Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1960, Tawada first came to Germany when she was 22 years old, settling in Hamburg. For the past two decades she has been prolific in both Japanese and German, earning critical respect for her writing in both languages. At first she wrote only in Japanese, even when she lived in Germany. Her long-time collaborator and translator, Peter Pörtner, discovered her work in Japan and organized to have her published in German translation. Following the success of her first two books, Tawada began to publish original poetry and prose in German. Today, she is one of the few active authors able to produce literature of an extremely high quality in multiple languages. It is possible to describe her as a translingual author, as she moves agilely between Japanese and German. However, Tawada herself would likely object to such a distinctions, precisely because of her fluid concept of language.

The Writing Project: Self-Invention

Tawada’s first-person narrators are almost always unnamed Japanese women living in Germany. For this reason, the reader is quick to assume that the protagonists are Tawada herself. Such an assumption can be dangerous with most authors, but for Tawada this illusion is an integral theme. It is in this way that the reader is disoriented and given an awareness of the distance between any author and his/her subject. Furthermore, Tawada writes her own fictional biography as a translingual woman author, her own legend of sorts.

In Tawada’s works, the act of writing is portrayed as the result of over-categorization. Having been forced to play so many different roles, both as a woman and as a person living in a foreign language, her narrators loose their sense of self. They write as instruments of language, history and culture, transcribing and translating the fragments that they encounter. As Tawada’s narrators experience this process, it can be assumed that Tawada does as well. On some level, all who write, not only women migrant authors, undergo this loss of self in the process of writing.

Tawada’s first two books to be translated and published in the German language were the collection nur da wo du bist, da ist nichts (only there where you are, there is nothing, 1987) and the short novel, Das Bad (The Bath, 1989). The first story in the book, nur da wo du bist, da ist nichts, is entitled Bilderrätsel ohne Bilder (Picture-Puzzles Without Pictures). This narration is delivered within the frame of a journey. The narrator is traveling by train from the city H to R (possibly Hamburg and Regensburg). Her purpose is to visit an exhibit of children’s books, but the narration begins while she is on the train and does not end until she has visited a marionette theater in R. The story of the trip is woven together with a story from the personal past of the narrator. Both stories have more significance than their content alone would convey. In the city of R the narrator encounters almost all of the motifs found in the chapter in Tawada’s doctoral thesis in which she analyzes Walter Benjamin’s writings on children’s books and dolls. In other words, the narrator’s perusal through the city traces the route of Tawada’s reading of Benjamin. The story within the frame, which recounts the narrator’s experiences with an ex-lover and a mysterious woman, has almost the same plot as Tawada’s short novel, Das Bad.

Within her own body of work, Tawada tells variations on the same story, metamorphosing a myth. In this manner, she establishes a legend of a Japanese woman who becomes an author in the German language.

Das Bad: The Loss of Self

This novel follows the mysterious and troubling experiences of the first-person narrator as she undergoes various linguistic and physical transformations. Beginning as a simultaneous translator, she looses her tongue to the ghost of a woman who died in a fire. As she has begun to grow scales on her skin, she seeks employment as a fish-woman in a circus. She eventually winds up as a typist, transcribing words that are dictated to her by a dead woman and translating from the language of the dead to the language of the living. The demand for her work is so great that she can get no rest. Finally, her boyfriend builds her a coffin in which she can get some sleep. She has lost her tongue, so she cannot work as a translator anymore. She soon also forgets the alphabet and she cannot type. After giving up her cosmetics, she also no longer appears in photographs. At the end of the novel, the narrator herself has become a transparent coffin.

The themes of Das Bad include the objectification of the Orient, second language acquisition, loneliness, motherhood and general questions of power and women’s bodies. All of these themes relate to each other within the context of the narrator being overcome by external forces. In order to write, the narrator must not seek empowerment. On the contrary, she must loose all control over her body, particularly over her linguistic facilities.

The narrator in Das Bad suffers from the multiplicity of roles that she is forced to assume; in this way, she looses her sense of self-determination. Her boyfriend, Xander, teaches her the German language, thus possessing her tongue as his own. When he photographs her, she does not appear “Asian” enough, so he covers her face in heavy makeup. The narrator visits her mother in Japan, who does not recognize her because she looks too much like a Japanese woman from Western films, that is, she has come to embody too well the Western stereotype of Japanese women. The narrator tries to conform to the ideals of others, but in the end she must give up and transform into a transparent coffin.

While any summary of the novel will sound chilling and pessimistic, this is not what is conveyed. To interpret Tawada’s imagery, one can refer to an essay that was published in the collection Talisman (1996). In the essay Erzähler ohne Seelen (Narrator/s without Souls), Tawada argues that the best narrators are the dead. Tawada quotes Walter Benjamin, in saying that the two types of storytellers are those who have undergone a long journey and those who have stayed in one place for a very long time. Tawada points out that the dead are on a very long journey, without ever leaving the place where their body lies. It is a particular gift to be able to hear the dead, to be able to translate, like the narrator in Das Bad, from their language into the language of the living.

Within the context of Women’s Studies, the novel’s conclusion is also positive, because the narrator’s creative output consists of bodily communication. Narrating from the body involves the reclaiming of a woman’s body from the projected wishes of men, using it instead as a form of communication. Tawada describes this as a process of listening to her own cells.

What is also important to note in the plot of Tawada’s novel is that the force that occupies the narrator is that of a woman. The narrator, earning her living as a simultaneous interpreter by day, sleeping with her photographer/German teacher boyfriend at night and peeling the scales off of her body every morning, was living within the context of a male-dominated society. It was then a dead woman who stole her tongue from her, setting off the course of events that ended in her transformation into a transparent coffin. In this way, the Japanese-German author is distinguished as a woman author, writing from a collectivity of women through her body.

In her analysis of the novel, Sabine Fischer sees the fate of the narrator as the last possibility of escape from the stereotypes and categorizations imposed upon her both as a member of a particular ethnic group and as a woman. However, it is not only the patriarchal society that limits the narrator, but, in Fischer’s opinion, also the Western feminist movements. Fischer points out that many European and American feminists have been quick to label women in other cultures as oppressed and helpless. Within an interpretation of Das Bad, this would mean that the Japanese-German woman writer is both subjected by and indebted to the Western feminist movements. Although these movements worked to increase the presence of women authors in the literary canon, they did so by inventing and propagating the image of a perfectly victimized Oriental woman as a contrast to their own ideals.

Puzzle Pieces

At the beginning of an analysis of the narrative Bilderrätsel ohne Bilder, it is important to note that the entire story begins with a displacement: the train ride from H to R. In this way, the narrator simulates her previous immigration to Germany. It is noted in almost every biographical background written on Tawada that her first trip to Europe in 1972 was taken by way of the Trans Siberian Railroad. Considering Tawada’s blurring of the border between fact and fiction, it is interesting to point out that the trip from H to R and the trip from Japan to Europe both involved trains for the narrator/Tawada.

In the essay, Erzähler ohne Seelen, Tawada claims to have read that according to a Native American legend, the soul cannot move as quickly as the body can in our contemporary modes of transportation, for instance airplanes and trains. Tawada then muses that she must have lost her soul during her first trip to Europe on the Trans Siberian Railroad. While the loss of a soul is considered to be a terrible experience in the Western tradition, Tawada rejects the idea of a single soul and its necessary habitation within the human body. She asserts that the soul is independent of the person. Elsewhere she writes, “I have many souls and many tongues.” The displacement of the author and either the loss of a soul or the acceptance of a multiplicity of souls becomes a precondition for development as a writer. This, in turn, is best accomplished by traveling.

The story recounted within the frame narrative of Bilderrätsel ohne Bilder portrays in flashbacks the narrator’s relations with a man named K and a woman named Eva. A connection can quickly be made between K and the protagonists of Franz Kafka’s three novels, named Josef K., Karl Rossmann and, simply, K. Eva is perhaps in reference to the biblical Eve. There could be multiple reasons for these references. Eva is the parallel figure to the dead woman in Das Bad, in that she overpowers the narrator’s body. Thus a connection with the first woman of history, who convinced Adam to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, is appropriate. Kafka’s protagonists are often exaggeratedly physically affectionate, and it is a lack of physical affection that angers the boyfriend K in Tawada’s story. Additionally, the idea of the author’s body becoming incorporated into the text is important for Kafka. This thread of the story is strung with vivid descriptions of physical movement and contact. In fact, the triggers for the narrator’s flashbacks, within the context of the framing travel-tale, are often the mention of a body part or function: sneezing, ears, thirst and vomiting, or placing a hand on an object.

Although the thought of physical contact transports the narrator to the past, the narrator herself describes having had difficulty with K’s physical intimacy. This is related to her love of books, as she explains how her passion is for the surfaces of books rather than their content. She seeks out books in languages that she cannot read in order to enjoy flipping through them. Once she becomes too intimate with the content of a book, it becomes dead to her. For this reason, the narrator buried her books in a park in Tokyo and decided to come to Germany.

Her attraction to K. is of a similar nature, partly because the narrator sees similarities between K’s body and books. She feels sorry for K’s ears, observing that they look like wet, open books. The transformation from body into book, the incorporation of the human body into a body of text, is mentioned again later, as the narrator is scolded for touching a book at the exhibition. Upon hearing the admonition, the narrator immediately asks herself when she started to feel uncomfortable being touched. She reacts by identifying her body with the body of the book. K’s body is also a book, but he is upset when the narrator treats his body like she treats books. Reciprocally, the narrator wants K to view her body as a book, but he complains that he can never read what she is thinking.

The story begins with the narrator’s relationship with K, but the more important figure in the narrator’s life is Eva. The narrator recounts the three times that Eva touched her: first to help her throw up when she was sick, then to trace the lifeline on her palm, and finally to apply some absurdly colored lipstick onto the narrator’s lips. By being counted, these three intimate touches become heavy with significance, like three questions that must be answered by the rest of the story.

The narrator’s final encounter with Eva takes place after the narrator has broken up with K. She calls Eva, but finds herself to be speechless. Eva tells her to go to an antique shop in the street in which they first met. The narrator knows for a fact that there is no antique shop in that street. It becomes clear to her that she needs to go to a nonexistent antique shop in the street, and in the nonexistent shop she meets Eva. Eva tears out the pages of a book, and the pages fall down on the author, causing her no pain but giving her great wounds that knock her to the ground. Eva bends over her, pulls off one of her fingers and bites off her earlobe and frames it on the wall. By possessing her body and making this body into art, Eva has helped the narrator turn into a writer. In this manner, the narrator in Bilderrätsel ohne Bilder undergoes the same transformation as the narrator in Das Bad.

Translation as a Method: The Hopeful Future of Shards

After the narrator has finished viewing the children’s book exhibit she visits a performance in a marionette theater. The story performed is that of a puppet named Annette, who is constructed by a talented watchmaker. Annette becomes a successful businesswoman because she never gets sick and never needs to sleep like regular human beings. Yet her only friend in life is a frog, because she does not know how to love. The narrator leaves the show early because she guesses that the ending will not please her. The play will conclude, she imagines, with a typical fairy tale ending: the puppet will learn how to love, and she will be transformed into a human being. Outside of the theater the narrator sees the puppet being dismantled and the pieces being carried away down the road by a procession of frogs. She imagines that the frogs will deliver the pieces to a gifted clockmaker, who will put the pieces back together as a new puppet. Although the narrator’s version ends in the death of the puppet Annette, it allows for the creation of future stories. Destruction and dispersion occur in order to facilitate future literary construction.

On a broader scale, the stories that are told in the narrative Bilderrätsel ohne Bilder can all be seen as pieces of other stories that have been fit together within the context of a journey. As the narrative comes to a close, the stories break apart into shards, with the promise that they will come together again to form other stories in the future. This is similar to the way that Das Bad and Bilderrätsel ohne Bilder have so many common elements. It could almost be said that Das Bad functioned as a prequel to Bilderrätsel ohne Bilder.

Tawada uses this technique often, incorporating elements from her previous work into her newer stories or altering a story significantly in the process of translating from Japanese to German or vice versa. Many of her texts have Partner texts in the other language, with similar elements but differences in length, content or even in genre.

The image of scattered shards fitting together is a metaphor used by Walter Benjamin in his essay, Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers (The Task of the Translator). There, Benjamin describes the translator’s role within the context of a broader concept of language. Benjamin asserts that it is not necessarily so important to convey the content of a work in its translation. Rather, a translation should convey something within the work that was not apparent in the language in which it was originally written. Something new should be revealed about a literary work every time it is translated. In this way, through the translation of a work into as many languages as possible, the language of mankind comes closer to expressing what is inexpressible within the literary work. Benjamin calls the expression of this inexpressible reine Sprache (pure language). Through translation, shards of the dispersed languages of the world fit together like the shards of a broken vessel. The complete vessel represents pure language.

This phenomenon was precisely what Tawada observed when she collaborated with Peter Pörtner on nur da wo du bist da ist nichts. She has spoken of her exhilaration as she brought each poem to him for translation, eager to see what she would learn from her own work through its translation into German. Tawada’s extensive alterations to her works when she translates them herself or her setting of the same plot in multiple contexts can be seen as an extension of Benjamin’s translation theory.

Homage is once again paid to Benjamin’s theories on language and translation in the fact that the book in which Bilder ohne Bilderrätsel is published displays the Japanese and German versions of narratives and poems side by side. This shows a respect for the fact that it is more than content that is conveyed through a translation.

Tawada has successfully established the legend of the Japanese-German woman writer in her writing project: the narrating woman travels from Japan to Europe by way of the Trans Siberian Railroad. She settles in Hamburg and learns the German language with the help of a German man, who becomes her lover. Objectified by him, she seeks out powerful female figures, who overpower or cripple her. In this state of powerlessness, she is capable of channeling the languages objects and of the dead. She transforms into a writer. The facts of Tawada’s own life are less important the myth she has created to represent her life. In accomplishing this, Tawada has emphasized aspects of the general condition of all authors and particularly that of MigrantenautorInnen. Her resistance to being labeled is expressed by several of her colleagues and her approach to being a woman author contributes to the general discussion of woman authors in Germany.