
YOUR FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE
Listen to This Poet Blending German and Japanese
Why you should care
Because this mystical author is writing the future.What Tawada did was read her work in three languages: German, Japanese and English. She writes in the first two. And though perhaps one or two people in the audience understood the original, something was still comprehended. She performs, holding up images of Chinese characters to which she refers; she reads part of a poem written on a latex glove that she wears, then turns the glove inside out, where the rest of the poem awaits. Sometimes, Tawada performs her work accompanied by a pianist. She is strange. Her work says things like, “They couldn’t read my face like a text,” and she says things like, “Language is like a co-author — I have something I want to write about, and then I discuss it with language. Sometimes language wants something different.”
At age 22, Tawada left Tokyo for Germany, to study German literature and to become purposefully lost in a foreign tongue. When she arrived, she was startled by how few people there were on the streets. In Tokyo, on busier turf, her father was a bookseller and she lived in the center of Nakano District — already her life sounds like the plot of a Haruki Murakami novel. She used to make puppets out of the pages of books. She loved Franz Kafka, whom, she says, “predicted reality,” which leads one to wonder what on earth Tawada’s reality is.
In Tawada’s work, people are often alone, confused by those around them and by both the physical shapes and the sounds of words. Though comparisons are difficult, the ones that come to mind are Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges and, yes, Murakami. Tawada, who is single, tells me, “I think it’s important for women to be alone if they want to write.” She believes that is necessary to avoid the mind becoming polluted by the wants and words of others. “To find your own language,” she continues, “you must be alone — and by that I mean not language as a language of communication, but language as an art, which has a structure with many hidden meanings.”
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