In this monthly column, writer Sohini Basak sets out to interview contemporary writers from Asia to understand the nuances of cultural practices, power hierarchies, literary lineages, gender norms, all the while asking the question: Is there an Asian way of thinking? The hope for the column is to not only celebrate, but also sharpen our understanding of the countries geographically closest to us, and heighten our collective curiosities about the shared colonial histories, mythologies, sentimentalities and anxieties. Here’s an excerpt from her interview with author Yoko Tawada:
Writing in both Japanese and German, author Yoko Tawada often teases out the textures of inhabiting a body moving between multiple languages. She moved to Germany from Japan when she was twenty-two and lives there still. Her work — short stories, plays, poetry, essays, novels — have received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chimasso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal, and though it might matter to no one, I place my bets on Tawada receiving the Nobel Prize every year. Her recent novels Scattered Across the Earth, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, and The Last Children of Tokyo, have received a lot of attention, I would urge readers of the column to seek out the short stories in Where Europe Begins and on a late afternoon, when the sun makes mysterious shadows on your bedroom wall just after a short spell of rain, to step into the world of the delicious novella, The Bridegroom Was a Dog.
You have often written about disappearances; of languages, dialects, communities, nations, traditions, species. Would you say that it’s a theme you’ve always been drawn to?
Not “language” in general, but the playful function of the brain, without which no human being can learn their mother tongue. In adulthood, it helps us to discover new ways of thinking. I am not so interested in regional languages as a topic, but the diversity of language is important to me. This also includes old languages, sociolect and language errors of a medical nature. “State” is more of a problem than a theme Above all, I would like the state not to be a prison, but a roof. Everyone wants to have a roof over their head, otherwise they would be homeless. “Tradition” as a fixed form is of little interest to me, but everything that is carried on from the past as a memory is important.
‘The Emissary’ was first published in 2014 and we read it in 2018 in Margaret Mitsuani’s translation. I’m haunted by it because so much of the dystopian Japan you create in the book could be easily about India. Could you tell us about the first sparks of inspiration for the book?
I have been thinking about the current social situation in Japan, which already existed before the disaster in Fukushima. I was thinking about the specific phenomena in Japan. But I realized that they could also be observed in other countries. The literature sometimes helps you to look at your own situation more clearly from a distance.
In ‘Scattered All Over the Earth’, set in Europe, the Indian character Akash wants to study places that have lost speech. If I could bring your background into the equation: you’ve studied Russian literature, lived in Germany for decades, and you write in both German and Japanese. Your stories are set in imaginary or real cities in Asia and Europe. Would you say there might be an Asian way of thinking and speaking?
For me, “Europe” is fiction. But I appreciate good fiction. Europeans have been trying to build this fiction for hundreds of years. You can also call it a vision. There have been problems like orientalism, but at least from today’s point of view I think this fiction and the EU based on it is a better idea than any imperialism or nationalism.
It is not easy to build “Asia” as one’s own vision. Above all, you have to know what we get out of it. At the end of the 19th century, Japan had the idea of forming a great Asian empire and this idea did nothing, even harmed the neighbouring countries. I have lived in Europe for 40 years and what I hear about “Asian” thinking is often clichéd or esoteric. If there is a meaningful Asian way of thinking, it should be one that enables stable peace in Asia.
How has your relation to writing about animals evolved over the years? In earlier stories, I found a slippery-ness, for example, in the scales that appear on a character’s body in ‘The Bath’ or the rumours that animate the village in ‘The Bridegroom Was a Dog’. Recently, the animals have become more solid. In ‘Memoirs of a Polar Bear’, the polar bear narrator remarks: ‘Now language remained at my side, touching soft spots with me.’
Your description of the change in the role of animals in my literature is very interesting to me. Thank you for that. In the past, I could feel more physically how the boundary between animal and human could disappear. Today, people and animals, but also plants and stones, are “storytellers” for me. They tell stories in a language that I cannot understand, and this fact changes my languages. The animals can be a co-narrator or a second narrator in the shadows, or the narrator of my soul.
The book critic Parul Seghal once reported how you sometimes begin a performance by reading out a poem from a white glove. I was instantly reminded of the American cover for your forthcoming novel Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel. What role does poetry play in your everyday life? Are you still writing poems?
I continue to write poetry, in Japanese and in German. I feel I write as much poetry as prose. Because with poetry you try to achieve the most radical form of language. So the everyday form of communication stops, and language goes hand in hand with music and art on a journey into uncertainty.
Yoko Tawada recommends five Japanese books she wishes were available in translation:
Sohini Basak’s first poetry collection We Live in the Newness of Small Differences (2018) was awarded the International Beverly Manuscript Prize. Other honours include a Malcolm Bradbury Grant (2015), a Toto Funds the Arts award (2017), a Vijay Nambisan Sangam House fellowship (2022) and a Speculative Literature Foundation grant (2024). Currently she serves as the poetry editor at Words Without Borders.
