• Japan

“I was born into Japanese the way one is thrown into a sack,” the Japanese German writer Yoko Tawada once wrote. “That is why this language became for me my exterior skin. The German language, on the other hand, I swallowed whole and it has been sitting in my stomach ever since.”

Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, Yoko Tawada, trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, New Directions, 192 pp., $16.95, June 2025

If these metaphors at first suggest a linguistic hierarchy, Tawada went on to neatly refute the idea in an interview. Her native language is as intimate and impossible to slough off as her skin; a second language, by contrast, is consciously consumed: chewed, tasted, metabolized. Some foreign words, she noted, resist digestion entirely; they lodge uncomfortably in the throat or belly, unassimilated. Others transform into “meat” and eventually become part of her flesh.

The dance between the familiar and unfamiliar has been a running theme in Tawada’s work. In her fiction, written in both Japanese and German, she enacts a kind of deliberate estrangement, staging encounters between her narrators and the world around them that force both reader and character to see the familiar anew. In “The Talisman,” a woman misreads earrings as protective amulets. In “The Man with Two Mouths,” a group of Japanese tourists meets a German trickster, whose bilingual puns and feats of ventriloquism both amuse and baffle them.

In Tawada’s universe, misreading is not necessarily a failure—it is a generative act, a way of showing that the link between word and meaning, between sign and signifier, is always being negotiated. In her newly translated essay collection, Exophony, Tawada turns the instability of meaning into a mode of inquiry. The book charts her encounters with language not as a fixed system, but as a shifting terrain—where miscommunication can be illuminating, and where the boundaries between languages are always in flux.

“Maybe what I really want is not to be a writer of this or that language in particular, but to fall into the poetic ravine between them,” she reflects in Exophony. The book is situated in that ravine. It’s an exploration of what it means to live between languages, in a place where speech and notions of selfhood are allowed to stutter, multiply, and resist coherence.

In Exophony, Tawada is a travel writer of language itself. She is not chronicling cities, monument, or cuisines so much as excavating the codes and conventions—spoken and unspoken—that define the contours of linguistic belonging. If traditional travel writing charts spatial displacements, Tawada’s genre-bending essays illuminate how speaking (or refusing to speak) a language shifts one’s position in the cultural cosmos.

The bulk of Exophony is structured as a loose itinerary, with chapters named after cities—Dakar, Berlin, Los Angeles, Seoul, Vienna—but each place is treated less as a location with precise geographical coordinates than a linguistic microclimate.

In Dakar, where Tawada traveled for a literary conference in 2002, she encounters the phrase “exophonic writer” for the first time. It connotes not simply writing in a second language, but a mode of consciousness that thrives outside the jurisdiction of the mother tongue. Hearing it, the term clicks into place for Tawada not as a label, but a compass. “The exophonic is an adventurous concept, brimming with curiosity,” she writes. So too is this book: Its chapters meander, accumulate sediment, double back on themselves like rivers reconsidering their banks.

Tawada’s prose—translated with sensitivity by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda—is both reflective and serrated, with sudden pivots from the anecdotal to the philosophical. Tawada can move from linguistic theory to an anecdote about translating a menu in Dakar and maintain the same lightness of touch. She will quote Paul Celan, the German-language poet she most admires, and later recount mishearing a phrase on a train.

In Seoul, Tawada observes that the lingering effects of Japan’s colonial past still shape cultural and linguistic exchange—or rather, the lack of exchange. “If Japan hadn’t committed war crimes against Korea—or had at least taken responsibility for them—perhaps linguistic exchange would feel more possible,” she writes. That sentence, simple and unadorned, contains an entire ethic of speech.

Again and again, she resists the assumption that language is a neutral vessel of selfhood, refusing to entertain essentialist questions about language and identity. People often ask her what language she dreams in—as if that would unlock her “true” self. She bristles. “Implicit in the question is the assumption that it’s impossible for people to truly speak two languages,” she writes. The dream question isn’t about dreams at all; it’s about classification. Tawada, predictably, declines to be classified.

Likewise, she dismantles the myths of the native speaker as an arbiter, and the mother tongue as a kind of epistemological homeland. “Nothing good can come from a predetermined sense of community,” she warns. “I want to believe that living means creating new communities wherever we happen to be, using the power of language.” What emerges in her considered essays is a notion of language as something migratory, a flock of birds refusing to nest.

Yet Tawada is too subtle a thinker to fall into easy romanticism about linguistic displacement. She moved to Germany in her early 20s after graduating from Waseda University to work for a book distributor. Her crossing into another language was voluntary—unlike the paths of those forced into exophony by war, colonialism, or exile. “People have no right to proselytize about the joys of exophony if they have never been forced to speak in a language not their own,” she reminds us, carefully situating her own linguistic dislocation within larger structures of power.

In Senegal, she reflects on how many writers, though raised speaking Wolof, had long written in French—a legacy of colonial education and literary tradition. But she notes a generational shift: Rather than returning to Wolof alone, some writers were now choosing English, embracing its global reach not out of affinity, but as a strategic foray into a new linguistic domain. “These writers were choosing to assert their independence not by reaching for the past and their roots, but by taking a leap into a completely different, faraway world,” Tawada observes.

While publishers have still relied on the English version of El Polaco to anchor their translations, Coetzee has emphasized the importance of the Spanish version and hinted that it may more fully reflect the novel’s final form. His publishing maneuver unsettles not just the norms of translation, but the deeply held belief that a text is only fully itself in its supposed “native” language.

That belief is also the target of Coetzee’s more recent reflections in Speaking in Tongues, a book-length conversation between him and Dimópulos published earlier this year. Like Tawada, he questions the premise that language is a stable container for thought or identity, recognizing its susceptibility to power, geography, and historical weight. In what Coetzee describes as his “rootless” English—a language stripped of idiom and national flavor, “divorced from any sociocultural home”—there is an echo of Tawada’s desire to write in the interval between two or more languages.

But where Coetzee speaks of the language he deploys in The Pole as “starved … of what I think of as native nutrients,” Tawada embraces language’s deficiencies, its opacities, as sites of poetic possibility. Far from seeking to neutralize language or pare it back to a purified essence, she seeks to layer it, to magnify its aberrations. This is not the subtraction of the “native,” but a reimagining of nativeness itself. The writer “always needs to be foreign, even in their own country,” Tawada said in a 2009 interview, so as to remain capable of “not taking things for granted.” Exophony dramatizes this idea well—that foreignness is not simply a geographical condition but a literary ethic: a way of staying alert to how things might be otherwise.

Tawada never presents Exophony as a manifesto, yet in its collisions of anecdote, history, and linguistic inquiry, it advances a quietly radical theory of literature. Tawada’s essays unfold like tidepools—shallow at first glance, but teeming with unpredictable life. She understands that language carries with it layered histories and unconscious allegiances, but also that it is always slipping out from under us.

In writing from the “poetic ravine”—between nations, scripts, and grammatical systems—Tawada doesn’t seek to reconcile these tensions, but to cultivate them. Her vision of world literature is not a flattening of difference into a marketable whole, but a practice of making visible the instabilities that readers are usually trained to ignore. It’s a useful estrangement—one predicated on the ways that language seduces us, betrays us, and occasionally makes us legible to one another, if only briefly, and never without cost.