Beyond “transborder”: Tawada Yōko’s Vision of Another World Literature

Abstract

This article critically examines transborder literary approaches that seek to renegotiate the position of Japanese literature within the world. Studies of transborder fiction have emerged in recent decades as a means of breaking down the boundaries of Japanese literature that assume agreement between a writer’s nationality and the language of her text. However, by following the suggestion made in David Damrosch’s influential book What is World Literature? (2003) that works of world literature gain in value through translation, transborder criticism betrays a desire to promote Japan’s national literature in a globalizing literary context. This article’s more critical view reveals that despite their calls for greater diversity, transborder approaches threaten to turn away from history and overlook the migratory flows of languages and texts already extant within Japanese literature. This critique focuses on the writer Tawada Yōko, whose prolific body of work in Japanese and German appears to epitomize the transborder ideal yet frequently challenges its assumptions. While Tawada’s essay collection Ekusofonī: Bogo no soto e deru tabi Exophony (2003) offers a prescient critique of contemporary trends, the Vietnamese narrator of her novel Tabi o suru hadaka no me (2004) invites us to peer through the gaps opened between this Japanese text and its German counterpart, Das Nackte Auge (2004), and witness hitherto unseen intertextualities to the novelist Thu Duong Huong. As these texts foreground moments of rupture, asymmetry and untranslatability, they implore us to think about the problems of transborder and translation differently. In so doing, they also envisage alternative connections between Japanese literature and the world.