Yoko Tawada

Multilingual double-talents often convey the impression that they can do everything without trying. Yoko Tawada (1960) is so many-sided that it is hard to say ‘what she is’. She is multilingual, she publishes in Japanese and in German, but she has also studied Russian literature at one of Japan’s most renowned universities.

She has made her home in several places; at 22 she moved from Tokyo to Hamburg, where she still lives. She has won numerous literary awards in and outside Japan, mostly for her prose work. In Japan she is best known as a writer of novellas and novels. For her novella The Bridegroom Was a Dog (1993) which casually introduces an ancient legend in a modern Tokyo suburb, and which has also appeared in English translation, she received the well-known Akutagawa Prize, and in 2003 she won the prestigious Tanizaki Prize for her dream novel Suspect on the Night Train. In the meantime she obtained her doctor’s degree at the University of Zurich with a dissertation on a subject from German literature. 

In much of her work she sounds like someone feeling at home with alienating situations. Not because such situations are familiar – not to us perhaps, but to her – but rather because alienation happens to be the dominant mode of being. Tawada looks for these zones between cultures, but also between perception and experience, where language may again give shape to its own raison d’être. This makes her poetry undeniably open; open to what has to be expressed as well as to what language can do with itself.

MOSCOW

Don’t give a bouquet to the woman.

Repairing the subway escalator, her fingertips clear to the bone with machine oil.

The motion of the precision joints

ascends in the brains of the commuters.

In her damp hands

the escalator tugged once

and like a serpent      began to rise.

She stood up –

and looked up.

Far beyond the flashing shoes of

the clattering gate

a god was idly pissing.

THE FLIGHT OF THE MOON

I was singing on the toilet

when the moon

came rolling in

bare naked

on a bicycle

racing through a forest of metaphor

the moon came to meet me.

Along the road outside

a beautiful woman walks by, brushing her teeth.

On a park bench

a man in a maternity dress is drinking apple juice.

At the end of the century health is always in full phase.

A hole in the sky drops open.

Distress like the moon, a gloom like the moon are gone

and the likes

fly brightly round and round that hole.

The deep folds of the abyss smooth.

Across the now-blank suffering face

poets start to skate.

The moon... mine... another.

© Yoko Tawada

Hair Tax

After months of controversy, the new hair tax was approved. The Hamster Lovers' Guild was said to be the driving force behind the reform. The Guild had always found it objectionable that the tax levied on mammals was the same for a hamster as for a German shepherd. They proposed that the tax be recalculated in accordance with an animal's surface area. The tax agency accepted this compromise, but then chose to avoid the term "surface area," which might have been construed as discrimination against the obese. A person who speaks of the size of a body's surface is lacking in political sensibility. Thus the term "furred surface" was coined. This expression was chosen to indicate that the law applied not to human beings but only to other mammals. The lawmakers, however, overlooked the fact that objects of other sorts could be furry as well. Genetic engineering had made it possible for the surfaces of desks, chairs, or beds to be covered with hair. The upwardly mobile quickly developed new tastes in furniture. At last, even those most pressed for time could have something to cuddle and stroke that did not require excessive care or attention. The reform of the tax law clearly put aficionados of this new hairy furniture at a disadvantage, as the new rules required that any hairy surface be taxed. But they were not the only ones to see their taxes rise. One day a group of tax agents announced that according to the new law, women would be required to pay tax on their legs if they had hair on them. A handful of retired officials even began to carry out random checks at beaches. Female college students saved money by shaving their arms and legs to avoid the tax. But they left the hair on their heads alone, for head hair had been declared tax-exempt. Most male students shaved their bodies as well. Men were subjected to inspections less frequently than women, but they didn't want to take any chances. University studies were risky enough; in all other ways they wished to play it safe. One saw only the most successful businessmen and politicians and their wives lying on the beach as hairy as bears. A hirsute body became a status symbol. Poverty, on the other hand, was naked, smooth, and soft. It became fashionable among industry leaders to have their wristwatches, pocket calculators, and ATM cards sprout hair in their own natural color. The hormone treatments needed to maintain these accessories were pricey, but their cost could be written off as a tax deduction.

 Translation copyright 2005 by Susan Bernofsky.

© Translation: 2004, Bruno Navasky