Life is a Game of Go: The Enigmatic Literature of Yoko Tawada

(New Directions.)

“It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.”

--Kenzaburo Oe

Yoko Tawada’s beautiful and strange literary work is totally saturated with mythology, both the public and the private sort, mixed together through a frantic postmodern blender to shake up a truly startling smoothie of poetic insights about the odd sensations that accompany our situation as human beings in a weary century. True, Tawada’s novels, often written in both German and Japanese before being deftly translated into the only language I can access, are what we might quaintly refer to as an acquired taste. But then, so is sake. But sake, once tasted, and whether hot, chilled or room temperature, alters our senses forever after. And so it is with Tawada’s marvelous and marvel-filled stories. They have the capacity to inalterably change the open-minded reader, in the way that only great literature can, and after reading her surreal, dreamlike reveries about our relationship to words and language, most other literary beverages feel slightly bland by comparison. So we won’t compare them, any more than we would compare sake to tapwater.

Yoko Towada. (Photo: Nina Subin)

As is customary with me, I encountered her recent novel, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, the first I had read by her, by pure chance, if there even is such a thing. My wife, Professor Mimi Gellman, happened to bring home a handful of books she acquired from her university library, announcing, “This one might be for you.” Indeed it was. I was staggered from the opening sentence onward, continued unabated with the story (it’s a fairly short novel) until finished, and then immediately embarked on a protracted binge of her other works. Its incredible style is almost impossible to describe and its convoluted plot almost too challenging to explain. Almost, but not quite. Though attempting to do so might risk diluting some of the heady foam of her unique thought patterns and the magical writing the results from her rarefied perspectives, I’ll do so anyway. Soon enough.

I think it’s fair to say that the strikingly prolific Yoko Tawada was a precocious author, perhaps even a prodigy. She was born in 1960 in Nakano,Tokyo. Her father was a translator and bookseller who appears to have planted the obsession for the way words shift meaning from one language to another in his daughter early on, who ended up being trilingual (Japanese, German, English) as she explored the foggy edges of literature where dreams collide with reality. At only 19 years of age she set out on her own, riding on the Trans-Siberian Railway to visit Germany, where she studied Russian literature and lived in Hamburg, eventually gaining her Masters Degree in German literature, and finally her Ph.D. from the University of Zurich in 2000, before settling back in Berlin, where she presently resides.

Tawada’s experimental excursions into writing began in 1987 with the publication of Nothing Only Where You Are, a book of poems released in a German and Japanese bilingual edition. Her first novel, Missing Heels, received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, at which point she commenced a vertiginous round of perpetual writing projects, and a phenomenal array of critical attention started coming her way, with a flood of prizes, grants and awards. In 1993 she won the Akutagawa Prize and then received her first major public recognition by winning the Lessing Prize Scholarship. The legendary New Directions Publishing firm took her on when it reissued the Akutagawa Prize-winning novella in 2012 under the English title The Bridegroom Was a Dog, and since then she hasn’t looked back. She had no time to look back, in fact, with a flock of publications following in rapid succession that had initially brought her to the attention of the storied New Directions editors.

1996 saw the release of Legend of a Saint, when she won the Adelbert Von Chamisso Prize, a German literary prize for non-native speakers of German, and The Man With Two Mouths came out in 1998, after she became writer-in-residence at the Max Cade Foundation at M.I.T. She then won the Izumi Kyoka Prize in 2000, the Tanizaki Prize in 2003, and the prestigious Goethe Medal from the Goethe Institute for meritorious contributions to German culture. In order to relax, she became writer-in-residence in Stanford University’s Department of English. In 2011 she released Memoirs of a Polar Bear, which won the Noma Literary Prize, and the 2012 Yoiuri Prize. 2013 brought her the Erlander Prize for translating works between Japanese and German. When the translation of Polar Bear was released by New Directions in 2016 it won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

As a rule I don’t pay much attention to prizes per se, but her achievements are so stellar, and so speedy in arriving, that I find it imperative to acknowledge them. Especially, perhaps, since it would not surprise me one little bit if one day I end up reported that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and profiling whatever upcoming book of hers managed to put her over the top of the pops. But it’s not just one book or another that has singled her out, as singular as many of them are, but rather the cumulative effect that takes place when one reads them as a complete metaphysical menu of rich dishes. Absorbing them, albeit a little compulsively, one after another in chronological order seems to be the most rewarding exercise. A good place to start your reading procession might be her 2014 novel Kentoshi, a near-future dystopian story published by New Directions in 2018 under the title The Emissary, which sets a suitable tone for approaching her unique style as a kind of midway point between everything before it and everything after it.

(New Directions.)

But the hits just kept on coming: in 2016 she received the esteemed Kleist Prize and in 2018 was awarded the Carl Zuckermayer Medal for services to the German language. And in 2022, her novel Scattered All Over the Earth was a National Book Award Finalist, and was also the daring opening salvo to a trilogy which would include Suggested in the Stars in 2024 and conclude with Archipelego of the Sun in 2025. In between these efforts she won yet more prizes, of course: the Prix Fragonard Award and Mainichi Publishing Cultural Award in 2023, as well as the Prize of the Japanese Academy of Arts and membership in the Academy of Arts in Berlin, both in 2024. And that year was also the release date for the novel that initially got me started on my addiction to this gifted teller of tall tales, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. This was the book that forever altered my perception of what a novel could be, and what it could do.

It was most likely not her intention and she probably couldn’t care less, but this novel in particular shares a deep stylistic vibe with many of my favourite postmodern authors, starting with the earliest ones, William Gaddis, and John Barth, then moving through the dense verbal foliage of John Hawkes and Thomas Pynchon, until finally touching the wayward shores of the late American titan, David Foster Wallace. This is not meant to compare them at all, since none of them, Tawada included, can be compared to anyone other than themselves. But there are an emotional temperature and linguistic finesse that they all share nonetheless. Indeed, Tawada has also indicated a gratitude to two other major literary influences, Franz Kafka and the poet Paul Celan, another favourite writer of mine who I think ranks as possibly the most important and influential author of the 20th century.

She has achieved a sort of multiphrenic status among the cult of postmodern thinking, with scholars who study her achievements adopting the term exophony to characterize the condition of writing in a non-native language. (The most famous exponent of this state is Samuel Beckett, an Irish author who wrote mostly in French.) Like Celan, and Pessoa too, she is also known for using neologisms frequently in order to capture some of the strangeness of our times, especially the isolation of the post-Covid period, and the erasure of formerly stationary cultural borders in the digital era. But having set a tone by charting the cartography of some of her influences, I would be remiss if I didn’t also highlight the crucial role played by writers from her own culture who inspired her, especially Yukio Mishima (Confessions of a Mask), Osamu Dazai (No Longer Human), and Kenzaburo Oe (Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness).

Thus we now gingerly approach the subtle weirdness and inexplicable charms of Tawada’s Covid lockdown tome, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, a rarefied study of isolation, border and boundary breakdown, non-linear narrative and embodied dreamtime travel which challenges even reader/writers like myself who relish describing the impossible, usually via ekphrasis. The novel unfolds through the third-person narration of Patrik, a literary researcher and specialist in the obscure poetry of non-native German-Jewish writer Paul Celan, about whom Patrik, who also refers to himself as “the patient,” will deliver a paper at an upcoming conference, if he decides to attend. The patient is beset by a variety of personal challenges and character quirks, at one point confiding to the reader, “People say I’m sick because I can simultaneously leave the house and stay home.” Eventually the reader learns to accept the nebulous fact that he may either be sheltering in place or may be leaving home to go to a certain café every day, or both.

The amorphous plot involves Patrik’s ambivalence about discussing Celan at all, especially since it involves travel during lockdown and encountering other people. One of the people he does encounter, if indeed it’s not merely happening in his overactive mind, is a friendly stranger, Leo-Eric Fu, who approaches his café table and begins chatting intimately about Celan and his cryptic poetry. Key to the fluid narrative is the fact of Tawada’s own status as a parallel non-native German author who clearly believes that the meaning of human existence and the austerity of Celan’s poetry (particularly the stunning neologisms contained in Breathturn) are synonymous. Eventually we realize that language itself, and also the art of translation, are the principal characters in the story, along with Patrik and his potentially imaginary friend. The other palpable narrative character, in a very poetically delivered sense, is the anxiety of postmodern life, which is enlarged greatly by the isolation inherent during a pandemic.

The reader knows something unusual is happening when we are taken in and out of first-person remarks mixed with third-person content interchangeably and with the almost perpetual flow of an ironic faucet, as when Patrik, AKA ‘the patient’ observes, “Time can’t be measured with the senses anyhow. Our sense of time is always imaginary. Timelessness, on the other hand, is definitely a real sensation. It began when all the concert halls closed. Eventually the program contained only broken promises.” The tenor of Tawada’s style also often echoes the tone of the poet who influenced her and whose quirky insights into mortality have also moved so many of us. As Tawada’s translator notes about the puzzling title: 

Trans-Tibetan comes from Celan’s poem "When I Don’t Know, I Don’t Know." The diamond-hard density of Celan’s lyrical lines is his technique of compounding and compacting language into often surprising portmanteau images, estranging words from their inherited meaning and thereby opening new avenues of association and interpretation. It takes only a passing knowledge of poetry though to understand Patrik’s quietly ironic sense of humour—one of the most enjoyable aspects of the novel.

Needless to say, the main character never does deliver his academic paper to the international conference on Celan’s poetry he has been asked to attend, not because of the pandemic really but more because he firmly believes that the conference doesn’t deserve to hear him speak about Celan’s melancholy magic. He has the classic disdain for sharing which marks him as a solipsist at heart, which might be why his sheltering in place has been no great burden for him. He was, like Celan in real life, already sheltering in place anyway. And one of my favourite things about this quietly brilliant little dream excursion of a novel is that it might accidentally bring more readers into the hermetic orbit of Celan’s gorgeous poetry via Patrik’s peculiar obsessions. Celan, also an acquired taste, though more like armagnac than sake, would have loved the fact that in the end the whimsical character of Tawada’s Leo-Eric Fu may have actually been a real angel, the kind that very few of us ever meet in what we imagine to be real life. When Fu finally spreads his wings, the game board is upended in a way that feels like Captain Ahab’s encounter with Moby-Dick.

For those of us who have fallen under the spell of Yoko Tawada, we can celebrate two things this year, the concluding novel in her trilogy and this summer’s release of her first book of non-fiction essays in English, appropriately titled Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue. And on a personal note, having blundered into openly declaring my prediction that she will soon add to her already impressive horde of prestigious literary awards by winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, I promise to report on that triumph when it occurs, probably in the near future.

(New Directions.)

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.