The Space Between languages
Vanessa Watkins
Heart the Lover by Lily King Grove Press, 2025.
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa-Hoffman-Kuroda, New Directions, 2025.
Lisa-Hoffman Kuroda’s translation of Yoko Tawada’s first book of essays into English is an exquisite gem, a privilege to read. Born in Japan and living in Germany since 1982, Tawada has published novels, poetry and short stories in Japanese and German since 1987. Her surreal speculative fiction concerns the erosion of boundaries between languages and cultures, a theme she carries over to her nonfiction as she pays homage to the wonders of translation and exophonic writing. Tawada has been awarded twenty-four literary prizes, including the 2018 National Book Award she shares with translator Margaret Mitsutani for The Emissary. Exophony:Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and nominated for the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize.
Relevant and illuminating to the general readership, Tawada’s first book of essays is especially fascinating to exophonic writers whose creative juices circulate between more than one language. According to Kuroda, Exophony is the author’s “own reckoning
with her native tongue after so many years of living in Germany as a kind of exile.” In Exophony, Tawada’s incantatory voice echoes the subject of her recent trilogy—Scattered All Over the Earth (2022), Suggested in the Stars (2024), and Archipelago of the Sun (2025) where a climate refugee from the vanished “land of sushi” creates her own language as she travels through a dystopian Europe.
Exophony is divided into “I: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue,” which consists of the author’s encounters with various languages during her readings, workshops, residencies and seminars around the globe; and “II: Adventures in German,” where she concentrates on specific equivalencies between the Japanese and German languages.
In her opening essay, set against the background of a symposium in Dakar, “Exophony as Common Sense,” Tawada defines Exophonic literature as “an adventurous concept, brimming with curiosity”:
If a writer decides to write in a particular language, they are under no obligation to use that language in the same way that the majority of its speakers use it. The writer is also not obligated to share the aesthetic sensibilities of their contemporaries. What’s more important is that they uncover some latent potential in the language, which no one had noticed before.
An entirely liberating perspective to me, a Brazilian, living in the United States and writing in English. Before reading Tawada, I had assumed anyone who wrote outside their native language, did it with a measure of self-doubt, which inevitably pervaded their knowledge and skillset in the chosen language. Tawada releases some of that pressure. She not only validates the exophonic writer’s personal expression, she urges them to
venture into the fluidity between languages. Sometimes all one needs is a different lens to see the entire color wheel in their work.
In “Los Angeles: The Poetic Ravine Between Languages,” Tawada welcomes the reader to contemplate a space where two mountains of language leach into the riverbed she pans to compose her transformative work:
I’m not interested in studying lots of languages. To me, it’s the space between languages that’s most important, more than the languages themselves. Maybe what I really want is not to be a writer of this or that language, but to fall into the poetic ravine between them.
Her terrain metaphor is a fresh, most intriguing way of looking at language. In
“Hamburg: Seeking the Voice,” Tawada continues to inspire, equating writing outside one’s mother tongue to “surrendering to a different kind of music,” as she addresses multilingualism and linguistic repertoire:
If anything, human beings in the modern world are repositories for countless languages that unmake and undo one another. Attempts to eliminate that mutual distortion are ultimately futile. We might even go so far as to say that the act of literary creation simply amounts to pursuing the consequences of one’s accent.
Tawada’s philosophical, and socio-political insights might find their way to the exophonic writer who feels their mother tongue may at times hold them back or even lose hold of them. She opens the floodgates of investigation into one’s own creative linguistic output.
Writing literature is the opposite of regurgitating the language we hear in our everyday lives. It is to come face-to-face with the very
brink of language and its possibilities. When you do, the wellworn grooves in your memory may be reinvigorated as the old layers of your mother tongue deform the language you currently use. (...) When you live with two languages in your head, the balance between the two never fully stabilizes. It’s possible the system of sounds we produce is constantly changing.
If the two languages in one’s head don’t stabilize, when does one language become predominant? Does one grow parallel or inversely proportional to the other? Does one language open channels for the development and understanding of the other? Does the interaction between the two prove to benefit or complicate the process of creation? The unearthed questions Exophony springs forth reverberate as the reader processes Tawada’s inquiry on language and translation, but now with the added encouragement that it is not only OK, but invaluable to pursue one’s own accent. The reader will find Tawada’s progressive insights scattered throughout Exophony, as they serve to strengthen her argument against the nationalistic belief that foreign languages are a threat to cultural identity.
Tawada’s book of essays casts the language enthusiast into a whirl of reflection on multilingualism and the constant movement between lexicons. It is such a great find that the reader will feel inclined to return to it every so often. As for exophonic writers, they will treasure it beyond the words they sculpt in that rich silt between “mountains of language.”