ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the linkage is neither casual nor coincidental but pivotal for the very form that transformation takes in key passages from Yoko Tawada's German-language novel Das nackte Auge, a Japanese version of which appeared simultaneously with a title in kanji referencing a 'traveling' naked eye. It concerns something related to train travel in particular, yet another ubiquitous motif in Tawada's many literary experiments and countless biographical descriptions of the author's arrival in Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1979, it is important to clarify that the argument here will not pivot on the trope of trains as such but on the figure of the rails. This requires attention to the rails, which appear as parallel tracks in a world of Euclidean geometry where parallel lines never meet. To put it more accurately, these parallels de-rail the critical lingua franca for thinking about twenty-first-century legacies of such regimes as historiographical categories of collective experience and comparative analysis.
