Yoko Tawada

Scattered All Over the Earth and Three Streets are exceedingly original works by an artist who never ceases to challenge her readers to see the world differently. When taken as inroads into Tawada’s singular mind and larger conceptual project, both books must be not only understood as literature, but literature of an inimitable sort. We can only hope for more.

The world is close to our own, suggesting that soon our boundaries will radically change. Tawada reminds us that we, too, might become refugees from lands that no longer exist—obliterated by nuclear mishaps, rising water levels, or arbitrary lines drawn in history textbooks.

Reading Tawada you feel her subtle authorial presence, simultaneously guiding the reader ashore and casting us out to sea; paradoxically, both lead to a single destination. Where do we — along with Hiruko, Knut, Akash, Tenzo, Nora and Susanoo — end up? It can only be described as somewhere soft and strange and new.

This dystopian novel is riveting, bizarre as can be, and like nothing else I’ve ever read. I’m terrified not enough people will read it.

These stories reinvent familiar landmarks and artworks, giving readers an imaginative and hopeful way to grapple with the history that’s written into the urban landscape.

Tawada’s stories agitate the mind like songs half-remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within

Tawada’s strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity, and what it means to own someones else’s story or one’s own.

Magnificently strange. Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman.

Everywhere in the Japan of Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, strange mutations unfold. In the years (perhaps decades, or perhaps generations) since an environmental catastrophe, the basic tenets of biology have broken down. Children are born weak, with birdlike bones and soft teeth. The elderly, in turn, are youthful, athletic, seem to have been ‘robbed of death’. Men begin to experience menopausal symptoms as they age. Everyone’s sex changes inexplicably and at random at least once in their lives…Tawada has gifted us a quiet new magical realism for the Anthropocene.

A mini-epic of eco-terror, family drama and speculative fiction. Tawada’s interest is satirical as much as tragic, with public holidays chosen by popular vote (Labour Day becomes Being Alive Is Enough Day) and a privatized police force whose activities now centre on its brass band. It’s this askew way of looking at things amid the ostensibly grim premise, and a sprightly use of language that makes The Emissary a book unlike any other.

Like sashimono woodwork, Tawada needs no exposition to nail down her dystopia. The Emissary achieves a technically impossible balance of open-hearted fable and cold-blooded satire.

Only the most profound reverence, I felt, could do justice to this writer and this work.

Tawada is a great disciple of Kafka’s.

Tawada masterfully transports the reader to this place approaching transcendence, where language—so distinctly human, we suppose—brings us into imaginative intimacy with another kind of being.

Tawada asks us to see writing from an unusual perspective: it is like balancing on a ball, or hunting. Thus we’re forced to see writing not just as a cerebral art but a physical one, as well.

Tawada bears out the truth that tongues can also bring inventive thoughts to vibrant life.

What propels Tawada’s stories is the unassailable logic of dreams and fairy tales, coupled with verbal energy. Tawada’s images resonate simultaneously on different levels.

Tawada’s chilling evocations of disorientation are the peers of Paul Bowles’ most chilling stories.

When reading Yoko Tawada…one is struck less by the resemblance of her fiction to that of other authors than by its utter originality.

Tawada’s stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.

A writer of scrupulous intensity.

In Tawada’s work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one’s own.

Tawada’s stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.