ABSTRACT
The discussion in Chapter 5 returns to Tawada Yōko (b. 1960), the writer of the novel, Kentōshi, whose translation as The Emissary won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2018. As a prolific and internationally acclaimed writer of fiction in Japanese and German, Tawada epitomises the ideals of “trans-border literature” in a way that makes her inclusion here appear illogical; even counterproductive. However, in this analysis Tawada’s writing also complicates these values of “trans-border” expectations from the inside. Tawada’s book-length essay Exophony (2003) and the Japanese novel Tabi o suru hadaka no me (2004) expose moments of rupture, asymmetry, and untranslatability resonant with the writings of Sakiyama and Yi. Moreover, neither of these works have been directly translated into English. By reading these two untranslated works, this chapter attends to the complex, plural, and precarious iterations of borders that each present. Guided by the Vietnamese narrator of Tawada’s novel, whose fragmented and unreliable vision offers an alternative way of seeing, this analysis builds towards points of intertextuality and intersection that an emphasis on border crossings threatens to overlook, and which opens new possibilities for locating Tawada’s Japanese fiction within the world.
