.

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Tawada provocatively positions the polar bears as ethnic minorities operating in a predominantly western human world, even as the bears reject this identification in the text. Tawada’s novel suggests this interpretive possibility even as she allows her polar bear protagonists to question the conflation of animal and human ethnic identities. After leaving the Soviet Union for West Berlin, Knut’s grandmother is questioned about her ethnic identity. The bear realizes upon arrival in Berlin-Schönefeld airport that she has arrived to a condition of exile: “A fly bumped against my forehead, no, it was no fly, it was a sentence: I’m going into exile! Suddenly I understood my situation.” 37 Immediately following this realization she is confronted by a young woman who attempts to define the bear. The woman, rendered object and referred to simply as “die Brille,” (glasses) makes assumptions regarding the polar bear’s origins: “Oh yes, you belong to an ethnic minority, right?.” 38 Knut’s grandmother wonders, “how should I explain, what I am.” 39 The polar bear does not outright refute the woman’s claim, but instead asks herself: “Did my tribe belong to an ethnic minority? It is possible that we aren’t as numerous as the Russians, at least in the cities, but deep in the North far more of our sort live in nature than the Russians.” 40 The bear’s inner response to the question of minority status does not disavow difference between her “Sippe”—family, clan, ethnic group –and “die Russen.” She maintains the distinction. Instead she calls into question who is in the majority, and in which spaces: “wir [sind] nicht so zahlreich . . . wie die Russen, zumindest in den Städten” (we are not as numerous . . . as the Russians, at least in the cities.” 41 Her “Sippe” are not city dwellers. Her “Sippe” is distinctly not a settled group. The “Brille” in this scene stands in for what Lister terms a “superficial liberal toleration of diversity, confined to the ‘private sphere’.” 42 “Die Brille” exposes her arrogant place of privilege and assumed expertise: “I wrote a term paper about the human rights of ethnic minorities and got a good grade for the first time. For me it was an unforgettably beautiful experience.” 43 “Die Brille” punctuates her awkward expression of selfsatisfaction and pseudo-expertise with an equally awkward “Long live the minorities!” 44 Tawada levels a humorous critique of a multi-cultural model of citizenship that, according to Lister, “runs the risk of essentializing and freezing cultural difference and of treating cultural groups as homogeneous and closed,” and which embodies this superficial liberal tolerance of the Other, “rather than genuine acceptance and recognition of such diversity in the ‘public’.” 45 Knut’s grandmother had emigrated from the Soviet Union with help from an organization called “Citizens’ Initiative KAOS—send no author to the orange plantations of Siberia!) 46—another version of the well-intentioned interventions of an activist group on the behalf of others. After the published portions of her autobiography are instrumentalized in the West as “Proof of socialist animal abuse,” the writing bear receives a

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threat “from a domestic association, which called itself the support organization for international communication) in which she is “invited” to move to Siberia. 47 KAOS helps the bear to freedom; however she quickly learns that $10,000.00 had been paid for her escape—“Later it became slowly clear to me that without the offer of money I would not have received an exit visa.” 48 After her arrival in West Berlin, she is under constant pressure to produce “ein Bestseller.” 49 The director of KAOS, Herr Jäger (Hunter), makes the contingent and controlled nature of her new capitalist western existence clear: “You needn’t worry yourself about your income; as long as you write, we pay.” 50 The writing bear never has control over her work and is thereby denied artistic freedom. From the beginning her editor publishes her manuscript without her knowledge and under a title of which she does not approve: “Applause Storm for my Tears.” 51 When she confronts her editor, he remarks: “You reader would rather know how you mastered the high performing arts without losing the wild in you and how you felt. Your experiences are important, not your thoughts.” 52 Unwilling to write literature that highlights an ability to mimic and that does not allow her to be other than “das Wilde,” a literature that foregrounds lived experience or “Betroffenheit” over the intellectual, the bear chooses her own “Ausweg”: “I finally decided to emigrate to Canada.” 53 Hers is an escape predicated by the distinction of an ethnic minority status—only after she is attacked by a Neo-Nazi gang does KAOS agree to let her go. It is helpful here to return to Aleida Assmann’s Cultural Memory to think through subjective memory and how it correlates to Tawada’s writing bear. Assmann tracks the “transition from memory as art to memory as power” in her chapter on memory and romanticism. 54 The impetus for the bear’s writing is a desire to recollect, an act that Assmann tells us becomes “more complex with the advent of Romanticism, because it was split into the two vectors of affirmative subjectivity (through manipulative recollection) and loss of subjectivity (through mystic anamesis).” 55 To put a finer point on recollection, Assmann further explains, “Recollection is linked to subjective memory, creativity, poetic imagination, and self-construction. Anamesis is a form of counter-memory that transcends the patterns of self-construction.” 56 When the bear writes, she is recording and re-coding the self through recollection, what Assmann terms a “radical autogenesis.” 57 The bear’s development from performer to writer mirrors the move to autogenesis, a move from the construction of a personified animal-self through an extreme somatic form of training by rote or repetition (what Assmann terms memoria as ars) to the freedom to create one’s subjectivity. 58 What becomes apparent through the bear’s autobiographical narrative is the tension between her desire for autogenesis and the distinction of functional memory that defines the bear as ethnic minority in the human world and its matrix of cultural memory within which she finds herself.

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We later learn that the bear emigrates again, this time to the GDR. Through her daughter Toska’s chapter, we learn the fate of the writing mother and the loss of her written record: Her mother was reportedly a famous person, who immigrated to the socialist part of Germany form Canada and supposedly authored an autobiography. The book was unfortunately long out of print and no one is said to have read it, so it’s rather a legend. 59

If we look to another portion of Assmann’s work, we find that the bear’s forgotten text becomes waste, one of the many cultural objects left out of the official archive through the process of selection. 60 The text is out print, no one has read it; it and its unnamed author no longer hold a place in cultural memory. Tawada’s choice to personify bears with personal histories, i.e. individual identity and collective history as an ethnic minority or group, attempts a form of historical legitimization through functional memory, which is denied in the text. The passing of the writing bear into legend opens an ambiguous moment in the novel. With no official memory of the text, no access to it through an archive, bear memory is rendered delegitimized and powerless. However, as the stuff of legend—a myth—the bear may be functionalized to communicate an alternative form of power and an alternative form of memory in migration to the subsequent generations of her family group. The second chapter of Etüden im Schnee, “Der Todeskuss” (Death kiss), explores the possibility of alternate forms of communicating the past through oral and shamanic practices. Named for the eponymous performance of a kiss between polar bear and animal trainer, the second chapter recounts polar bear Toska’s personal history in tandem with the recollections of her animal trainer Barbara. Toska, the daughter of the writing bear in the forgoing chapter, is at first unable to write. Narrated in the beginning by her human trainer Barbara, Toska’s chapter foregrounds the spiritual and desire-driven connection between the two. 61 Toska’s tale begins as an oral history, mediated and written by Barbara and facilitated by dreams. The female trainer thinks deeply about Toska as a personified stage performer and regards her as an artist, even as she laments the contingencies placed on her bear existence. I imagined Tosca’s pain and suffering, and thought: “How pitiful the life of a stage artist is! [ . . . ] If Tosca were human, she could write her own autobiography and print it at her own expense. But since she is an animal, her sorrowful, feminine life experiences that she’s had as a female bear, will die with her. Poor creature, you name is woman bear!” 62

Barbara’s empathy for Toska is striking, not least because Barbara is her trainer, but also verges on the satirical with the over-emphatic final statement, which recalls the awkward exchange between her writing grand-

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mother and “die Brille” in the book shop of the prior chapter. Barbara seeks to functionalize Toska’s memory and free her from the written page: “I write your life’s story, so that you can step out of your mother’s autobiography!” 63 Again an emphatic statement, punctuated by an exclamation mark, seeks to free Toska from the shadows of the past and to establish the bear in her own right for the future. Rather than allow the well-meaning trainer the final word in her personal story, Tawada gives voice to Toska’s tale. Through a form of transmigration, a shamanic switching of souls, Toska suddenly possesses the ability to write. A paw print in the text marks the shift in narrative perspective and suggests a transfer of consciousness through the daring performance, “Todeskuss,” performed by the bear and her trainer. 64 Communication between Barbara and Toska transpires through shamanic rituals, elements of which are threaded throughout the novel and reference the religious practice of many circumpolar peoples, including the bear cults of the Sami and Ainu. In the Ainu tradition, the Bear Festival figures as the “most important Ainu Ritual” according to Takako Yamada. Yamada delineates the role of female shamans as mediators between the Ainu human and divine worlds and notes that possession, “the condition for becoming a shaman, was mostly seen among women.” 65 The Fire Goddess, who serves as mediator between humans and gods, invites the Bear God to the human realm for the Bear Festival, is a god of domesticity who tends the home hearth. She is “the most important deity for the Ainu” and arrives from the divine realm to “the hearth in the center of the house” to watch over the human race. 66 Barbara, whose domestic work in the novel includes sweeping the floors and tending the captive animals, speaks with Toska in her dreams. Their communication is facilitated by fire, as Barbara sees “the black flame in Tosca’s pupils flickered . . . it grew light around me, so light, that it blinded me and the dividing line between the wall the ceiling disappeared.” 67 Elements of the Fire Goddess and the Bear God come together in this scene of shamanic possession, in which Barbara and Toska speak for the first time. In line with the Ainu worldview that “‘Kamui [gods] are human beings, and human beings are kamui’,” their scenes of transmigration conflate the human and the animal, the “civilized” with the “primitive,” the human and the divine. 68 The shamanic rituals of circumpolar peoples operate within their own particular cosmogony and worldview that, while religious, can nevertheless be considered philosophic and “scientific.” In Myth and Meaning, Claude Lévi-Strauss disabuses his reader of the assumption that “‘primitive thought’” is driven by “functionalism,” or the fulfillment of basic needs, and insists that peoples referred to as “primitive” seek to understand their natural and social world “by intellectual means, exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a scientist, can or would do.” 69 Taw-

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ada incorporates elements of the Ainu Bear Festival and the Fire Goddess’ mediation between the human and divine (polar bear) realms in order to complicate the assumptions that underpin this binary understanding of “primitive” and “civilized” and thereby creates an allegorical re-telling of the Ainu worldview. The incorporation of shamanic practice, coupled with the recurrent question of ethnic minority status in Tawada’s text prompts questions regarding oral history, the perceived primacy of written history over story telling, notions of genealogy and mythic time, as well as complicating ideas of the “primitive” and its opposite, what Claude Lévi-Strauss termed “the savage mind” and its ability to engage in imaginative scientific inquiry and intellectual thought. 70 Elements of the Bear Festival and Tawada’s metatextual critique of the relationship of the intellectual to the natural world continue into the final chapter of Tawada’s novel, a chapter that centers on Knut and his coming of age in the human realm. Knut’s story is his coming of age, just as it is his in memoriam. In the final chapter of Etüden im Schnee, “Im Andenken an dem Nordpol” (In Remembrance of the North Pole), Knut’s development from cub to adult is recounted as third-person narration until the bear is able to refer to himself in the first-person. Unlike his female ancestors, Knut is not a trained bear and “war kunstlos” (was artless). 71 His performance is improvised; it is as Hagenbeck would have said, “the real thing.” Whether or not he is a writing bear remains unanswered, although we learn that he reads articles about himself. A computer stands in his room, “The device had stood there from the beginning like a family altar,” but in time Knut can no longer remember how to turn it on. 72 He has no direct memories of his family; his only access to the past is mediated through boxes. Knut’s first habitat is a wooden box: “Soon he understood that he wasn’t surrounded by walls, but rather lay in a box.” 73 The box is an arc in which lie Knut’s future self—“Suddenly a sagging stuffed animal sat next to him” —and his past, his genealogy. 74 A family portrait hangs inside the box; “A strange animal or two animals on a piece of paper.” 75 Knut destroys this photographic trace of his parents, Toska and Lars, in favor of his human caretaker Matthias. Knut obliviates the stored record of his genealogy and family past, later outright disavowing his heritage: “My ancestors all come form the GDR, not the North Pole!” 76 Knut conflates his own identity with those of his human caretakers. The bear god is human, even as the stored images in his box of memories reveal a different past. The idea of the memory box is introduced in Assmann’s work in order to “capture different epochs in the history of western cultural memory.” 77 For Assmann, the final stage is the so-called “cruel box,” a reference to E. M. Forster’s short story “Ansell.” 78 Forster’s box is a heavyladen box of books brought to the countryside so that his narrator can continue work on a dissertation. 79 The box falls into a gorge, its contents

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transforming “into Nature—they become water lilies, meteors, or roosting birds.” 80 Indeed, Forster’s box opens “like a water-lily” and the books “plunged like meteors through the trees” and “the smaller ones roosted coyly . . . on the branches.” 81 “Forster,” Assmann writes, “conjures up a therapy of forgetfulness for an over-conscious, over-intellectual age,” by emptying Ansell’s cruel box into the river. 82 In Knut’s cruel box, family photos hang, replaced in time with books by Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, and Yukio Mishima. Together with the reference to Forster, Assmann introduces the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs and his work to emphasize “the circular effect of memories stabilizing groups, just as groups stabilize memories.” 83 This collective memory is marked by reciprocity and, as Assmann quotes him, “requires the support of a group delimited in space and time.” 84 Knut’s “cruel box” takes various shapes over the course of the chapter; the wooden box, a television, a box of books, the computer. It also arrives in the form of a new caretaker named Maurice, who appears in the time of Knut’s adolescent, “halbgewachsen” (half grown), and emerging sexuality. Tawada’s composite figure Maurice can be read as referencing both sociologist Maurice Halbwachs of Assmann’s text and the eponymous Maurice of E.M. Forster’s novel of same-sex sexual awakening and opens the box to books of same-sex relationships for Knut: “Maurice offered Oscar Wilde, Jean Genet, and Yukio Mishima.” 85 Knut seeks group affinity first through his “männliche Mutter” Mathias and later Maurice, who offers him an intellectual entry point into narratives on same-sex desire. Soon thereafter, Knut becomes aware of the animals around him. Knut’s “nature” is no therapy of forgetting for the intellectual as it is in Forster’s “Ansell.” Instead nature itself is intellectualized: “Knut once had the pleasure of hearing a lecture series by Dr. Owl about darkness.” 86 A monkey “taught Knut the cruelty of social animals” and the bear realizes, “He didn’t understand the animal world.” 87 Knut is increasingly isolated from both the animal and human worlds, a result of an attack on his caretaker and Knut’s coming of age. Cut off from the men he loves, Knut begins showing symptoms of the congenital encephalitis that will kill him. As his symptoms intensify, Knut receives the oral history of his past through ghostly visits from his writing grandmother and enters into nightly dialogues about the present and future with an apparition of “the king of pop,” Michael Jackson. The computer in his room, a contemporary memory box that serves as “Familienaltar” and site of distributed cognition, brings the dead child star and the dying polar bear together in a final conversation that presages the bear’s return to his mother, Toska.

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CONCLUSION While the Natural History Museum in Berlin preserves the memory of Knut’s living body through the realistic art of taxidermy, Tawada’s novel Etüden im Schnee re-constructs memories in migration that map on to Aleida Assmann’s Cultural Memory and Western Civilization and uncovers embedded historical, cultural phenomena like Hagenbeck’s animal and people exhibits, the legacy of which Germany grapples with today. The novel also very clearly opens itself to critical approaches in animal studies and ecocriticism, analyses that are beyond the scope of this essay. Instead I have sought to illuminate the ways in which Tawada’s novel calls into question the formation and cultivation of cultural memory in migration. Through its embedded references to Ainu cosmogony and its mediations between the human and divine worlds, each bear’s narrative becomes emblematic of alternate histories of interaction between the human and the animal, the “civilized” and the “primitive.” If we return now to the image of Knut in the museum’s glass vitrine, we can see that through Etüden im Schnee Tawada asks us to question what histories are made visible, what histories are valued, and to what end. NOTES 1. Reported in the New York Times Magazine with a wonderful picture of Yoko Tawada seated next to the vitrine for her reading. See: Rivka Galchen “The Profound Empathy of Yoko Tawada,” New York Times Magazine, October 2016. 2. Aleida Assmann, Cultural Memory and Western Civilization. Arts of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6. 3. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 101. 4. Although the Natural History Museum in Berlin is part of an independent research foundation, the Leibniz-Institution für Evolutions- und Biodiversität, the museum’s Board of Trustees includes membership who represent both local and federal government offices. See Board of Trustees list at https://www.museumfuernaturkunde.berlin/de/about. 5. At the time of this writing, the research initiative Hamburgs (post-) koloniales Erbe / Hamburg und die frühe Globalisierung at the University of Hamburg, through its recent project “Kolonialisum und Museum,” had developed a virtual exhibition and downloadable app to make visible the colonial history of the Hamburger Völkermuseum to its visitors. Other projects, like the Humboldt Forum appeared less willing to engage with the ethics of the past and chose the oblivion of history over transparency. 6. Ruth Lister, Citizenship. Feminist Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 52. 7. Yoko Tawada, “Erzähler ohne Seelen,” in Talisman (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 1996), 50. 8. Many scholars have cited Tawada’s concept of a fictive ethnology, stemming from her essay “Erzähler ohne Seelen” in Talisman. Sabine Fischer, for example, applies Tawada’s “Japanese glasses” quite literally as a viewpoint from outside of German society, whereas Claudia Breger suggests a more nuanced understanding of fictive ethnology as a form of productive subversion through mimicry and parody. Linda Koiran is one of the first scholars to look directly to Tawada’s own analyses of

Transmigration and Cultural Memory in Yoko Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee 227 European literature that are informed by ethnologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss and Bronisław Malinowski. 9. See for example Karin van Dijk’s “Arriving in Eurasia: Yoko Tawada Re-Writing Europe,” in Re-Thinking Europe: Literature and (Trans)National Identity, edited by Nele Bemong, Mirjam Truwant and Pieter Vermeulen (New York: Rodopi, 2008), 162–175. 10. Lister cites R. Simpson’s more focused definition of a “Fortress Europe” that is in fact better understood as a “‘fortress Western Europe, defending its own economy, putting up the shutters to “outsiders” and maintaining surveillance of the “outsiders” within’” (cf. Lister, 47). 11. Lister, Citizenship, 44. 12. Lister, Citizenship, 44. 13. Lister, Citizenship, 47. 14. Lister, Citizenship, 47. 15. Yoko Tawada, Etüden im Schnee (Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2014), 109. All translations are my own. 16. Tawada, Etüden, 109. 17. I have relied on Polar bears: A Complete Guide to Their Biology and Behavior for more specific information regarding polar bear habitats and their range. 18. So-called “People Shows” or “Anthropological exhibits” were by no means limited in practice to Germany. The World’s Fair in St. Louis also featured such forms of “entertainment” under the guise of learning. See Susan Brownell, ed. The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race and American Imperialism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). 19. After Hagenbeck’s shows, the exhibitions lived on. Some of Hagenbeck’s “donated” pieces are still found in the Hamburger Völkerkundemuseum today. Interestingly, in her 1996 literary essay “Erzähler ohne Seele” in which she reflects on the shamanic practices of the Tuva, another semi-nomadic, circumpolar people related to the Sami and Inuit, Tawada names the Völkerkundemuseum and references the lifelike costumed dolls exhibited in glass vitrines. See the museum’s virtual exhibit Colonial Background: The Museum of Ethnology Hamburg at https://www.google.com/ culturalinstitute/beta/exhibit/3gLSWkBQpqlsLw?h%20=de. Accessed January 21, 2019. 20. Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 82–83. 21. Rothfels, Savages, 89. 22. Rothfels, Savages, 127. 23. Rothfels, Savages, 137. 24. Rothfels, Savages, 141. 25. Rothfels, Savages, 141. 26. See Franz Kafka, “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie” in Franz Kafka. Die Erzählungen, ed. Klaus Wagenbach (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1961), 154–164. 27. Kafka, “Ein Bericht,” 158. 28. Kafka, “Ein Bericht,” 157. 29. Tawada, Etüden, 65. 30. Tawada, Etüden, 66. 31. Tawada, Etüden, 66. 32. Rothfels, Savages, 111. 33. Miho Matsunaga published on the Japanese text titled Yuki no renshūsei prior to the publication of the German-language Etüden im Schnee. The “partner text,” a concept Miho Matsunaga defines as a separate iteration of a Tawada text written by the author in a language other from its partner, is not a direct translation of an original text (cf. Matsunaga, 2014 and Matsunaga, 2002). 34. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 130. 35. Tawada, Etüden, 20.

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36. See, e.g., Tawada’s theater piece Kafka kaikoku, in which the author stages a dialogue between Kafka and Japanese writer Izumi Kyōka with the literary figures of Kafka’s Metamorphosis and “The Country Doctor.” 37. Tawada, Etüden, 40. 38. Tawada, Etüden, 51. 39. Tawada, Etüden, 51. 40. Tawada, Etüden, 51. 41. Tawada, Etüden, 51. 42. Lister, Citizenship, 51. 43. Tawada, Etüden, 51. 44. Tawada, Etüden, 51. 45. Lister, Citizenship, 51. 46. Tawada, Etüden, 53. 47. Tawada, Etüden, 47–48. 48. Tawada, Etüden, 50. 49. Tawada, Etüden, 73. 50. Tawada, Etüden, 73. 51. Tawada, Etüden, 33. 52. Tawada, Etüden, 42. 53. Tawada, Etüden, 59. 54. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 79. 55. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 84. 56. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 84. 57. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 90. 58. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 83. 59. Tawada, Etüden, 106. 60. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 333–343. 61. There is much work that can and should be done surrounding same-sex desire both here in Etüden im Schnee and in other works by Tawada that are simply beyond the scope of this particular analysis. Same-sex desire figures prominently in this novel, between Toska and her trainer Barbara, and later among Knut, his “männliche Mutter” Mattias, his later caretaker Maurice and even, perhaps, Michael Jackson. 62. Tawada, Etüden, 137. 63. Tawada, Etüden, 138. 64. Tawada, Etüden, 196. Transmigration also allows Barbara to share her past with Toska, a past that Miho Matsunaga informs us in her essay “Ein Eisbär, der Zeitung ließt” is an allusion to the well-known GDR animal trainer Ursula Böttcher, who died in 2010 (cf. Matsunaga, 58). 65. Takako Yamada, The World View of the Ainu: Nature and Cosmos Reading from Language (London: Kegan Paul Ltd., 2001), 74–75. 66. Yamada, World View, 58. 67. Tawada, Etüden, 123. 68. Yamada, World View, 81. 69. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. 3rd. ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 16. 70. Lévi-Strauss, Myth, 15. 71. Tawada, Etüden, 242. 72. Tawada, Etüden, 298. 73. Tawada, Etüden, 210. 74. Tawada, Etüden, 210. 75. Tawada, Etüden, 210. 76. Tawada, Etüden, 275. 77. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 117. 78. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 114–118. 79. Forster, E. M. “Ansell,” in The Life to Come and other stories, (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), 1–9.

Transmigration and Cultural Memory in Yoko Tawada’s Etüden im Schnee 229 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

Assmann, Cultural Memory, 166. Forster, “Ansell,” 6. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 117. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 121. Assmann, Cultural Memory, 121. Tawada, Etüden, 226. Tawada, Etüden, 227. Tawada, Etüden, 227.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Assmann, Aleida. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization: Arts of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Breger, Claudia. “Mimikry als Grenzverwirrung. Parodistische Posen bei Yoko Tawada.” In Über Grenzen. Limitation and Transgression in Literatur und Ästhetik, edited by Claudia Benthien and Irmela Marei Krügler-Führhoff, 176–206. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag, 1999. Derocher, Andrew E. and Wayne Lynch. Polar Bears: A Complete Guide to Their Biology and Behavior. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Fischer, Sabine. “Durch die japanische Brille gesehen: die fiktive Ethnologie der Yoko Tawada.” Gegenwartsliteratur. Ein germanistisches Jahrbuch. 2 (2003): 59–81. Forster, E. M. “Ansell.” The Life to Come and Other Stories. London: Edward Arnold, 1972. 1–9. ———. Maurice. London: Andre Deutsch. 1999. Galchen, Rivka. “The Profound Empathy of Yoko Tawada.” New York Times Magazine. October 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/30/magazine/yokotawada.html. Kafka, Franz. “Ein Bericht für eine Akademie.” Die Erzählungen. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1961. 154–164. Koiran, Linda. “‘Ethnologische Poetologie’ und ‘Puppenschrift’: Yoko Tawadas deutsch französische ‘Liasons’ in Spielzeug und Sprachmagie.’” In Eine Welt der Zeichen. Yoko Tawadas Frankreich als Dritter Raum, edited by Bernard Banoun and Christine Ivanovic, 197–205. Munich: Iudicium, 2015. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. 3rd ed. New York: Schocken Books, 2005. ———. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. Matsunaga, Miho. “Ein Eisbär, der Zeitungen ließt. Yoko Tawadas neuester Roman Schneepraktikanten (Yuki no renshusei).” In Die Lücke im Sinn. Vergleichende Studien zu Yoko Tawada, edited by Barbara Agnese, Christine Ivanovic, Sandra Vlasta, 55–62. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2014. ———. “‘Schreiben als Übersetzung.’ Die Dimension der Übersetzung in den Werken von Yoko Tawada.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik. 12, no. 3 (2002): 532–546. Monro, Neil Gordon. Ainu Creed and Cult, edited by B. Z. Seligman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Museum of Ethnology Hamburg. “Colonial Background: The Museum of Ethnology Hamburg.” Accessed January 21, 2019. https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/ beta/exhibit/3gLSWkBQpqlsLw?h%20=de. Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts. The Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008. Seligman, B. Z. “Appendix II: The Bear Ceremony.” In Ainu Creed and Cult, edited by B.Z. Seligman, 169–171. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Tawada, Yoko. “‘Eigentlich darf man es niemandem sagen, aber Europa gibt es nicht.” In Talisman. 45-51. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 1996. ———. Etüden im Schnee. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2014.

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———. Kafka Kaikoku. In Mein kleiner Zeh war ein Wort. Theaterstücke. 271–284. Tübingen: Konkursbuch Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2013. Van Dijk, Karin. “Arriving in Eurasia: Yoko Tawada Re-Writing Europe.” In Re-Thinking Europe: Literature and (Trans)National Identity, edited by Nele Bemong, Mirjam Truwant, and Pieter Vermeulen. 162–175. New York: Rodopi, 2008. Yamada, Takako. The World View of the Ainu: Nature and Cosmos Reading from Language. London: Kegan Paul, 2001.

FIFTEEN Staging of Self, Performance of Life Formation of a Subject in Yuki no renshūsei Tomoko Takeuchi Slutsky

Tawada Yōko’s works have a tendency to subvert and transgress normative values, and to challenge and blur supposedly existing boundaries. The 2011 novel Yuki no renshūsei, is no exception. Standing out among the many boundaries the novel plays with, and pushes against, are those between self and other(s), between species, and between literary genres. This essay examines how these boundaries are challenged; it does so through the lens of the formation of a subject, conceived as performance in the novel. The essay focuses on the figure of the anonymous female polar bear in the first section of the novel, whose life story of fame—first as a circus performer and then as a bestselling author of her autobiography—is narrated in the first “person.” The bear sees herself first as a performer, a circus actor on stage, and then later as an autobiographer. This essay explores how both circus acts and autobiographical writing can be seen equally as performances that constitute the formation of a subject and the staging of a self. Key to these performances—circus acts and autobiographical writing—is the notion of mimesis. For example, the polar bear’s circus performances mostly consist of mimicry of human behaviors, such as standing on two feet or riding a tricycle. Writing her autobiography could be said to re-present, or an attempt to imitate the polar bear’s lived experiences in narrating and writing. That is not to say that the text of Yuki no renshūsei reduces autobiography to a mere copy of a lived life, or even supports such a simple dichotomy between “original” and “copy.” On 231

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the contrary, the text tends to subvert and obfuscate such definite dualism. The relationship between original and copy, reality and fiction, are vexed, inverted, muddled, and complicated; this makes the novel exciting to read. Thus, starting with a discussion of mimesis, this essay will then ponder how mimesis applies to the polar bear’s performance, first, at the circus and second, in the case of writing her autobiography. Then, as I see both performances as a formation of subject or staging of self, I read the novel in dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of “subjection,” i.e., on the formation of a subject, which is conceived as a series of performances. After these three stages of analysis, I conclude that Yuki no renshūsei offers a view that life itself may be a grand performance, consisting of repetition of mimetic acts, a stage where one constantly presents oneself. MIMESIS AS PERFORMANCE—AESTHETIC OR POLITICAL? Mimesis, according to Aristotle, is a characteristically human trait that distinguishes us from other species: “The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living creatures.” 1 Aristotle closely relates mimesis to the theater and acting. Ever since, mimesis has been almost singularly conceived as an aesthetic issue in Western philosophy, until Darwin came to claim in The Origins of Species (1859) that mimesis can be observed in the world of nature, that plants and animals practice mimicry in the interest of protective adaptation to ensure the survival of their species. That is to say, Darwin showed life itself to be mimetic under certain conditions: Insects often resemble for the sake of protection various objects, such as green or decayed leaves, dead twigs, bits of lichen, flowers, spines, excrement of birds, and living insects; but to this latter point I shall hereafter recur. The resemblance is often wonderfully close, and is not confined to colour, but extends to form, and even to the manner in which the insects hold themselves. The caterpillar which project motionless like dead twigs from the bushes on which they feed, offer an excellent instance of a resemblance of this kind. 2

In the context of a novel about polar bears, I quote literary critic Margot Norris, who gives an example of a polar bear in her discussion of how Nietzsche incorporated Darwinian survival instinct in formulating his “will to power”: In adapting to arctic conditions, the bear no longer simply appropriates his enemies in a fight, but practices a form of strategic surrender of its power that resembles a kind of deception. Instead of risking its life in battle, it survives by eluding its enemy, by appearing to be invisible, by

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masking itself as snow when its fur turns white. Its adaptation is organic cunning. 3

Suggesting mimesis as an evolutionary strategy, an act of survival, Darwin not only challenged the Aristotle’s aesthetic notion of mimesis, but also expanded it by attributing it to non-human beings. Whether it belongs to the domain of aesthetics and pleasure, or the domain of biological politics and survival, mimesis is an act, an enactment, and therefore a performance. Even in the Aristotelian model of mimesis, especially as he specifically explicates it in the context of theatrical production, it can be an imitation of a certain character, a production of a fictional figure, or an embodied copy. At the same time, mimesis can refer to the activity of an agent (the actor) that puts oneself into an action, modeling oneself according to a given prototype. In sum, the point I am making here is that for Aristotle and Darwin mimesis is performative. This is relevant because in Yuki no renshūsei also presents mimesis as a performance, both aesthetically and politically. 4 In Tawada’s novel mimesis is, on the one hand, depicted as a means for survival. For example, “I”, in the first section of the novel, learned to stand up on two feet as a baby—not because she was mimicking a bipedal human, but because the floor was so hot that she had no choice but to minimize her bodily contact with the scorching surface. It was not a will to act or imitate, it was an act of survival. Yet it eventually became an act for the stage, the spectacle of a bear acting like a human. The novel thus complicates the notion of mimesis without compromising either the Aristotlean or the Darwinian conceptions. Rather, mimesis as art and mimesis as survival are intricately interwoven in the novel and leads to a reflection that perhaps life itself is a succession of mimetic repetitions (as figured in the renshū of the title, which means to practice) and performances, and among them, the biggest act of all is the performance of staging oneself. This idea is reflected by the protagonist bear referring to herself as a stage: “The stage that is I.” 5 Or, we could think about another polar bear: Knut, later in the third section, who was born and raised in the Berlin Zoo. Knut is seen to be “artless” from the viewpoint of his grandmother who was a star of the circus and a renowned author. Yet ironically, every movement, gesture, and action of Knut becomes an act—an exhibition—for the audience in the zoo, where his life is turned into a spectacle. Life becomes performance here—living and acting overlap each other—and the distinction between life and art no longer seems tenable. Here, “acting” reveals its doubled face: acting as in doing something and acting as in playing/ performing a role. Knut’s every action (as in doing something) becomes an act or a performance for an audience. I earlier introduced a passage describing how the whiteness of a polar bear’s fur is mimetic, required for survival by imitating the environment of the Arctic snow. I would like now to look at another passage to illus-

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trate mimesis as both aesthetic and bio-political. In the description of the white fur of the protagonist: Donning the all white fur of the highest quality, my body looked extraordinarily imposing. Simply by raising a hand as I thrust my chest, sensuous aromas arose, scattered like powders of light, they occupy the surrounding area. Not only the living things but also the inanimate objects—desks and walls—immediately faded and withdrew in the background. The satiny white of this fur, unlike the ordinary white, is a translucent white that lets through the sunlight. The heat energy of the sun reaches the skin through this whiteness and is preserved preciously beneath the skin. This is the whiteness that was won by my ancestors, who survived in the Arctic. 6

The white fur that used to render her ancestors “invisible” and protected in the surrounding environment, now, in contrast, exposes her against her environment, making the surrounding others (“tables, walls and even the people in the audience”) invisible. The white of her fur stands out as a sublime beauty, a pleasure to gaze at. Thus, her fur is presented both as a natural mutation and also an aesthetic property. Yet here, the beauty of her white fur is not supplementary but vital to her livelihood because it ensures her survival in human society. Among many references to literary representations of animals in the novel, reference to Kafka’s A Report to an Academy (1917) is especially à propos regarding mimesis as both performance and strategy for survival. Kafka exposes the devious political ends of imitation, reenactment, and performance in his novella. A Report to an Academy links animal mimicry and theatrical performance as evolutionary strategies in the struggle for survival, which reaffirms that “evolution” does not necessarily mean “progress,” but rather, a survival of the fittest. Thus, mimesis is not a simple imitation but also a performance; further, it pertains to both aesthetics and survival, to art and to life. The polar bear’s circus act of bipedalism and her white fur are adaptations both to ensure her survival and also “bear” an aesthetic nature. From the circus stage to the stage of self, I will now move to another (mimetic) performance of the polar bear: writing an autobiography. Through the process of the polar bear’s writing her autobiography, the novel raises the problematic issues surrounding autobiography: issues such as memory, temporality, fiction and reality, and the location and identity(ies) of authorship. These issues of autobiography are intimately tied to how the formation of self is conceived in the novel. AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS SELF-STAGING Autobiography is generally considered to be non-fiction and written by a “real” person who is also a narrator and a protagonist of the text. Phi-

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lippe Lejeune claims that this triple identification of author-narrator-protagonist seals what he calls the “autobiographical pact,” 7 and categorizes the genre of autobiography as an institutionalized communicative act where author and reader are engaged in this particular “contract.” Yuki no renshūsei challenges and dismantles Lejeune’s formula and two other common assumptions about autobiography—that it is non-fiction and it replicates the lived experience. First, the novel complicates the issue of authorship in autobiography, thus challenging the triple identification of the writer-narrator-protagonist. It is significant that the protagonist polar bear, who becomes an autobiographical author, remains anonymous to the novel’s readers. With this absence of the author’s name that should be identical with the narrator and the protagonist, the novel seems to jolt “autobiographical pact” of Lejeune, according to whom, “the author of the autobiography cannot be anonymous.” Likewise in the story, the authorship of the protagonist polar bear’s autobiography is put in question. Her autobiographical story is published without her consent or knowledge, with the title unknown to her, and with the promise that it is going to be serialized; a decision also unknown to her. The polar bear feels the whole business of entitling, serializing, and publishing her story, “without obtaining the permission of the author” was managed “high-handedly.” 8 This publication of the polar bear’s manuscript betrays the assumption that autobiography is an account by an author/narrator/protagonist, directly presented to its readers. Opposing this idea of immediacy, the novel depicts many stages of mediating processes. Usually, once manuscripts leave the hands of the writer and are put into circulation in the publishing market, the texts will be edited, printed, designed (lay out) until it is published. In this process, how many of the decisions—material or immaterial—belong to the supposed “author” (whose name will be printed on the cover)? The end product, by the time it reaches the public, has gone through many hands (the writer, the editor, the designer, the printer, the distributer and the reader), so to whom does the text belong? By raising all these questions, Tawada’s novel puts Lejeune’s triple identification in question. The impossibility of reducing authorship to a single locus is even more vividly exemplified in the second section of the novel, in which the story of Tosca, the daughter of the female polar bear from the first section, and her human handler in the circus, Ursula, is recounted. The narrative is told from Ursula’s point of view: it is continuously carried out with an “I.” Toward the end of the section, however, it is revealed that Tosca took up the writing at some point qua Ursula. The narrator “I” had been switched from a human handler Ursula to a female polar bear Tosca, who had been “ghostwriting” for her human handler for some time. Adding to this narrative overlap, there is a doubling of “Tosca,” for we soon find that there was a predecessor bear also named Tosca, another Tosca previous to the one ghostwriting for Ursula. Yet in Ursula’s

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mind, for some time, these two bears were indistinguishable in her recollection or writing. Thus the identities of the narrators, protagonists, and other characters become quite messy and murky in this section. This can foster various issues such as the interchangeability of the pronouns (“I” in this case serves as a place holder in which different tenants can occupy), identities, and species. While acknowledging these possibilities but without pursuing them, I would like to emphasize the fact that the stories in Yuki no renshūsei refuse to enter “the autobiographical pact” while presenting, nonetheless, autobiographies. It is as if the novel is proposing an alternate model of autobiography, by way of fragmentation and incongruity, while deconstructing the traditional view of autobiography as a genre marked by a linear continuity of a person’s life and static identity through time. If the novel disabused an assumption about autobiographical authorship by demonstrating how ambiguous its authorship can be, it challenges another common assumption that autobiography is non-fiction. Contrary to the view that an autobiography is a veritable record of one’s life, the novel presents the counterview that an autobiography cannot escape from becoming a fiction, due to the function and nature of memory itself. The polar bear muses, for example: My memories come back and forth, like waves at the beach. The coming wave looks almost identical to the previous one. Yet looking closer, they differ slightly. Remaining unaware of which wave was the real one, I cannot do anything but writing the same thing repeatedly. 9

That is to say, each time she recalls a certain past, the memory of it is different from the previous recollection, however slightly. Because the subject recollecting keeps shifting with time, its memory, too, keeps shifting. “I” from a moment ago is no longer an “I” in the present, wherever that is, just like the “I” in the past is no longer the “I” who is writing an autobiography. Facing this fact that memory shifts depending on the time of recollection, the polar bear comes to a quasi conclusion that “writing an autobiography may amount to fabricating what one cannot remember by filling it with speculation.” 10 On top of this, the fact that the subject “I” keeps shifting from moment to moment, a static, coherent representation of self belies the true state of self, one that is subject to a constant change. In this sense, the autobiographical “I” may be said to reflect the precarious intersections and balances of what Paul Ricœr calls “idem” and “ipse.” 11 In the discussion of personal identity, Ricœr refers to “idem” identity as the identity of something that is always the same which never changes, rooted in the “permanence in time.” 12 Ipse identity, on the other hand, is selfhood across and through change. Or rather, it may be said that “idem” identity pertains to spatio-temporal sameness and “ipse” as selfhood as agency. Ricœr points out that self-identity involves both dimensions of idem and ipse; one is and is not the person one

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was ten years ago. For example, the “I” who is narrating can be conceived in terms of ipse, self as agent. “I” who is being narrated, on the other hand, is a construct of idem identity that does not seem to change through time. Thus, writing an autobiography is inventing an “I” that is fictive and imaginative, for a static, coherent “I” or “what I was in the past” is an illusion. From this point of view, writing an autobiography is a staging of “I” on the “stage that is (called) I,” 13 as the bear refers to herself. Lastly, the novel counters the assumption about autobiography that it replicates, thus imitates, the lived experience. Rather than mimetic, the novel conceives autobiographical writing as poietic, and performative act. In the process of writing her autobiography and becoming an author, the polar bear often compares the act of writing an autobiography to the circus act she used to perform. For example, she ponders that “becoming a writer” may be a more dangerous “act” when compared to the act of balancing on a ball: “I have experience being on various objects such as a ball, a tricycle and a motorcycle. But publishing a book—it’s a trick that is far more dangerous than those, isn’t it?” 14 Thus, her circus tricks and publishing a book or becoming an author are comparable, in my opinion, as a way to stage oneself. Staging herself by writing an autobiography can be “more dangerous” perhaps because the “subject” that one is trying to stage cannot be exactly identified with the “subject” performing the staging. Or, becoming an author is dangerous because an “author” is an abstract “construct” by multiple agents, yet has the appearance of being part of reality. When one is performing in the circus, the dangers involve hurting oneself, making an error, embarrassment and/or punishment as a consequence. In any case, something more serious is at stake when one becomes an author. Earlier, it was noted that writing evokes the polar bear’s memory, and later, it is observed that the constant “I” is created by self-narration in an autobiography. Thus, writing an autobiography is staging an “I,” a performing in narrative. This idea that writing is evocative or even generative is pushed further when the polar bear muses later: “The act of writing is similar to hibernating; you may look sleepy in the eyes of others, but actually you are giving birth and nurturing memory in the cave.” 15 In the process of writing, thus, memory is not only recalled and nurtured, but is generated and created. This effect of writing manifests in the novel, for example, after the polar bear wrote about Yvan, her human handler from her childhood, she muses; “having written about him, Yvan, who was supposed to have been dead inside myself, came to be alive.” 16 It is of course a figure of speech that he “came to be alive,” that the memory of the man was excavated deep from her childhood, and the memory became so vivid as if he was standing right next to herself writing at present. On another occasion, the polar bear muses on the fact that she has become a published author: “To be precise, it is not that I became a

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writer, but rather, the written sentences have made me one.” 17 This idea attests again to the productive effect of writing. Writing, thus, comes to bear an active force like conjuring up her memories and turning her into a writer—like a magical power. Magical it may be, this generative and evocative force of writing can have a reverse effect. The more her “selfhood” depends on writing, the more anxious she becomes about her ontological status: “What happened in the past is secure, for I have written some of it in my autobiography, but I have no idea what is going to happen from now on. . . . I am disappearing. Death means that everything ceases to exist. . . . I was horrified by the idea that the unwritten parts of my life remain unwritten and die out.” 18 What she has written in her autobiography gains a material existence in the forms of graphs and becomes traceable, and will probably survive her mortality. Yet the parts that are not written will be forgotten, disappear and become untraceable as her mortality expires. This anxiety troubles the bear, with the feeling that “I am disappearing,” without being written. This ontological anxiety turns into the desire to write about her future, rather than the past in her autobiography. What exactly does it mean to write one’s autobiographical future? The usual practice of writing an autobiography consists of narrating the past incidents in retrospect, that is, in recollection. Yet because of the nature of memory, the position such as “the one who I was” would be imaginary. Writing one’s future as part of autobiography also requires an anticipatory imagination of “what I will be.” Thus, seemingly opposite, this writing about one’s life, whether in retrograde or in anticipation, past or future, constitutes the same poetic, creative, activity: autobiography is fiction and art (as opposed to life). In the novel, autobiographical writing of the polar bear’s future functions as a quasi prophesy for the following parts of the novel tell the stories of her off-spring as foretold in the future from the narrative present in her autobiography. The scenario that the imaginary future written in an autobiography comes to be true, seems to correspond to the idea that “life imitates art,” 19 to borrow Oscar Wilde’s expression, the fictive produces the real. In fact, the polar bear, at some point in the novel, is said to have a “wild spirit,” 20 yet the adjective “wairudo” is written in Japanese katakana, it could be interpreted that the polar bear is said to have “the spirit of Wilde,” which seems to be à propos in light of the above discussion. The issues surrounding autobiography, such as the fallibility of memory, or the gap between the past self and the present one, even troubled St. Augustine as far back as the fourth century, whose Confessions is considered to be the first autobiography in the West. Ever since, many writers and thinkers have tackled, theorized, and pondered these issues— making the genealogy of discourse on autobiography quite long. Yet one aspect that distinguishes the idea of an autobiography, in this novel, from the usual discourse, is that the polar bear starts writing her future life in

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her autobiography. Such an idea/act can be possible because the novel suggests that writing an autobiography concerns the ontological issue of self; a performance to produce oneself. In this sense, when the polar bear states, “It seems that autobiography is something that everybody writes,” can be interpreted that “everyone has to write about oneself in order to exist,” or “whatever one writes is a form of autobiography.” To summarize, the novel subverts the traditional discourse of autobiography by suggesting that an “author” of autobiography is ambiguous and multiple, that autobiography is a fiction, and that autobiography is also a performance. These three points are vital as they pertain to the notion of selfhood, which the novel conceives as ambiguous and multiple, a fictive construct, and a performance. Given that self is thus conceived in Yuki no renshūsei, how such a self comes to be formed will be examined next, in dialogue with Judith Butler’s theory of “subjectivation.” SUBJECT FORMATION AS PERFORMANCE I have observed that writing an autobiography was seen as staging oneself as a continuous and coherent entity, and could be compared to a performance. Inquiry into the formation of a subject can reveal yet another performative aspect. Judith Butler’s theory on subject formation conceives the subject as a continuous process of becoming. For Butler, to become a subject, one constantly and repeatedly has to practice oneself and form oneself. She terms this performative notion of the subject formation as “subjectivation”—corresponding to the French “assujetissement”: which, “signifies the process of becoming subordinated by power as well as the process of becoming a subject . . . the subject is initiated through a primary submission to power.” 21 Butler defines “power” in this context as “a set of conditions that precedes the subject, effecting and subordinating the subject from the outside.” 22 By this Butler means that a subject is constantly emerging while being subjected to an external power. Yet this formulation poses a problem—for if power is a condition for a subject to emerge, it assumes a subject prior to its existence for the power to subordinate. Without going into details about this problem, here, it will suffice to vaguely understand “power” as some normalizing code or force in the social arena (language, laws, or of course, gender—for example). The emergence of a subject is thus characterized paradoxically with both the attachment to, and defiance against the power. Such theorization of Butler mirrors the conception of self in the novel. An early scene in Yuki no renshūsei, for example, demonstrates a mechanism of Butler’s “subjectivation.” It is the scene where the process of how the female polar, still a baby bear, came to stand up on two hind legs is depicted:

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The rope fettering her hind legs, and the burning aches she felt in contact with the floor, would be the powers subordinating the bear from the outside. She resists, yet finds she is fettered; remaining attached to the rope(s), she now tries to avoid pain and repeats several movements and eventually, stands up on her hind legs. This is the moment of the birth of a performing bear—the polar bear’s identity as a star on the circus stage was formed thus and with the repetition of it. I see this process of the polar bear fettered, her attempt to resist, and eventually standing up as a trope of Butler’s “subjectivation”— the emerging of a subject as a result of submitting to, yet defying, an imposing power. 24 The important point from Butler’s formation of a subject here is that one constantly and repeatedly has to practice oneself. This scene of the baby bear standing up on the ground after the repetition of several attempts is just one of the examples where I see the Butlerian model of the formation of self being manifested. Just like Butler argues with fervor that “repetition . . . is never merely mechanical . . . ” 25 in this performative formation of a subject, in Yuki no renshūsei, “renshū” or constant practice, is one of the central motifs that permeate the entire novel. CONCLUSION Yuki no renshūsei presents the performative aspects of the formation of self, which this essay attempted to examine through the concepts of mimesis, autobiography, and Butler’s theory of subjectivation. As a conclusion, introducing the following passage seems apt, as it exquisitely presents how this extraordinary text conceives the formation of a subject—human or otherwise. The passage comes from the last scene of the novel, where Knut, the grandson of the female polar bear of the first section, looks up at the sky as the snow starts falling: There, a small black shard fluttered in the air. Snow. Another one. Snow. Then another. Snow. Fluttering here, fluttering there. Snow. It is wondrous that a movement of something white momentarily appears

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black. Snow. Falling as it ripples. Snow. A flake. Snow. Another flake. Snow. Cascading one after another. Looking up, snow flakes (surrounding him) flow away one after another, like tree leaves blown by the wind. 26

It is a beautiful passage capturing a scene of snow falling: a flurry appearing, dancing, being swayed here and there—and then disappearing, yet another reappearing—one after another. It is just a little while that each snowflake keeps its form, recognizable as such: “Snow.” It is white, yet looks black at times—malleable and ever changing. This description of the snow corresponds to the idea of the ever fleeting, malleable, and flux state and nature of a subject or self—which is forming and deforming, in a constant “movement.” From this, I interpret that a subject is formed by a repetitive performance of staging and restaging of self, depending on its spatial and temporal environment, based upon a phantasmatic, i.e., imagined model that itself shifts as time passes—in which becoming and unbecoming, anticipating and reemerging—continues in a circle, just like the snow depicted in this last scene of the novel. Quite contrary to the traditional conception of self as something fixed and unchanged in time and place, the ever-fleeting state of a subject is like this continuous falling of snow. The formation of a subject is a series of performances and enactments in an incessant repetition. Yet each repetition is not exactly the same as the previous one, thus, each performance or enactment involves a creative or imaginative aspect. That being said, however, just because it has a creative or imaginative license, the formation of a subject is not free of pre-existing conditions. That is to say, the formation of a subject or the staging of an “I” as seen in autobiography, is not a complete fiction that is completely detached from outside influence. The past, and its repetitions, are a force that provide a framework for development of a subject. In the present, through mimesis and/or performance, we reinforce and re-enact that subject. Yet, the past is a created fiction that is constantly reinterpreted in the present, and our understanding of our current subject changes and informs who we will be in both the present and future. Thus these mimetic performances and practices are also fictions that do not rigidly hold us into a pre-ordained path, but like the snow, constantly evolve and reform and hold the chance for multiple possibilities of futures. NOTES 1. Aristotle, Poetics. ed. Stanley Appelbaum (Mineola: Dover, 1997), 5. 2. Charles Darwin, The Origins of the Species (New York: New American Library, 1958), 205. 3. Margot Norris, “Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, and the Problem of Mimesis” MLN. Vol. 95, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1980), 1235.

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4. Perhaps this is an indication that aesthetics and politics are closely related. 5. Yōko Tawada, Yuki no renshūsei (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2011) 20. All English translations from Japanese texts are mine, unless otherwise noted. 6. Ibid, 12. 7. Philippe Lejeune, Pacte Autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 15. 8. Yōko Tawada, Yuki no renshūsei (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 2011), 37. 9. Ibid, 20. 10. Ibid, 82. 11. Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 12. 12. Ibid. 13. Yōko Tawada, Yuki no renshūsei (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 2011), 20. 14. Ibid, 29. 15. Ibid, 25. 16. Ibid, 21. 17. Ibid, 43. 18. Ibid, 87. 19. “Vivian: ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.’” Oscar Wilde The Decay of Lying (1889) in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 2003), 1071–1092. 20. Yōko Tawada, Yuki no renshūsei (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 2011), 44. 21. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life or Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 3. 22. Ibid, 13. 23. Yōko Tawada, Yuki no Renshūsei (Tokyo: Shinchō-sha, 2011), 10. 24. Perhaps here I should clarify that by “subject,” Butler does not mean an individual person (or a bear). Subject should be understood as a site, or a position: “a linguistic category, a placeholder, a structure in formation” (PL 10) where individuals come to occupy. 25. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life or Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 16. 26. Yōko Tawada, Yuki no renshūsei (Tokyo, Shinchōsha, 2011), 320.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adami, Marina. “Berlin Zoo puts down star bear cub Knut’s aging mother.” Reuteus. June 23, 2015. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-odd-germany-knutidUSKBN0P31DN20150623 Akutagawa, Ryūnosuke. Bungeiteki na, amari ni bungeiteki na. ed. Shunji Chiba. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2017. Aristotle. Poetics. Edited by Stanley Applebaum. Mineola: Dover, 1997. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1997. ———. Bodies that Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993. Brooks, Peter. Enigmas of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Cave, Stephen. “Who Killed Knut?” Aeon, November 13, 2012. https://aeon.co/essays/ the-death-of-a-polar-bear-and-the-paradox-of-captivity. Demallo, Margo, ed. Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing. Routledge: New York, 2013. Eakin, Paul John. Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Herman, David. Narratology Beyond the Human: Storytelling and Animal Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. ———. “Animal Autobiography; Or, Narration beyond the Human.” Humanities 5, 82 (2016). https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/4/82 Kafka, Franz. A Report for an Academy. Middletown: Katrindo, 2018.

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Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Lippit, Seiji M. Topographies of Japanese Modernism. Columbia University Press: New York, 2002. Norris, Margot. Beasts of the Modern Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. ———. “Darwin, Nietzsche, Kafka, and the Problem of Mimesis.” MLN 95, no. 5 (1980): 1232–1253. doi: 10_2307/2906490 Pascal, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960. Ricœur, Paul. Soi-même comme un autre. Paris: Seuil, 1990. Slaymaker, Douglas. ed. Yōko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007. Tawada, Yoko. Yuki No Renshūsei. Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2013. ———. Etüden im Schnee. Tübingen: Konkurbuch, 2014. Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Ed. by Merlin Holland. London: Collins, 2003.

SIXTEEN The Hands of Bears, the Hands of Men Animal Writing in Tawada Yōko’s Yuki no renshūsei Doug Slaymaker

I gave much thought to scrolls and scrolling, and technologies and identities, in preparation for this essay and the conference of which it was a part. 1 I found myself imagining scrolls being unfolded, and words and images flowing across paper and screen: scrolling, unfolding, flowing, movement, and, often, waves, and inundation, and too much information. I was also picturing the differing technologies, and the media, attendant upon it: scrolls and paper, manuscripts, pens and brushes, computer screens and input devices, mouths for voice and sound, and ears for reception. But also, given that the original charge for the conference encouraged us to think about the ways that “individual and cultural identities linked to the materiality of a given language and writing systems,” the flow of associations continued onto a number of writers that I have been engaged with recently. These are writers who talk with and about their hands, who talk about their hands in other’s hands—and not just human hands; they talk about hands that hold writing instruments and pound on keyboards, hands that struggle with text, both getting text onto a media, but that also struggle with the media that has been produced. This because the texts often take on lives of their own. The struggles of those hands are also experiments with trying to capture, or render, or engage, and at times stop, the maddening flow of ideas and thoughts, the flow of issues around identity and nation that are scrolling across the surface of one’s brain. It took me to both the hand on the scroll and the scrolling of the ideas. 245

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The work strongest on my mind when thinking about this was Tawada Yōko’s 2014 novel Yuki no renshūsei, translated by Susan Bernofsky from the German version (and the importance of “version” I will explicate below). I will refer to the Japanese version throughout as The Snow Apprentice, which seems a more direct translation of the Japanese Yuki no renshūsei/雪の練習生 and of the German Etü den im schnee. The novel brings together this concern for technologies of transmission—pens and computers, voice and narration—with a close consideration of the issues of identity associated with the command and deployment of those technologies and voices. Tawada is the author of both the Japanese and German versions of this work; the point of that statement is to underscore that neither is a translation of the other. It is also to say that they may all be translations and that there may not be any originals source texts to point to. The process is referenced within The Snow Apprentice; indeed, the processes of writing and translation are among the central obsessions of the novel, which articulates the idea this way: “The original and its translation began to play a fugue, though as far as I could see, it was more like a game of Cat and Mouse than a sublime musical form.” 2 They form two versions of the same narrative line, fighting in two languages, pushing and pulling like a cat and a mouse. Cat and mouse may be appropriate, rather than quarreling brothers, say, because The Snow Apprentice is a work mostly about animal agency. It fits in the broader range of Tawada’s experiments, not so much by the animal voices, but by the explorations of boundaries and identity. It is among the many stories that bring the boundaries around the “human” into sharp focus. Issues of boundaries and identity have long been the substance of Tawada’s work, but for much of her career it has been in the context of the nation-state, often symbolized by passports and the crossing of national borders. More recently, she has been exploring other borders, particularly in the wake of the triple disasters of Northern Japan; these include the interspecies borders highlighted in this work as well as those of youth and age, male and female, and of trauma, disaster, and health. In the close reading that follows, I want to analyze how the multiple identities, borders, and technologies are articulated and represented in the Japanese version of The Snow Apprentice. In particular, one of the main accomplishments of this work is the way that, in Japanese, when the narrator takes up a pen to write, cleverly involving us readers in the process of memoir writing, there is little to remark upon until we realize that the 手/te/hand holding the pen is a手/te/paw, because the narrator is a polar bear in Germany. The Japanese word for hand of a person and paw of a bear is the same, whereas English and German distinguish human and non-human. The Japanese hand on this paper, in the Japanese version , allows for an exploration that is neither possible nor retained in English (nor in German or French versions, for that matter). This is be-

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cause Japanese does not distinguish between the “paw” of a non-human animal and the “hand” of a human: te covers both. These language possibilities have two practical, and profound, ramifications for readers: 1) one’s assumptions about reading the tale of a human writer are not challenged for some pages until the allusions and the double-entendres fall into place, and 2) not only are sharp divisions in the animal kingdom elided, but, in Japanese at least, so are those of gender. There is no need to specify “he” or “she” to construct many of the sentences. Japanese allows this in ways that don’t feel forced. It is not even missed. It is a nonquestion for many pages. It is only apparent, forced, or required in the languages of translation. Much of the accomplishment of The Snow Apprentice is in the surprise, now well-known and made obvious in the English titling—Memoirs of a Polar Bear: the narrator is a bear. A first-person narrator that is writing their own history and is also a polar bear: this is an important experiment, a profound technical challenge; unfortunately, its importance is lost in the translation. In fairness, this is no longer a surprise for Japanese readers, either, since the surprise has become part of the novel’s discourse, although this fact was much commented on shortly after the work’s release. In the following pages I will attempt to explicate how this is possible and how it is achieved in Japanese. I want to be sure that there is no mistake about my intent; this is not a critique of Susan Bernofsky’s masterful translation. 3 The following comparisons are made in order to elucidate and highlight some of the accomplishments in Tawada’s experiment and to explicate some of the ways in which it is achieved. I am not a reader of German which makes some of this tentative, although I trust that this exercise will render a more complete understanding of Tawada’s skill. It is not exactly apples-andoranges in translation, either: Bernofsky produced a smooth translation designed for publication. My translation choices are in the direction of overly-literal and direct, with some sacrifice to readability. I am particularly interested in the natural-sounding use of passive voice in Japanese, employed here to defer the question of naming the species and gender of the narrator. Thus, for example, when we read in the first line of the English that, “Someone tickled me behind the ears, under my arms,” 4 we have a very straightforward, succinct sentence; the Japanese reads, however, “Behind my ears and under my arms he was tickling me, and it was so ticklish I could hardly stand it.” Perhaps not so different, but it is worth noting that this kind of passive voice and deferral of agency is not at all unusual in Japanese. We know that the tickler is a man, a detail that will become even more interesting as it is given to us at the outset, especially as the gender of many other characters are kept from us; additionally, “he” is to become a mother figure and referred to as such, adding another gender dimension to this. None of this is awkward, nor does it draw attention to itself, in Japanese. But it is an important piece of the

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reading of the novel, and of the reader’s processing of the narrative’s material. My point is that this first sentence does what the rest of the novel will do: defer the species, gender, and very identity of the I/me character; and the Japanese allows for this to be accomplished in ways easy to overlook. As I have noted, this is not insignificant given that the Japanese reader’s assumption is that the narrator is a human being. As the narrative continues, we read in the English translation from the German, “Then I lifted my rump to the sky and slid my head below my belly. . . . Innocent, I opened my anus to the cosmos and felt it in my bowels.” The description of a playful child, perhaps, if a bit precocious, then continues: “Everyone would have laughed if I’d used the word ‘cosmos’ in those days: I was still so small, so lacking in knowledge, so newly in the world. Without my fluffy pelt, I’d have been scarcely more than an embryo.” 5 Now, by way of comparison, this reads in Japanese: “I can imagine being laughed at for this: ‘Such a little pipsqueak, what’s with the coming out with a comparison to the cosmos?’ It’s true, I was in fact nothing other than a little pipsqueak. But even after having grown some hair, even totally naked, I was not so much a slippery little thing as a tufty one.” 6 Among other things, this sentence makes use of the rich mimetic vocabulary of Japanese, where “slippery” of my translation is tsurutsuru and “tufty” is fusafusa. Words, that is, that mimic the feel of something rather than describe or name it. This, to repeat, all while not giving away that the “I” of these sentences is not only unspecified in gender, but is not human, in opposition to what most readers can be expected to assume. It continues on to the next line: “I couldn’t walk very well yet, though my paw-hands had already developed the strength to grasp and hold. Every stumble moved me forward, but could you call that walking?” 7 The Japanese reads, “The power to clench things, the power to grab hold of things, was already quite developed, but as for walking I was not so adept, so rather than walking it was more as though with pliant posture that I happened to move forward.” 8 Bernofsky has solved here a translation problem with “paw-hand,” but this is a problem for English and German, not for Japanese. The word translated as “paw-hand” is also a German neologism, 9 one that gives away a fact of anatomy much earlier than the Japanese version. A reader can be forgiven for thinking, indeed is expected to be thinking, that they are still reading about a newborn baby human. Further, with the use of the passive voice here as well, there is not any need to name the part of the body that can clasp and grab. I have noted that the Japanese does not require a differentiation between “hand,” “paw,” or anything else; in this instance, it does not even need to specify the paw/hand. This level of ambiguity and slipperiness of meaning is not unusual in Tawada’s Japanese, but it is used with especially clever facility in these paragraphs. It is not a trick; it is a profound technical feat.

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A few paragraphs later in the English translation, we read, “One day the man attached strange objects to my feet. I tried to shake them off but couldn’t. My bear paw-hands hurt, it felt as if the floor were stabbing them from below. I raised my right hand and the left but couldn’t keep my balance and fell back down.” 10 In Japanese, it flows something like this: “One day he attached strange objects to my rear feet.”—this of course introduces an oddity, for if this narrator were human, what could “rear” feet refer too?—“I shook my feet vigorously, trying to send those objects flying, but they were securely fastened to my feet and I couldn’t get them off. During this period, since I felt pain in my hands, I abruptly raised my right hand, and then my left, but then fell forward onto my hands again.” 11 The point here, again, is to show how the Japanese is able to preserve the ambiguous identity: there is no need to differentiate between the “hands” of an assumed human narrator and the “paws” of the actual polar bear one. There is an “I” but no gendered pronouns. The scrolling and the action of hands goes down a different path at this point in the narrative, where the reader encounters a break on the page and a shift in tone. The activity of writing becomes highlighted as we read in English: “Writing: a spooky activity. Staring at the sentence I’ve just written makes me dizzy. Where am I at this moment? I’m in my story—gone. To come back, I drag my eyes away from the manuscript and let my gaze drift toward the window until finally I’m here again, in the present. But where is here, when is now?” 12 A literal rendering of the Japanese provides: Given that the act of writing things down is such an uncanny thing, when I look closely at the things I have just written, the inside of my head begins to feel wobbly (guragura shite) and I lose all sense of where I am. I find that in this very moment I have completely entered into the tale that I have begun writing and the “now-and-here” has already disappeared. While raising my eyes and absentmindedly staring out the window, I eventually return to the “now-and-here.” But this “nowand-here”: I wonder where is that anyway? 13

It is at this point that the tale becomes one about the activity of a writer, or writing, a meta-fiction, of scroll and scrolling. The narrative will continue to raise meta-questions about writing. What, for example, counts as the mother-tongue of a polar bear? I have already pointed to how the narrative transitions to writing as a spooky and eerie activity, somehow strange and queer, as indeterminate. “Writing” is “something I am not used to” 14 we read early on; the narrator—a polar bear, I remind you—discovers that, while engaged in the act of writing, the past returns. As she writes (yes, we eventually discover that the writer self-identifies as “she”), her caregiver from childhood, named Ivan, now dead, is standing in the room with her. That is, the past is present; it is called up while writing. “Ivan, dead within me for so

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many years, came back to life because I was writing about him.” 15 Writing can bend time. She needs a drink. She approaches the concierge of her apartment building to ask for vodka and is counseled, wisely enough, that, “Those times when you have things to forget, they are the wrong time to be drinking . . . If there are things to be forgotten, you should keep a diary (nikki).” 16 It turns out that the woman had been reading a Russian translation of the Japanese Sarashina Nikki, known in English as the Sarashina Diary, the eleventh century work of a high-born lady and her travels. There is a genre question hidden in this exchange as well: invoking a “diary” is one thing while speaking of a “nikki” is a much more personal kind of memoir. Obviously, this lineage and this distinction is available to Japanese readers in ways unavailable in other languages. As one reads The Snow Apprentice, in whichever language, not only is the gender and the species identification of the narrator left to conjecture and confusion, so is the genre question of what we are reading and what is being written. In the English translation, the concierge says that, “You must have the courage to write, just like the author of this diary.” The Japanese, in contrast, simply states that, “You should put your mind to it and start writing.” Nonetheless, the genre, and motivation question follows, as the bear askes the concierge: “But diaries (nikki) are for recording the things that happened on that particular day, are they not? That’s not it; it’s the things that I can no longer remember that I want to recall via writing.” To which the concierge responds: “In that case, it’s not a diary, but an autobiography that you should be writing.” 17 That is, these are questions about what are language and writing for, and what is it like. The act of writing will a few pages later be compared to hibernation, since one hides away, alone, with a fuzzy brain, feeling sleepy; likewise, publishing and writing an autobiography will be pronounced to be far more dangerous than circus acrobatics. It’s a dangerous business all the way around, apparently dangerous for all of us in the animal world. NOTES 1. “From Scroll to Scrolling: Shifting Cultures of Language and Identity.” Rohatyn Center. Middlebury College. Middlebury VT. 9-11 March, 2017. 2. Tawada, Yō ko, and Susan Bernofsky. Memoirs of a Polar Bear (New York: New Directions, 2016), 33. 3. Indeed, Memoirs of a Polar Bear garnered the inaugural Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, an honor extended to both the novel and the translator. 4. Tawada, Memoirs, 3. 5. Tawada, Memoirs, 3. 6. Tawada, Yō ko. Yuki no renshū sei (Tō kyō : Shinchō sha, 2011), 8. 7. Tawada, Memoirs, 3. 8. Tawada, Yuki, 7. 9. Confirmed in conversation with Tawada Yōko, 13 November, 2018, Waseda University, Tokyo. 10. Tawada, Memoirs, 4.

The Hands of Bears, the Hands of Men 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

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Tawada, Yuki, 8. Tawada, Memoirs, 4. Tawada, Yuki, 8. Tawada, Yuki, 9. Tawada, Memoirs, 12. Tawada, Yuki, 18. Tawada, Yuki, 18.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Tawada, Yō ko. Etü den im schnee: Roman. Tübingen: Konkursbuch, Verlag Claudia Gehrke, 2014. Tawada, Yō ko, and Susan Bernofsky. Memoirs of a Polar Bear. New York: New Directions, 2016. Tawada, Yō ko. Yuki no renshū sei. Tō kyō : Shinchō sha, 2011.

SEVENTEEN The Fictional-Reality of ActualVirtuality Yōko Tawada’s Kentōshi (The Emissary) Seungyeon Kim

Adults arrogantly talked about whether food tasted good or not, as if a gourmet sensibility put you in a superior class of people, forgetting that everyone was already sunk to the waist in a swamp of problems— how must they look to these children? Poison often had no taste at all, so no matter how finely honed your palate, your taste buds weren’t going to save your life. 1

In the event of a catastrophe that shakes the very foundations of human existence, how can literature respond? This is a grave question that was posed following the events of 3.11. It still continues to be asked these many years later. In order to record this reality, new critical readings of “Post 3.11 Literature” 2 are being presented. Nevertheless, there is a strong propensity in this critical literature to confine the readings to the organization and introduction of relevant works; that is, they are concerned about categorization, and we often find limitations in these commentaries about whether or not the literature fits into the post 3.11 topos. There are also concerns about whether it is even possible to escape this realm of categorization. There seems to be an apathy characteristic of the post-Cold War that is at work here. It seems that people are unable to directly confront the regulations of freedom, especially the curtailments on freedom of speech in contemporary society; even more so are they unable, or unwilling, to confront self-censorship and other invisible constraints. 253

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Tawada’s Kentōshi (2014) is a clear demonstration of this confrontation, of these constraints and curtailments. Tawada saw the disasters unfolding from a space outside of Japan and her mother tongue. She draws a clear portrait of the post 3.11—i.e., the contemporary—situation, which is to say the post-Cold War society outlined above; she does this by vividly conveying information from abroad in her story, Fushi no Shima, 3 which she wrote in Germany shortly after 3.11, and in Kentōshi, which she wrote after visiting Fukushima. “The near future,” “science fiction,” and “dystopia” are all monikers that have been used to describe her work; while the novel has been interpreted as expressing a marked sense of urgency, Tawada repeatedly emphasizes that “this is not the future” being described; 4 rather, it is the present reality being described. She further suggests that the fiction considered as dys/utopian describes not a world beyond ours (kanata), but describes the actual reality that exists “here and now.” The work focuses on how all the past nuclear follies committed were contained within this devised symbol of the island outside of FUKUSHIMA and poses the question of how long we can keep repeating this futuristic-apocalyptic dys/utopia. For example, Shigemi Nakagawa has written, in this context, For over two years, no one has shouldered the onus for the man-made calamity caused by natural disasters (earthquake and tsunami). To ponder Japan’s mysterious state of affairs, we must elucidate the complex layers of meaning that pervade “catastrophe.” Often humans go beyond the facts and meanings behind actual natural disasters and connect the events in various ways to their surrounding environment, reattributing the responsibility for those facts and meanings to different factors. Herein lies the difficulty of literary analysis. 5

Nakagawa states that we need to pay attention to works that analyze the fiction of “Japan” as actual, real problems. However, the problems that are raised in these texts are not future events yet to happen. Many texts concerned with nuclear disasters have confronted the past, literature is an inquiry on how to focus on the here and now: how to accept it and how to live, as Nakagawa notes in the quotation above, remains the question for us. Tawada further develops this idea as follows: What do you use to reference how to carry out your life or what kind of person to be? As they are, the Analects of Confucius and the Book of Flowery Tradition will not help you answer these questions. Mass media acts as a guide for those who need a manual. It tells them “eat this if you’re elderly,” “do this to relax,” or “stop doing this.” In contrast to the kindness of mass media, I would like to write a novel that plunges readers into the depths of perplexity. 6

This essay is from 2000, which is to say, long before 3.11. It is therefore not possible to easily express how the ideas presented there have changed in the intervening years. Nor is it possible to know which issues

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and ideas have changed and which have not, in the years since the triple disasters. How can literature, and particularly this work, depict the scenery and individuals present here and now? Within this age of abundance of information, a partial answer is perhaps provided by the 2006 Rokkasho-mura Rhapsody (directed by Hitomi Kamanaka) which is mentioned in Friends After 3.11 (directed by Shunji Iwai in 2012). In Rokkasho-mura Rhapsody, Yasuko Tomabechi, who works in agriculture in Towada City, Aomori Prefecture, neighboring Rokkasho, says: “Neutrality sounds nice and all, but when it comes to nuclear fuel, you’re just either for it or against it.” This is stated in opposition to the Rokkasho Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Facility, but it can also be seen as an effort to emphasize the existing state of affairs at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. It is a criticism of the way people think, of those who continue to avert their gaze from the situation in which they are placed, who don’t even attempt to see what is right before their eyes. It is a criticism that is not limited to the simple dichotomy of those in favor or those against. However, one cannot deny that even “nonfiction” is subject to an author’s intentional choices. The viewer is forced to ask whether the person so vividly portrayed on the screen is a complete separate entity with extrinsic problems, or if they are, in fact, the viewer himself and his own problems. So-called compassion is actually oppression and violence, as well as dilemmas of discrimination and exclusion, are then made apparent. All too easily the question of blame and responsibility arises, all too easily the dichotomy of perpetrator and victim is established, leading to finger-pointing and a too-easy dichotomies, when perpetrator and victim are often, in these situations, the same persons. For example, we encounter a sixth-grade child whose father works for Tokyo Electric Company, she responded to that lack of thorough consideration by writing a letter to the newspaper: “All of us, including Tokyo Electric, are to blame for the creation of nuclear power plants; we are all irresponsible.” 7 According to a public document from the Reconstruction Agency entitled “Current Status and Tasks for Restoration,” approximately 48,000 people were still forced to live in evacuation shelters as late as April of 2019 (compared to approximately 470,000 immediately following the earthquake and meltdown). 8 The situation continues while the government plans to cease all “restoration activities” (fukkō) in the near future. 9 And people’s memories appear to be fading. The discourse concerning this issue does not end with works that deal with victims (hisaisha) and restoration from “natural disasters” such as earthquakes and tsunamis. By examining Tawada’s post 3.11 literature and its “(re-)reading” I want to approach the problematization of the suffering of being alive in the fiction (and reality) of the nation-state, and of how to confront it and live inside it.

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THIS IS NOT A DYSTOPIAN FICTION (NOVEL), NEITHER OUR NEAR FUTURE ANY MORE Although no one openly discussed the isolation policy, there was lots of griping about fruit. 10

The isolation (sakoku) depicted in Kentōshi is an environment and a reality in which the fictional Yoshiro, Mumei, and the non-fictional Japanese people all have to live. The reality for Yoshiro was that “This life with his great-grandson was about all he could manage.” 11 There was no other choice. It is an environment where people cannot feel “the roundness of the earth beneath his [their] feet” 12 due to food shortages and breakdowns in communication and mass transit—problems which should be more pressing than the interests of the government and corporations. Such scenes play out not only in “Japan,” but they are the reality in many modern societies, even places that are beyond the limits of human awareness. Amidst the rampant economic imbalance and ever evolving mass transportation facilities and information technology, this work uses the idea of isolation to evoke these scenes, usually ignored as invisible to the naked eye. Additionally, the isolation is due to “serious problems” 13: a visible natural disaster, as well as an invisible one expressed in the phrase “Some terrible mistake he had made long ago.” 14 As Yonatani repeatedly stresses to Mumei and the other school children in his classroom, “But Japan isn’t the way it is now just because of earthquakes and tsunami [ . . . ] it’s not just natural disasters.” 15 It is clear that these problems and mistakes signify the triple catastrophe of March 11, which was not only a “natural disaster.” The “incident” laid bare all the widespread problems (although they had been made invisible despite of people being aware of them or not) of the people and their lives in the isolationist landscape. What warrants attention is that this very landscape was brought on by an “isolationist policy” developed after the disaster occurred. As we read, South Africa and India—having been among the first countries to withdraw from the global rat race in which huge corporations turned underground resources into anything they could sell at inhuman speeds while ruthlessly competing to keep the lowest production costs—now kept to a policy of supporting their economies by exporting language alone, discontinuing all other imports and exports. [ . . . ] Contrary to the predictions of foreign experts, the economies of both were growing steadily. 16

Isolation (sakoku) may appear utopian in today’s globalized world because it enables a country to withdraw from the economic competition of globalized society. In the world of the novel, “South Africa and India” have been enriched by a new economy in which they export their languages. But what of the lives of the people who live there? Nothing is said of the daily lives of the people who have had the image of an eco-

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nomic utopia thrust upon them. The invisible Japanese government’s machinations for the “plan to sell the Okinawan language to China” 17 also lies in a wholly different location than Yoshiro, Mumei, and Okinawan everyday life. Of course, the day-to-day lives of those on whom the “isolationist policy” and new “economic prosperity” were forced did not change in the slightest. Indeed, it is unnecessary to attach meaning to the reports of South Africa, India, “food shortages,” and “climate change,” but more importantly this work shows that these issues are not merely a problem of isolation or post 3.11 reality. In other words, this is neither a turning point that marks a before and after, nor something that demarks the ordinary from the non-ordinary. It is an environment that cannot be changed immediately, a setting in which there is no choice but to live within it. The people living there lead a life of self-censorship and are unable to see the “law (structure).” In addition to isolation, the people also yearn for food as they are faced with a food shortage. They migrate in droves from Honshu, longing to enjoy the “prosperity” of Okinawa which flourishes due to agriculture. We discover, however, that “there were very few jobs outside of agriculture,” and only “laborers” who could fulfill various conditions were accepted. Although Okinawa basically placed no restrictions on immigration from Honshu, they were afraid of an explosion in the population of single male laborers. To prevent this, it was decided that people who wanted to work on farms in Okinawa had to apply as married couples. Single women could apply as well as same-sex couples, both male and female, but applications from single men were not accepted. Exceptions were made for single women who had a sex change operation after they became residents; they were allowed to stay as single men. Only prospective immigrants with jobs lined up were allowed to apply, and since there were very few jobs outside of agriculture, it was safe to say that without a farm to employ them, people from Honshu wouldn’t receive permission to immigrate. 18

This appears as colony-less colonialism under the guise of migration, with such action being spurred by food shortages and the interest in maintaining the labor force; it cultivates “prosperity” and a sense of acceptance for today’s colonialistic migrants and refugees. While you will find no mention of gender norms and “castration” and “an independence movement” 19 here, it is not hard to imagine that the discrepancies in the perception of and the desires for the “prosperity” that the indigenous people and the migrants hold could cause some type of friction. The perception of distance and borders that appear under the new economic structure makes it impossible to see “Okinawa” from remote “Honshu.” The only glimpse into the state of affairs in Okinawa is in the repeated mention of “fruit” on the picture postcards that are sent to Yoshiro from his daughter Amana.

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Chapter 17 “That’s practically all she writes about. It isn’t so interesting, reading about the latest red pineapple, or square pineapple, since they’re not going to be shipped here anyway, but actually, I’m getting a little worried. It’s strange, her writing about fruit and nothing else. A while ago I might have suspected she’d been brainwashed . . . ” Yoshiro felt something was wrong: either Amana’s head was so full of fruit she could think of nothing else, or her mail was being censored, or she was hiding something from him. Her postcards were frustrating, as if the most important part was covered by the back of an invisible hand, making it impossible to read. 20

The “wrong” that Yoshiro suspects cannot be reduced to “brainwashing” or “censorship.” In this is revealed a relationship of domestic colonial rule, one which is tied to “censorship.” At the same time, “the contamination” hidden in Okinawa becomes apparent from the scene where Yoshiro deciphers Amana’s message from her postcards. While this problem of contamination remains ambiguous, though, through the desire for prosperity and through self-censorship enforced by the strangers to survive the food shortage, the “prosperity” achieved by agriculture appears “clean.” However, since the food shortages are caused not only by soil contamination but also by climate and cultural changes, one cannot claim with certainty the Okinawa’s soil was not contaminated at all. The “new kind of fruit” Amana repeatedly writes about brings to the fore the contamination that had been hidden beneath the prosperity. It has evaded censorship and emits a certain textuality. This is a clear response to “the dark specter of contamination” 21 that lurks in the myths lauding the safety of nuclear power and how it is a technological and cultural evolution that will answer both the energy shortage and people’s desires for economic prosperity. The strangeness caused by commercials that insisted on the “safety” of food products from Tōhoku (especially Fukushima) after 3.11—this performance of the ingestion—is here revealed as a similar form of “brainwashing” 22 : “The word clean had sounded fishy somehow—after all, this wasn’t a commercial for laundry detergent, thought Yoshiro, though he hadn’t said so aloud. 23 A question remains regarding this invisible “Okinawa.” This is nothing other than the problem of the war. To where should all the weapons in Okinawa be aimed now that they have been abandoned by the mainland and have lost the excuse of being used as protection from foreign invaders? How fare the lives of the people who migrated? The everyday of those living in this situation is completely concealed. How can Yoshiro or the readers, who look at it standing on the outside, imagine it? When Sede read the question, “Would you like to be relocated to the Korean Federation?” his hand began to shake. [ . . . ] Maybe it would be safer to go to Korea instead of staying in China. After the reunification of

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North and South, the Korean Federation had not been held back by its past. 24

In Higan (2014), the establishment of another “Korean Federation” as a type of utopia must not have been easy. 25 The history and ties from the actual, non-fictional Korean War, and even before, are completely unspoken, consigned to a “past” that is forgotten/should be forgotten (in no way has it been forgotten, however). Tying the situation of Okinawa to the problem of the weapons left there is certainly not a simple task. The scene of hidden “contamination” and “war” paradoxically but precisely presents such a reality as a blank space. This way the very fear of the word “nuclear” evokes again the traumatic pictures of “war and nuclear weapons,” becoming engraved as the fear of contamination from radioactive materials. This is obvious in the post-apocalyptic landscape through the whole of Kentōshi and, even more, in Fushi no Shima and Dōbutsutachi no Babel (2013). 26 In Idaten Dokomademo (2014), 27 the fear gradually becomes internalized and psychological as “self-confidence” (jishin; 自信) and “earthquake” (jishin; 地震) blend, and the kanji and the words continue to break down along with the self’s (jishin; 自身) body and name. This prompts us to look at the roots of the concealment, the self-censorship, the apathy toward the situation (as if it has already been resolved), and the way people perceive matters: “Or perhaps without really understanding them, he simply accepted the special circumstances that surrounded them all like a spider’s web.” 28 While the post 3.11 discourse proclaims the feelings of impending doom associated with the word “nuclear,” this very fear of the words nuclear and restoration (fukkō), of the symbols of isolation (sakoku) and Okinawa, all reveal the hidden reality—the here and now— which people cannot see or are reluctant to see. This points attention toward the isolative nature of the data manipulated in order to protect the principles of “safe and peaceful use” and “deterrence,” as well as of a fundamental self-censorship, in other words toward the way these issues are being perceived. (RE-)READING ON THE NATION-STATE AFTER 3.11 TODAY: MUMEI’S TRAVELS (TABI) Saeko Kimura writes the following in regard to Kentōshi: Kentōshi does not attempt to prophesize what future damage caused by a nuclear disaster will look like. It attempts to show what it is like to live carefully on contaminated land in order to stay away from harm, and to be under oppression by an invisible, unattributed force. The future that Kentōshi depicts is not of easily imagined radioactive harm, but of a possibility of a reading into the anxiety of something unfamiliar and unknown. 29

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I would like to interpret the “oppression by an invisible, unattributed force” and “anxiety of something unfamiliar and unknown” as problems of the nation-state to which Tawada’s works call constant attention. This is possibly tied to re-readings of Tawada’s existing works after 3.11. It is simultaneously an attempt to reexamine how awareness of issues within current texts post 3.11 has been affected, and a rethinking of the discourse on interpretations of these topics, primarily border-crossing. The symbols of “isolation (sakoku)” and “Okinawa,” that is, of war, poverty and immigrants (refugees), exposed by the radioactive contamination, can be thought of as a symptom of the failure of the nation-state. This is not limited to the disasters of 3.11; the rise of the Islamic State (IS) and the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union are other vivid examples of this phenomena. By the end of the twentieth century, the nation-states (especially in Europe)—burdened with the paradox of the openness and closedness of the pre-established harmony at the end of the Cold War—built “fortresses (by borders).” Specifically, the problems of migration, which is governed and maintained by legislation concerning nationality and immigration/emigration control, are an important theme in the works of Tawada, who personally experienced them. This is reflected most frankly by Tawada herself in the depiction of the events concerning her “passport”: I felt ashamed of trying to prove my innocence by insisting I hadn’t been to Japan since that had happened. Back in 2011 the word Japan elicited sympathy, but since 2017 sympathy had changed to prejudice. If I got EU passport I wouldn’t need to think about Japan every time I crossed a national border, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to apply for one. It seemed strange even to me the way I hung on to my old passport just when having one had become such a bother. 30

In Fushi no Shima, the “Japanese passport” and the “EU passport” are representatives of the identity predetermined by the nation-state. From this point of view, it is also possible to judge the “contamination (kegare)” or “innocence” of the Self, and, accordingly, its rejection. The “permanent residence permit” proves to be an insufficient guarantee. The chrysanthemum on the “Japanese Passport” is worrisome: it looks as though the flower has undergone genetic mutation in the instant of the oppression, regardless of continuing from before or after the years 2011 or 2017. People, including the narrator (watashi) in Fushi no Shima and Tsuyukusa in Kentōshi, are forced to diasporic migration, and their means of returning home have all been lost. Numerous memories of repatriation and one’s hometown or homeland are evoked when Yoshiro states: “How must Tsuyukusa feel, knowing she would never be able to return to Japan?” 31 We should focus not on whether the migration was voluntary or forced, but on the fact that what made the migration unavoidable was not the disaster itself, but the nation-state behind it.

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The Japan (and the Japanese people) depicted not only in Kentōshi, but Tawada’s “border-crossing literature,” hold true to their nation-state steadfastly, just as in the real world. Nagao Nishikawa discusses that shroud of ambivalence: We are confined by the difficulty of discussing the disintegration of the nation-state with the language of the nation-state (it is difficult to discuss national culture without using the words culture and nation). The various ideas generated within the nation-state are ambiguous, and it is in that ambiguity that we live our lives. As long as the ideas that we hold are ambivalence, we can only ascertain that with our own eyes within a mutable reality and search for future possibilities within selfdevelopment and the changing of ideas which have been driven into the ground. We know just how suspicious and dangerous bright lights and solutions from abroad can be from our historical experience as a nation-state. 32

Nishikawa expresses the concepts of speculation and exploration of how to grapple with and overcome the situation in which one has been placed in the nation-state. This is nothing short of an exhibition of the resolve to accept contiguous realities; that is, how to accept and live in the here and now. Like the current situation cited at the onset, the necessary mental state when confronted with daily ambivalence is where literature is headed. Speculation and exploration might open the door to it. This concept is also expressed in the following statement from Yoshiro: He wanted to write something Mumei would be able to read, but at the same time, Mumei’s presence made it difficult to write for children. A raw, honest treatment of the problems they faced every day would only end in frustration at the absence of solutions, making it impossible to arrive at places one could only reach in books. Creating an ideal fictional world for his great-grandson was another possibility, although reading about an ideal world wouldn’t help the boy change the world around him any time soon. 33

It goes without saying that the shared phenomena in this book are analogous to controlled evacuation in the name of restoration (fukkō). The people, forced to migrate like a diaspora, were left without a place to return; to put it even clearer, from the very beginning they did not have anything that could be considered a place to which they could return. Yoshiro was old enough to remember the funeral of the last living politician to be driven from his post for saying things like, “If Tokyo fails the whole country will go down with it. We must save Tokyo even if it means sacrificing all the outlying prefectures!” While he certainly didn’t approve of the egotism of Edo—now called Edonism—just saying “Tokyo” aloud still excited him somehow, bringing back an enthusiasm for the city he couldn’t let go of, making the thought of Tokyo disappearing altogether so unbearable he thought he’d just as soon vanish along with it. 34

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The feelings of deprivation and loss of place and belonging that were felt by Yoshiro and the others who “still wanted to live in Tokyo” 35 come with an effect that is more than an illusory historical product. They shifted their gaze to and from people when they were assembled through evacuation regulations and felt like victims, forever branding them in history as the aggrieved. He didn’t seem to know what “suffering” meant; he simply coughed when food wouldn’t go down, or vomited it back up. Of course he felt pain, but it was pure pain, unaccompanied by any “Why am I the only one who has to suffer like this?” sort of lamentations that Yoshiro knew so well. Perhaps this acceptance was a treasure given to the youngest generation. Mumei didn’t know how to feel sorry for himself. 36

So, what exactly is a “victim (hisaisha or higaisha)?” Through Yoshiro’s eyes, which also determine a certain bias in the readers, Mumei’s body— which “couldn’t [be] put on the same page in the Illustrated Guide to Animals” 37—is perceived as pitiable, inducing with it the recognition of his victimhood. For example, “[I] don’t know when I developed a liking for entirely different bodies—birds, say, or octopi. I’d like to see everything from an optical point of view.” / “Optical?” / “No, I meant octopi. I want to see through the eyes of an octopus.” 38 The “octopus” is “optical.” It is the optic of the other. For someone that has been given a body similar to that of an “octopus,” such as Mumei, it is not only a way to “turn [myself] back into an octopus,” but also to feel as “somebody else’s” body feels. 39 Common sense does not apply anymore. Yoshiro and Mumei have to find a new way to live in their precarious environs. [ . . . ] Yoshiro and Mumei tell each other to metamorphose (kawarimi seyo). Yoshiro—who questions again what he has thought to be right for over 100 years— and Mumei—having received a new body—do not focus on who bears the most burden. Instead, they try to create an environment in which they can survive. Indeed, they are creating a new world. 40

Arisa Iwakawa focused on the disparity between Mumei’s body and Yoshiro’s body and interpreted it as “a possibility to find a new world” in an “age fraught with ecological risk.” However, before she recognizes this absolutely conflicting body disparity, Mumei’s identification with an octopus and his perception of other people are perceived as an ambivalence of self and other, swinging between a migration rendered (un)ordinary and a forced state of refuge: “Great-grandpa has real bushy eyebrows and a square jaw, so he looks strong, but his feelings get hurt real easily, and he often looks like he’s about to cry. For some reason he seems to pity me.” 41 This is relativized by the great-grandpa–greatgrandson relationship of Yoshiro and Mumei and their narration in addition to the words of the first-person narrator, Mumei, 42 whom we can catch a glimpse of for just a moment. Mumei thinks Yoshiro and the other

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old people are strange. He pities and worries about them. The vulnerability of Yoshiro, who is “healthy” and “robbed of death,” and the “pure pain” of Mumei, whose body is beyond his control, are not dualistic concepts. Rather, this ambivalence shows a possibility, embodied in Mumei’s existence, to transcend generation and gender, and to rethink the biases of liable parties, the roles of “aggressor/victim,” or the concerns of “reputational risk” after the disasters. As we can see from the story, Mumei’s days are “fresh and full of fun” and his current situation is “not [my (his)] fault.” 43 What connects this situation with the future is Mumei’s “travel” (tabi). Even though his travels are forced by the “Emissary Association,” they are for him and him alone, not Yoshiro or anyone else. It is the path chosen by Mumei, who is not a victim inside Japan’s reality, nor, it goes without saying, an aggressor. However, the story ends as Mumei “fell into the pitch-black depths of the strait,” his journey abroad cut short. What Mumei saw in the eyes of Suiren were the faces of Yonatani and Yoshiro from before he flew “across time, propelled into the future.” 44 Mumei’s words, “I’m all right. I just had a really nice dream,” are a hint that his travels can only exist in his dreams and in a “memory” of the future. 45 The substantiality of the travel certainly implies getting into “a border patrol boat” 46 and a physical and geographical “border-crossing” of the frontiers of “Japan.” However, it is unimaginable that Mumei’s life would have changed dramatically even if his border-crossing had been realized. This migration of consciousness, which can be read as a parallel world, and this understanding in the form of a memory of the future, simply exhibit a method of literary confrontation acquired through Mumei’s language awareness and somatic senses. What lies at the end of Mumei’s travels is not border-crossing, but a gaze directed at someone else’s face and a state of awareness to ascertain the core of events. Through this ending, in addition to the reality of Japan, resembling that of the triple catastrophe of 3.11, it renders useless the notion of a “border” that exerts power inside and outside its limits. The continuity of a “memory of the future,” which is not a border-crossing, reveals the depths of the “strait” and the “cavern.” 47 POST 3.11 TODAY’S VISUALITY/INVISUALITY: ALIEN’S EVERYDAY LIFE Yoshiro didn’t know why he was able to picture the airport so clearly. With no effort on his part, these images just came to him, begging to be written into a novel. [ . . . ] Sneaking into a forbidden place to dig up forbidden knowledge didn’t interest him at all. But even if what he published was only a description of what he had imagined, if his fiction happened to correspond too closely to what the airport was really

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Kentōshi exposes the status quo that has been made invisible and continues the “travel (tabi)” of literary speculation and exploration. Yoshiro and Mumei’s linguistic awareness and somatic feelings evoke the problem of human nature in its duplicitous and ambiguous nature, and its ungeneralizable complexity. It is no longer easy to distinguish whether the scenes dealing with these issues are a part of their everyday life or not. Inside this fiction (and reality), even inside the unreachable place portrayed by Yoshiro’s imagination, the menace of an unescapable totalitarianism is continually exposed. The events of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Incident exceeded not only the spiritual and cognitive boundaries of direct victims (hisaisha) of the “disaster,” the “Japanese,” but of humans as a whole. Nevertheless, its gravity in Japan is stereotyped as “restoration (fukkō)” and a sense of crisis of an “unexpected natural disaster.” The event is fading from people’s memories as though the situation has been resolved. Discourse, at least within Japan at the time of the disaster, caused a certain kind of reputational damage supported by the people themselves, wherein a distorted form of regionalism would reject expressing concern about the contamination of foodstuffs. Concurrently, visitors and residents from abroad (as well as governments from all around the world) began distancing themselves from Japan. The US Armed Forces stationed in Japan were no exception. The event was treated as something that was not limited to areas near Fukushima. 49 Furthermore, this problem became exemplified by transnational marriages and revealed the closed-offness lurking behind the openness, the fiction, of a “multicultural symbiosis.” People changed from being recognized as constituents of the same collective, which only stands through compulsions and presuppositions of “Japanese citizenship” (having the surname from a Japanese husband or belonging to a home with a family register), into “Aliens (gaijin)” who could not even be “non-citizens (hikokumin),” regardless of their visa status. This was of course a manifestation of the exclusivist and discriminatory consciousness that continued unchanged from before 3.11. It was a symbolic event that called attention to the precariousness of “family” and “nation.” Beset with scenes of the tsunami in an appeal to the crisis, the situation was obscured and became something that people either could not see or they shut their eyes to. Japan’s equivalence to a nation that preaches about globalization while being closed off to information from the outside world can be seen in the disparity between how the Japanese government and business (primarily Tokyo Electric) manipulated information and thorough investigative reports on cover-ups from abroad. 50 Tawada’s work does not only recall the fear of impending danger caused by the

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catastrophic scenery, it addresses the condition of those who have no country, no place to return to, so that they would not be erased, forgotten or labeled refugees, non-citizens (hikokumin). In this sense, “Japan Was Not Isolated.” 51 Having left the country without permission, Japanese pirates in the international gangs did not have the right to return. [ . . . ] / While it didn’t seem all that strange for Norwegians or Swedes, with their Viking heritage, to join pirate gangs, people from countries like Nepal, or Switzerland, with no connection to the sea, were also joining up. And the sizable number of Japanese pirates suggested that there was no gene for isolation. 52

As this quotation makes clear, membership in an “international pirate gang” corresponds neither to the illusion of the nation-state, nor to that of “isolation.” Yoshiro calls Mumei “chum.” 53 This is but an attempt to nullify the greatest device of the nation-state: “family.” There, traditional relatedness based on “genes” and “blood connections” are futile, and what Marika longs for is precisely the detachment from “bloody forebearers.” 54 At a time when having non-Japanese relatives was enough to bring you under suspicion, such a foreign-sounding surname was sure to be a strike against her. She did, in fact, often feel she was being watched. She would come home to find signs of a break-in; even when nothing had been taken, the police would come around to investigate. She changed her name to Yonatani, writing it in Chinese characters, and raised the boy on her own, shielding him with her strong arms, never mentioning his father. Hearing this made Mumei notice certain things about his teacher’s face for the first time. 55

Tawada explains that she intentionally does not portray foreigners in this work. However, as can be observed in the scene where Mumei recognizes Yonatani’s face, in a rather paradoxical manner Tawada makes apparent an existence marginalized and lost in the invisible or purposefully ignored portions of the everyday. This text forces readers to face the people who live there and who are being excluded. Mumei’s “travel (tabi)” does not represent a border-crossing, but rather the enactment of imagining of these people. This is also linked to Tawada’s visit to Fukushima—a movement observable between the Fushi no Shima and the later Kentōshi. The landscape of here and now which the two fictions lay bare is not brought about by having or not having visited Fukushima, or by the physical or geographical distances between Germany and Japan (Fukushima). It is more than the act of looking (or seeing). It is a change in one’s gaze or awareness. 56 During this “travel (tabi)” it is meaningless to question the definitions of the boundaries of the country imposed by the nation-state and the boundaries of evacuation zones imposed by the Japanese government, as well as to simply make visible these invisible lines,

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similarity to what can be seen on a world map. The “maps of the world made in Japan” and “the pain of overlapping with this map of the world” haunt Mumei. The only means of “release,” if only for a moment, would be “a different map of the world.” 57 Queering this reasoning a bit further, one can ask, “Are Mumei or Suiren even Japanese?” We read, “This map is definitely my portrait, he thought. [ . . . ] All my bones are curved. Not that I bent them, they were just like that to begin with—if this is what’s called pain, it was there from the start, for no particular reason.” 58 The individuals and their lives represented by Yonatani (who was introduced because of his forced “Japanization” in a sense) exist parallel to pre 3.11 in the real world (Japan) where globalization is advocated. It goes without saying that the (in-)visualization and concealment, as well as the recognized rejection, are also things borne post 3.11. The difficulty of Yonatani’s life and the way readers discovers how to confront it are clear embodiments of leaving the nation-state. CONCLUSION: (RE-)THINKING TODAY Today’s literature is unthinkable without the presence of this “post 3.11” reality. However, what does a “post 3.11” interpretation mean? This is a rather meaningless question (or rather a useless one). The question should be, why is it possible to make invisible the central issue of the nation-state that lies at the core of the triple catastrophe of March 11, 2011. Discard the topos “FUKUSHIMA” and substitute it with the idea of “restoration (fukkō),” that is the great menace of the structure of the nation-state we live in today. This essay is the result of a consideration into how the problems of the nation-state and migration portrayed in Tawada’s texts can be reinterpreted, and it explores how one is to (re-)read post 3.11 in order to clarify the debate on today’s topics. Tawada’s text follows the fall into a narrow pit of attachment to a location’s memories and language enforcement within the ambivalence of the nation-state. It piles suffering upon suffering, but it continues asking questions and harboring doubt. How is it possible to make effective the response to this fiction/reality? While activities for “restoration support for victims (hisaisha) of the disaster” were necessary at the time, attention toward the core phenomena that surround people who are forced to evacuate is scarce. This restoration leads to the fading of the memories of the Great Hanshin (-Awaji) Earthquake. If we look at the problem of housing erected after the disaster this becomes clear. At the end of the day, the only existence which corresponds to the object of these issues is the “citizen.” In the category of temporary operations stipulated in the “Basic Act on Reconstruction in Response to the Great East Japan Earthquake (No.76, 2011),” non-citizens are not considered. The motions to provide for foreign victims affected by the disaster and staying in Japan

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have ultimately had little impact, too. The strife and difficulty of living in the face of the hollow rationale of the nation-state as a (non-)citizen or (non-)national cannot be inverted. To deem such a thing beyond control would be a desire to escape into a sense of security borne of totalitarianism, a “fictitious world void of contradiction” worthy of Arendt’s critique. Tawada’s texts show how we can consider alternative, what Tosaka Jun calls “feel at home (安場快適),” systems and customs that social structure rations out. 59 It shows us that we can discover a “positive facet to the cruel and salvationless state of exile” identified by Edward Said. 60 In spite of upholding the “state” establishment, the international community’s failure to recognize IS, or the Islamic State, continues to be criticized and shows the contradictions and limitations of the concept of nation-state. However, there is much history to unrecognized states. In the case of Japan, North Korea is the most symbolic example. That is, it is not a matter of world affairs concerning nations. What can we call the language/literature that is born in these places (since it is surely being written already)? Will it be forced into the structure of “XX-literature” and be called something like “IS literature?” In such case they would not need to shoulder the nation, which shares a language and people, such as the Olympic representatives, for example. It appears to be a kind of alternative expression (which is rife with contradiction and linked to the strengthening of nationalism within the Islamic State). Tawada questions this rift. She expresses this through her playfulness with identity (identity no tawamure), for example, through the phrase “I am not an XX-ian (XXjin), but I am a member of the IS.” In a world where we cling to things due to the threat of exclusion, she calls for Identity (“XX-jin”) that is made possible through the language of fiction/literature. 61 Is not Yonatani, who appears in Kentōshi, a materialization of that possibility? Tawada’s texts, and their readings as post 3.11 literature, show that it is possible to think about literature in the context of today. Her works constantly and repeatedly question the convention present in domestic Japanese literary study, where “Japanese people write Japanese literature in Japanese” and where “Japanese read and study Japanese literature in Japanese.” Now, many years after the triple catastrophes of March 11, what can be seen in Tawada’s earlier works (e.g. Exophony) is neither a glance of a remote world, nor something conceptual, such as a “linguistic travel, hope, or possibility.” Her works have always revealed this: that it is something more actual, concrete, and somatic. Not only is Mumei’s everyday life nothing out of the ordinary, but neither are events such as Mumei’s recognition of Yonatani’s face, or the post 3.11 landscape. This work approaches Humanity and the ways in which people live in this real and actual world on a more fundamental and conscientious level. It asks how we accept things about which we do not or cannot speak, and how we confront reality and others who must live and speak in the (un)ordinary reality. How do we shed the regulations which bind these

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people and their awareness? The gaze of someone who has been asking this endless question, overlooking the disasters of 3.11, is precisely where the clues to addressing these recurring issues are to be found. NOTES 1. Yōko Tawada, The Emissary (Kentōshi), trans. Margaret Mitsutani (New York: New Directions, 2018), 54. 2. “Post 3.11 Literature” here does not simply equate to that which simply categorizes literature released after March 11, 2011, as Saeko Kimura (2018) warns. It represents that which lays bare how catastrophe offers new viewpoints or possibilities for approaches to interpreting or reading literature. This essay focuses on those who had being affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake and the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Incident (Fuku-ichi). It is an extension of the discourse on the awareness of catastrophes represented in literature embodied in the Great Hanshin (Awaji) Earthquake and Atomic Bomb Literature. 3. Yōko Tawada, “The Island of Eternal Life,” trans. Margaret Mitsutani, in March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown, ed. Elmer Luke and David Karashima (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). 4. In conversations with Ryōichi Wagō and Hiroshi Kainuma (Gunzō 72, no. 10 (October 2017): 153-66), Tawada states the following: “Kentōshi is often referred to as a near-future science fiction novel, but I believe it is my take on how Japan is today and how it has changed [ . . . ] In other words, the nuclear incident has accelerated problems and made them apparent [ . . . ] These, of course, are not problems experienced by specific prefectures, but problems that Japan as a whole and also the entire world experience.” 5. Shigemi Nakagawa, “Living with Guilty Conscience: Japanese Literature and Nuclear Disaster,” Ritsumeikan Studies in Language and Culture 25, no. 2 (January 2014): 39–42. 6. Yōko Tawada, “Hatsugen-Miraiki,” Shinchō 97, no. 11 (November 2000): 264–265. Another word for “depths of perplexity” might be “intoxication” (mayoeru; 迷える (魔・酔える)). 7. “Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant: A Letter from A Sixth-grade Child whose Father Works for Tokyo Electric,” The Mainichi Shimbun, June 23, 2011. 8. Public document “Fukkō no genjō to kadai” from Reconstruction Agency, last modified April 30, 2019, http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/topics/main-cat1/sub-cat1-1/ 20131029113414.html. Content reported November 30, 2018. Updated and reviewed annually every November since 2012. 9. The same document states that the completion of the “Residence and Town Restoration Project” (based on the Great East Japan Earthquake Disaster Reconstruction Basic Law Heisei 23 (2011) Law No. 76) is expected to be at the end of 2018, and by March 2021 (the end of the 2020 fiscal year) all “Restoration and Recreation” will cease under the name of the Restoration Olympics (fukkō gorin). It was not merely a report on the current state of restoration (fukkō), but it was generated by a repeal of the Reconstruction Agency, which was based on the Reconstruction Agency Establishment Law (Heisei 23 (2011) Law No. 125). 10. Tawada, The Emissary, 42. 11. Ibid., 40. 12. Ibid., 25. 13. Ibid., 42. 14. Ibid., 133. 15. Ibid., 122. 16. Ibid., 95–96. 17. Ibid., 96.

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18. Ibid., 47. 19. Ibid., 57. 20. Ibid., 60–61. 21. Ibid., 84. 22. All ministry cafeterias from the Prime Minister to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ran “Active Support for areas struck by the Great East Japan Earthquake: Let’s show our support of the affected areas (Fukushima prefecture) and eat their marine products and rice!” The series of campaigns at the time were carried out by all administrative bodies of the country and published on the home page of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or so it seemed. The torch of the “Let’s show our support!” campaign was passed to the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries and continues even in December 2018. The gap between the foreign countries’ expressions of worry over Japanese foodstuffs and firmly rooted perceptions of European foodstuffs continuing from Chernobyl is very clear. Ministry of Agriculture, “Tabete Ōenshiyō!” last modified April 30, 2019, http://www.maff.go.jp/j/shokusan/eat/. 23. Tawada, The Emissary, 78. 24. Yōko Tawada, The Far Shore (Higan), trans. Jeffrey Angles (March 2015), “Words Without Borders,” last modified April 30, 2019, https:// www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-far-shore. 25. Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2010). Cumings clearly states this phenomenon the following: The Korean War was fought for mutually unknown and incommensurable (if not incomprehensible) goals by the two most important sides, North Korea and the United States. The North Koreans attacked the South because of fears that Japan’s industrial economy and its former position in Korea were being revived by recent changes in American policy, [ . . . ] What he [Kim Il Sung] could not have known was that his invasion solved a number of critical problems for the Truman administration, and did wonders in building the American Cold War position on a world scale. 26. Yōko Tawada, Kentōshi (Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2014). 27. Ibid. 28. Tawada, The Emissary, 133. 29. Saeko Kimura, Sonogo no shinsaigo-bungakuron (Tokyo: Seidosha, 2018), 91–92. 30. Tawada, “The Island of Eternal Life,” 3–4. 31. Tawada, The Emissary, 58. 32. Nagao Nishikawa, Kokkyō no koekata: kokuminkokkaron josetsu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001), 435. 33. Tawada, The Emissary, 16. 34. Ibid., 49–50. 35. Ibid., 61. 36. Ibid., 33. 37. Ibid., 101. 38. Ibid., 14–15. 39. Ibid., 100. 40. Arisa Iwakawa, “Kawarimi Seyo, Mumei no Mono: Yōko Tawada’s Kentōshi,” Subaru 40, no. 4 (April 2018): 170–72. 41. Tawada, The Emissary, 100–101. 42. Ibid., 114–19, 145–48, in addition to quotes. 43. Ibid., 96–98. 44. Ibid., 126. 45. Ibid., 128. 46. Ibid., 131. 47. Ibid., 138. 48. Ibid., 27. 49. For example, according to an article from March 18, 2011 in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun headlined “Escalation of Extrication from Japan by Foreign Citizens,” governments starting with India’s began evacuation and return efforts on March 15th

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until the 17th. Most notable of all is this report: “The US Department of Defense, has officially approved the evacuation of all who wish for the families of the US Armed Forces in Japan. This will affect all bases on Honshu and the use of military aircraft is being considered.” Regardless of civilians and soldiers, the situation was treated as if the problem was not contained to the locale of Fukushima. 50. The local newspapers were used to transmit and make this information public within Japan; however, the disparity in consistency between the urgency of response now and then cannot be denied. This is especially pronounced in the reports from the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), Die Fukushima-Lüge (“The Fukushima Lie,” local broadcast March 7, 2012) and Täuschen, tricksen, drohen (“Deception, tricks, and threats,” local broadcast February 26, 2014) after the live broadcast of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Incident. 51. Tawada, The Emissary, 90. 52. Ibid., 95. 53. Ibid., 79. 54. Ibid., 87. 55. Ibid., 129. 56. In Hon 39, no. 11 (本; November 2014), Tawada states “Kentōshi wo megutte”: “I wanted to expand my short story “Fushi no Shima” and write a full-length novel. This travel (tabi) changed my position a little. As a result, I was able to complete Kentōshi which was unexpected even for me.” 57. Tawada, The Emissary, 124. 58. Ibid., 123–124. 59. Jun Tosaka, Shisō to fūzoku, (Tokyo: Mikasashobō, 1936). 60. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile: and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 61. In conversation with Robert Campbell, “Han-Tanin tachi no Toshi to Bungaku,” Shinch ō 115, no. 4 (April 2018): 83–95.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Arendt, Hannah. Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1968. Cumings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2010. “Escalation of Extrication from Japan by Foreign Citizens.” The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, March 18, 2011. “Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant: A Letter from A Sixth-grade Child whose Father Works for Tokyo Electric.” The Mainichi Shimbun, June 23, 2011. Iwakawa, Arisa. “Kawarimi Seyo, Mumei no Mono: Yōko Tawada’s Kentōshi.” Subaru 40, no. 4 (April 2018): 170–172. Kimura, Saeko. Sonogo no shinsaigo-bungakuron. Tokyo: Seidosha, 2018. Ministry of Agriculture. “Tabete Ōenshiyō!.” Last modified April 30, 2019. http:// www.maff.go.jp/j/shokusan/eat/. Nakagawa, Shigemi. “Living with Guilty Conscience: Japanese Literature and Nuclear Disaster.” Ritsumeikan Studies in Language and Culture 25, no. 2 (January 2014): 39–42. Nishikawa, Nagao. Kokkyō no koekata: kokuminkokkaron josetsu. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2001. Reconstruction Agency. “Fukkō no genjō to torikumi.” Last modified April 30, 2019. http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/topics/main-cat1/sub-cat1-1/20131029113414.html. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Tawada, Yōko. “Hatsugen-Miraiki.” Shinch ō 97, no. 11 (November 2000): 264–265. ———. “The Island of Eternal Life.” Translated by Margaret Mitsutani. In March Was Made of Yarn: Reflections on the Japanese Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Meltdown, edited by Elmer Luke and David Karashima. New York: Vintage Books, 2012.

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———. Kentōshi. Tokyo: Kōdansha, 2014. ———. “Kentōshi wo megutte.” Hon 39, no. 11 (November 2014). ———. The Far Shore (Higan). Translated by Jeffrey Angles (March 2015). “Words Without Borders.” Last modified April 30, 2019. https:// www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/the-far-shore. ———. In Conversations with Ryōichi Wagō and Hiroshi Kainuma. Gunzō 72, no. 10 (October 2017): 153–166. ———. In Conversation with Robert Campbell “Han-Tanin tachi no Toshi to Bungaku.” Shinch ō 115, no. 4 (April 2018): 83–95. ———. The Emissary. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani. New York: New Directions, 2018. Tosaka, Jun. Shisō to Fūzoku. Tokyo: Mikasashobō, 1936.

Index

Adelson, Leslie, 15, 31n6, 117n13 Adorno, 55, 58n31 Ainu, 223, 226 Ajase, 173, 174 Akira, Suzuki, 41, 43 Almodovàr, Pedro, 103, 107, 114 Amati-Mehler, Jacqueline, 118n31 An, 6 Animal-human, x, 101 “Ansell” see Forster E.M anthropogenic, 169 Apter, Emily, 18 Area Studies, 18, 112 Arendt, Hannah, 270 Arens, Hiltrud, 126, 127 Aristotle, 232, 233 Assmann, Aleida, 214, 219, 221, 224, 225 Atwood, Margaret, 108 autobiography, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 231–232, 234, 235–236, 236–239, 240, 241, 250 Awaji, 188, 266, 268n2 Babelian, 20 Bachner, Andrea, 117n6 Banoun, Bernard, 31n16, 101, 134n11 Barnes, Roland 25 Bassnett, Susan, 134n8 Baudelaire, Charles, 25 Bear Festival, 209, 224 Bear God, 223 Beatles, 85 Berlin Zoo, 213 Bernofsky, Susan, 135n26, 246, 247, 248 Beuys, Joseph, 19 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 166 Bible, 111, 143, 185 bio-political, 233 border controls, 215

borders, vii, viii, x, 15, 30, 64, 104, 124, 139, 166, 174, 196, 215, 216, 246, 257, 260 Borudō no gikei, 13, 15, 30, 62 Böttcher, Ursula, 101, 228n64, 235 Braidotti, Rosi, 175, 179 Brandt, Bettina, 62, 127, 162n30, 199 Brazil, 82 Breger, Claudia, 226n8 Breton, Andre, 25, 28 Briggs, Kate, 104 Buddhist, 2, 173, 174 Bullokar, William, 117n5 Butler, Judith, 239, 240, 242n24 Cage, John, 86 calligraphic, 36, 43 Canadian school of feminist translation, 122 capitalism, 30, 33n57, 174, 181n21, 182n38 Castro, Olga, 123 catastrophe, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 180, 190, 191, 193, 253, 254, 256, 263, 266, 268n2, 283 Celan, Paul, 35, 36, 38, 74, 86, 96n12, 115, 136n44 Chamberlain, Lori, 122 Chiaki, Ishihara, 152 Chikyū ni chiribamerarete (Scattered Across the Earth) , viii, 193, 195, 196 Christensen, Inger, 83, 96n8 Cold War, 112, 253, 254, 260, 269n25 colonialism, 25, 257 concrete poetry, 81, 86 Confessions , 238 Creeley, Robert, 86 Crossman, Edith, 104 culture, vii, 8, 11, 17, 37, 44, 45, 52, 56, 71, 92, 104, 107, 113, 115, 117n8, 122, 273

274

Index

124, 126, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134n4, 135n20, 155, 182n38, 185, 193, 195–196, 196, 213, 214, 261 Cumings, Bruce, 269n25 cyborg, x, 178 Damrosch, David, 18 Dante, 108, 117n10 Darwin, Charles, 232, 233 Darwinian, 168, 232, 233 de Campos, Haroldo, 96n7 deixis, 15 Deleuze, Gilles, 104, 106, 118n21, 164, 171, 175, 176, 177, 179, 201 Denemarková, Radka, 104 Derrida, Jacques, 20, 32n22, 117n8 diaspora, 261 Die Muttersprache, 105 earth, 3, 10, 17, 156, 157, 158, 159, 172–173, 174, 182n30, 256 ecocritical, 163–164, 165, 167, 169, 174, 178, 180n1 Eiade, Mircea, 53 Ellis Island, 65, 68, 141 Emmerich, Michael, xi Emissary Association, 158, 159, 263 environmental, 163, 164, 167, 169, 174, 190 Eurydice, 186 evacuation shelters, 255 exophonic literature, 112, 113, 201 exophony, 18, 55, 102, 103, 112, 113, 114, 115, 121, 133n1, 201, 211n6 Fachinger, Petra, 130 fatherland, 66, 142 feminist translation, 122, 123 Fire Goddess, 223, 224 Fischer, Sabine, 226n8 foreign gaze, 202 foreigner, 87, 122, 124, 201, 202 foreignness, 55, 86, 103, 133, 200–201, 204, 216 Forster, E.M. , 214, 224–225 Foucauldian, 216 Foucault, Michel, 12, 45, 45n7 Freud, Sigmund, 52, 54, 109, 173–174, 182n38

fukkō, 255, 259, 261, 264, 266, 268n9 Fukushima Daiichi, 169, 190, 255, 264, 268n2, 270n50 gate, 35–36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 45, 89 gender, vii, viii, 21, 123, 125, 132, 171, 180, 186, 192, 205, 239, 247, 247–248, 257, 263 Genet, Jean, 224–225 Germany, 5, 6, 66, 91, 107, 128, 159, 186, 215, 217, 222, 226, 227n18, 246, 254, 265 Glissant, Édouard, 66 Godard, Barbara, 122, 125, 135n23 Gramsci, Antonio, 165 grapheme, 15, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40 Great Hanshin Earthquake, 266, 268n2 Halse, Christine, 135n20 Haruki, Murakami, 70 Hatoyama, Yukio, 10 Hawkey, Christian, 64 Hendrix, Jimi, 85 Hiruko, 186, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193–194 Hölderlin, Frreidrich, 66 Honey, Anne, 135n20 human ego, 173 human subjectivity, 164, 169, 171, 173, 174, 175–176, 177, 179, 182n38 human-nonhuman, 167 Hutton, Christopher, 102 hybridization, 69 identity, vii, viii, ix, 46n18, 62, 87, 126, 130, 132, 156, 169, 179, 215, 216, 222, 224, 234, 236, 236–237, 240, 245, 246, 248, 249, 260, 267 ideographic, 32n43, 35, 36, 39, 40, 42, 81, 85, 86, 95, 96n7 imagination, 19, 29, 45, 192, 200, 205, 221, 238, 264 immigration, 215, 216, 257, 260 inochi no ne, 3 Iwai, Shuji, 255 Iwakawa, Arisa, 262 Izanagi, 186, 187–188, 189, 190, 192 Izanami, 186, 187, 188, 194 Izumi, Kyoka, 70–73, 228n36

Index Jakobson, Roman, 16, 35 Jandl, Ernzt, x, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86–87, 88, 94, 95, 142 Japan, vii, 1, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 62, 68, 70–73, 82, 90–91, 117n10, 135n20, 142, 155, 158, 159, 164, 173, 178, 186, 187–188, 189, 190, 193, 194, 214–215, 246, 254, 256, 260–261, 263, 264, 265, 266–267, 268n2, 268n4, 268n9, 269n22, 269n25, 269n49, 270n50 Johnson, Barbara, 107 Jun, Tosaka, 267 Jūzō, Itami, 7 Kafka, Franz, 62, 70–73, 108, 201, 218, 234 Kafka Kaikoku, 62, 69–73, 228n36 Kamanaka, Hitomi, 255 kamikaze, 1–2, 2, 3, 5, 11 kamikaze tokkotai inochi no tsukaikata, 5 Kant, Immanuel, 42, 44 Katsue, Kitasono, 96n7 Keijirō, Suga, ix, xi, 211n6 Kentōshi, viii, 146, 155, 157, 160, 162n28, 186, 189, 190–191, 191, 192, 193, 194, 196, 254, 256–259, 259, 260, 261, 264, 265, 267, 268n4, 270n56 Kim, John, 16, 31n6 Kimura, Saeko, 259, 268n2 Kleine, Melanie, 182n38 Kochanie ich habe Brot gekauft, 64, 67, 69, 142 Koiran, Linda, 129, 134n4, 226n8 Kojiki, 186, 187, 187–188, 193 Kokoro, 9 Kokugaku, 40 Kokutai, 46n18 Kosawa, Heisaku, 173–174 Kraenzle, Christina, 19, 134n14 Kristeva, Julia, 114 Kumamoto, 173, 193 Kumo wo tsukamu hanashi (Grasping at Clouds), vii–viii Lacan, Jacques, 182n38, 205 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 109, 115 language, vii, viii–x, 2, 4, 14–15, 16, 17, 18, 19–20, 21, 21–22, 23, 24, 27, 30, 32n34, 36–38, 39, 39–41, 42, 43–45,

275

45n5, 46n8, 46n11, 46n18, 49, 50, 51, 52, 52–53, 53, 54, 55, 56, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 67–68, 69, 73, 74, 76n29, 81–82, 83–84, 86–87, 89, 92–94, 95, 96n2, 96n5, 96n7, 97n24, 102–104, 104–106, 107–108, 108–109, 110, 110–112, 113, 114–116, 117n8, 121, 122–125, 125–127, 127, 128–130, 131–132, 132–133, 133n1, 134n14, 135n20, 135n26, 136n43, 136n46, 139, 140, 140–141, 141–142, 163, 167, 171–173, 173, 174, 176, 180, 182n30, 182n38, 194, 194–196, 199, 200, 201–202, 202–203, 205, 206–207, 207, 208, 210, 210n4, 211n6, 212n40, 239, 245, 247, 250, 256, 257, 261, 263, 266–267 Lasker-Schüler, Else, 86 legal person, 30, 33n57 Lejeune, Philippe, 234–235 Lennon, Brian, 92, 93, 97n23 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 117n8, 223, 224, 226n8 “Life's First Night”, 7 Lister, Ruth, 215, 220, 227n10 Littler, Margaret, 164 Lurie, David, 32n43, 97n30 Mabuchi, Kamo, 46n14 Mae, Michiko, 19, 134n15 Mallarmé, Stephan, 17 Man’yōshū, 6 mapping, 18 March 11, 2011, vii–viii, 256, 266, 267, 268n2 Marmadashvili, Merad, 29 Márton, László, 56 Matsunaga, Miho, 97n23, 227n33, 228n64 McLuhan, Marshall, 89–90 Meine schönste Lengevitch, 64, 66, 67, 143 Mezzadra, Sandro, 19, 30, 33n57 Michiko, Ishimure, 164–165, 167, 169 migration, 28, 32n21, 115, 123, 133, 214, 216, 219, 222, 226, 257, 260, 262–263, 266 mimesis, 81, 231–232, 233, 234, 240, 241 Minamata Bay, 164, 178 Mishima, Yukio, 224–225

276

Index

Mistuo, Iiyoshi, 36 Mitsutani, Margaret, viii, 146 modernity, 45, 54, 55, 69, 70, 71, 167 Monnet, Livia, 167 monolingual, 74, 82–83, 87, 91, 92, 94, 97n24, 163 monolingualism, 68, 88, 92–93, 107, 116 Moretti, Franco, 32n24 Mori, Ogai, 185 mother tongue, ix, x, 53, 55, 66, 67, 82, 87, 92–93, 96, 102, 102–104, 104–106, 108, 108–109, 110–112, 113–116, 117n5, 117n8, 117n10, 124, 141, 163, 194, 195, 195–196, 199, 200, 201–202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 210n4, 211n25, 249, 254 mothers, x, 101, 106, 107–108, 108, 116, 172, 181n28 motion, 18, 21, 22, 85, 88, 266 Motoki, Tokieda, 41, 45n6, 46n9 Mounin, Georges, 134n4 Mozart, 53 Müller, Heiner, 119n50 Myth and Meaning, 223, 228n69, 229 Nakagawa, Shigemi, 31n5, 254, 268n5 nationalism, 3, 39, 46n8, 103, 117n15, 195, 267 nationality, 38, 39, 43, 46n18, 117n10, 215, 260 nation-state, 8, 44, 102, 111, 196, 246, 255, 259, 260, 261, 265, 266–267 Neilsen, Brett, 19, 32n26 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 15.5 15n3 Nihonshoki, 188, 190, 197n10, 197n22 Ningen Shikkaku, 9 Nishikawa, Nagao, 17.31 17.33 17n32 Noh theatre, 266 Norris, Margot, 232, 241n3 North Korea, 267, 269n25 Numano, Mitsuyoshi, 190 nuclear meltdown, vii, 268n3 Oedipus complex, 173 Okinawa, 257, 258, 259, 260 Ong, Walter, 89 optic, 35, 38, 40, 43, 262 original, ix, 15, 18, 22, 36, 43, 62, 66, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 98n47, 106, 109, 115,

116, 127, 135n23, 135n25, 135n26, 140, 141, 145, 146, 160, 166, 171, 178, 181n28, 196, 202, 207, 208, 214, 219, 231, 246, 282 Orpheus, 186, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193 Osamu, Dazai, 3, 9, 10 Pallavi, Rao, 33n49 Pamphlet for Grammar, 117n5 Panasonic, 3 Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow, 164, 165, 169 partner texts, 62 Pashukanis, Evgen, 33n57 passports, vii, viii, 215, 216, 246, 260 Pastior, Oskar, 140 performance, ix, xi, xin7, 16, 20, 61, 97n24, 129, 218, 219, 222, 223, 224, 231, 232, 233, 234, 238, 239, 241, 258 performative, xi, 62, 71, 129, 130, 171, 233, 237, 239, 240 Perloff, Marjorie, 19, 32n21 Petrarch, 83, 140 Petrovsky, Helen, 24, 29, 30 Piatigorsky, Alexander, 29 pirate, 265 poetics of translation, 61, 62, 64 Poetological, 62, 136, 163, 171, 178 Pound, Ezra, 96n7 prosthesis, 108 Proust, Marcel, 201 queering, 265 Rabenmutter, 107 Ramaswamy, Chitra, 107 Redon, Odilion, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30 Refugee, vii, 19, 215, 257, 260, 264 Ricoeur, Paul, 236 Ritter, Christine, 19 Roberts, Lee M., 76 Rokkasho-mura Rhapsody, 255 Romanticism, 6, 45, 102, 221 Rotaru, 69 Said, Edward, 266 Saito, Yumiko, 17, 54, 61, 68 Sakoku, vii, 256, 259, 260 Sami, 217, 223

Index Schengen Agreement, 215 Schleiernacher, Freidrich, 66 Sedgwick, Helen, 108 Seimei, 12 Simon, Sherry, 21 Simpson, Juliet, 27, 28 Smith, Jordan, xi, 281 Sōseki, Natsume, 9 space in-between languages, 121 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 18, 19, 179 Sprachmutter, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 163, 176 St. Augustine, 238 Stabat mater, 114 Stein, Gertrude, 86, 114 Sterba, Richard, 173 subaltern, 19, 164, 179 subjectivity, viii, 40, 42, 117n6, 117n15, 163, 169, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 179, 182n38, 221, 281 Susanne de Lotbinière-Hardwood, 122 Tabi , 62, 118n24, 201, 259, 263, 264, 265, 270n56 Tachibana, Reiko, 124, 133n1 Takaaki, Morinaka, 36, 37, 40 Takiji, Kobayashi, 9 Tamio, Hōjō, 7, 8 Tanigawa, Michiko, 129 Tanpopo, 6 Task of the Translator, 20, 22, 36 The Crab Cannery Ship, 9, 10 The Order of Things, 12 The Origins of Species, 232 Third Reich, 102 Thornber, Karen, 166 "To Edgar Allan Poe", 25 Tokyo Electric Company, 255, 264 Tomabechi, Yasuko, 255 translation, : translation theory, 122, 124, 134n4; translational fiction, 125, 134n14; translator, xi, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 30, 35, 36, 62, 66, 67, 71, 74, 89, 94, 104, 121, 122, 125, 129, 131, 134n4, 135n23, 140, 166, 203, 208, 250n3, 279, 282 travel, vii, viii, xin6, 14, 18, 20, 90, 156, 158, 159, 193, 217, 249, 250, 259, 263,

277

264, 265, 267, 270n56 travelling, vii, 86, 134n14, 207, 279 Tropiques, Tristes, 117n8 tsunami, vii, 163, 183n52, 254, 256, 264 Tübingen, 13, 58, 68, 89, 134n11, 134n15 Tymoczko, Maria, 124, 135n20, 135n26 Überseezungen, ix, 50, 56n7, 74n2, 106, 121, 122, 123, 126, 132, 133, 134n14, 135n26, 136n47, 199, 205, 207, 208, 209, 210 Ullmer, Gregory, 19, 32n22 Ulysses (Joyce), 109 Umibe no Kafuka, 69 Venuti, Lawrence, 18, 124, 135n20 Vico, Giambattista, 33n57 Vietnam, 14, 25, 90 von Flotow-Evans, Luise, 122 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 86 Wagner, Richard, 53 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 92, 93, 98n41 Weber, Samuel, 22, 30 Weigel, Sigrid, x, 58, 61, 281 Wilde, Oscar, 221, 224, 225, 238 "will to power", 232 Wolf, Uljana, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 73, 74, 139, 140, 141, 142 Womanhandling, 121, 122, 125, 131 Wright, Chantal, 124, 201, 202 Yamada, Takako, 223 Yildiz, Yasemin, 91, 93, 104, 123, 163, 178 Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, viii Yuki no renshūsei/Etüden im Schnee/ Memoirs of a Polar Bear, x, 62, 101, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 117n4, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 224, 226, 231, 233, 234, 235, 238, 239, 240, 246, 247 Yukichi, Fukuzawa, 46n18 Yuko, Kurahashi, 164 Yumiko, Saito, 17, 54, 61, 68

About the Editor

Doug Slaymaker is professor of Japanese at the University of Kentucky, USA. His research focuses on literature and art of the twentieth century, with particular interest in the literature of post-disaster Japan, and of animals and the environment. Other research projects examine Japanese writers and artists traveling to France. He is the translator of Kimura Yūsuke’s Sacred Cesium Ground and Isa’s Deluge and Furukawa Hideo’s Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure (both from Columbia University Press).

279

About the Contributors

Brett de Bary is Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. Her research and publications focus on Japanese modern literature and film, critical, post-colonial, and feminist theory in Japan. Most recently, she has co-edited and co-translated, with Rebecca Jennison, Lee Chonghwa’s Still Hear the Wound (Cornell East Asia Series, 2015), for Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation. She has edited Universities in Translation: The Globalization of Mental Labor (HKUP, 2010). Deconstructing Nationality, which she co-edited with Naoki Sakai and Iyotani Toshio, was published by the Cornell East Asia Series in 2005. Naoki Sakai is Goldwin Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at Cornell University. He also teaches in the graduate field of history and the graduate faculty of feminism, gender, and sexuality studies of Cornell University. He has published in the fields of comparative literature, intellectual history, translation studies, the studies of racism and nationalism, and the histories of textuality. His publications include: Translation and Subjectivity (University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Voices of the Past (Cornell University Press, 1991); The Stillbirth of the Japanese as a Language and as an Ethnos (Shinyōsha, 1995); Nationalism of Hikikomori (Iwanami Shoten, 2017); The End of Pax Americana and Inward-looking Society (Duke University Press, forthcoming). He edited a number of volumes including Politics of Translation, special issue of Translation, co-edited with Sandro Mezzadra (2014); The Trans-Pacific Imagination, co-edited with Hyon Joo Yoo (World Scientific, 2012); The End of Area, special issue of Ppositions Asia Critique (Duke University Press, 2019). Naoki Sakai served as the founding editor for the project of TRACES, a multilingual series in five languages—Korean, Chinese, English, Spanish and Japanese. Sigrid Weigel is director emerita of the Research Center for Literature and Culture (ZfL Berlin) Prior to that she was professor at Hamburg, Zürich, TU Berlin; Visiting Professor at Princeton; and director of the Einstein Forum. She holds several honorary doctorates (Leuven, Buones Aires, Tbilisi), received the Aby-Warburg-Preis 2016, is an honorary member of MLA, and honorary president of the International Walter Benjamin Society. Her numerous books include: Body- and Image Space. Re-Reading Walter Benjamin (1996); “Escape to Life”: German Intellectuals in New York. A Compendium on Exile after 1933. (Ed. 2012); Walter Benjamin. 281

282

About the Contributors

Images, the Creaturely, the Holy (2013); Empathy: Epistemic Problems and Cultural-Historical Perspectives (Ed. 2017); Testimony/ Bearing Witness: Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture (Ed. 2017); Grammatology of Images (forthcoming). She was the advisor of Yoko Tawada’s Ph.D. dissertation. Christine Ivanovic, PhD and Habilitation in German, Slavic, and Comparative literature, University Erlangen-Nürnberg/Germany; has been teaching at universities in Germany, Japan, the US, and Austria. She has been the 2015-2018 Berta-Karlik-Professor at the University of Vienna and the Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor of German Studies, Brown University. She has edited three volumes and written numerous papers on the work of Tawada Yoko. Gizem Arslan is Lecturer in German at Southern Methodist University (Dallas, USA). She publishes primarily on migration studies, translation studies, and writing systems. Her recent publications include contributions to fora on migration studies in German Quarterly and the DDGC Blog, as well as “Making Senses: Translation and the Materiality of Written Signs in Yoko Tawada" (forthcoming from Translation Studies, 2019) and “‘Animated Exchange’ on Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Translational Strategies” (The Global South, 2014). She is currently finishing her book project titled Metamorphoses of the Letter: From the Turkish Alphabet Reform to Fukushima. Paul McQuade is a writer and translator originally from Glasgow, Scotland, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. He specializes in modern Japanese literature, focusing on the work of the bilingual author Tawada Yōko, as well as issues in translation, gender, and the politics of language. He is the author of Hometown Tales: Glasgow (Orion, 2018) and Between Tongues (2020, Cōnfingõ). Madalina Meirosu is a visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Swarthmore College, PA. Her comparative work focuses on cross-cultural representations of suffering, illness, and death, while drawing attention to gendered perspectives on the body. She enjoys working with nineteenth-century German, French, British, and American literature, as well as with contemporary authors. Fujiwara Dan is associate professor at University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès (France) and research fellow of French Research Institute for Eastern Asia (IFRAE-Inalco). After having received his PhD from University Paris Diderot, he shifted from modern French Literature to modern and contemporary Japanese literature with a special focus on representations of family, adolescence, and childhood. His current research focuses on Japanese-language “border-crossing literature” (ekkyō bungaku), especially the works of Rībi Hideo, Mizumura Minae, and Tawada Yōko, and post-3.11 literature. Annegret Marten is an early career researcher at King’s College London and the Humboldt University Berlin, who previously received de-

About the Contributors

283

grees in Cultural Studies from Düsseldorf University. She works as an editor, translator and researcher, living and working between London and Berlin. Her research interests include contemporary theater, cultural theory, and the posthuman. Her current research focuses on poetics of monsters in contemporary experimental texts. Sachiyo Taniguchi received her B.A., M.A., and PhD from Ochanomizu University in Tokyo. She is an associate professor at Ochanomizu University. Her research interests include Japanese literature and transnational literature, with particular emphasis on the works of Yoko Tawada. She is also doing research on the relationship between authors and publishing culture. Tingting Hui is a PhD student at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), with a specialization in literary and cultural studies. Her doctoral project, funded by Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA), proposes the accent as a literary concept that has so far remained under the radar. Through an analysis of theoretical, philosophical, and literary texts that dramatize or reflect on the implications of speaking with an accent, her project aims to theorize the relation between language and body and to understand the different approaches of literature and linguistics to language. Suzuko Mousel Knott is an assistant professor of German Studies at Connecticut College and affiliate faculty to the Gender, Intersectionality and Sexuality Studies and Film Studies Departments. Her research interests include contemporary German-language literature and film, East Asian Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Media Studies. In addition to authoring book chapters and articles on Yoko Tawada, she completed a dissertation on Yoko Tawada’s works at Washington University in St. Louis and is the author of the forthcoming book Yoko Tawada: Writing in Ecstasy. Tomoko Takeuchi Slutsky is completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her dissertation focuses on animal representations in Japanese and French literature in the context of modernism/modernity. She is a recipient of Konoe-Coates ’39 fellowship. Seungyeon Kim is a PhD student in Japanese literature at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. His research focuses on Japanese literature and culture, with particular interest in the literature of post-3.11, and on the work of Tawada Yoko. He has always exhibited a keen interest in Exophony (cross-language, border-crossing or translation). In his current research, he concentrates on how literatures reflect catastrophe and postmemory. Other research projects include contemporary Korean literature and film, and comparative literature, such as the literature of "Comfort Women" and (post-)colonial east Asia history.