Manic Beansprouts

In the era​ of the cosmopolitan languages of power, like Arabic or Latin, it might have seemed obvious that someone would choose to write in a second language. It only became something to be thought about, to be argued over and interpreted, in the era when vernaculars became nationalist instruments, and a writer was bound to their first language not just pragmatically but politically. But still: was Adelbert von Chamisso anguished by his move from French to German after the French Revolution? It seems unlikely. Even Conrad appears to have experienced his shift from Polish to English as a simple accident of biography. It was only in the European 20th century that an increase in political and ethical exile – Nabokov fleeing the Bolsheviks, Beckett fleeing Irish conservatism, Kundera fleeing the Soviets – led to a switch of language becoming symbolic as a rebuke to both authoritarian politics and an equally authoritarian theory of literature that was limited by the myth of the mother tongue.

It’s not as though the 21st century has lacked murderous violence, and the movement of writers forced into emigration hasn’t slowed or stalled. But what’s also emerging, without this hard biographical fact of political pressure, is another kind of multilingual possibility, an attempt to invent a form of writing that’s still haunted by transitions between languages and the refusal of originals – a dream of pure mobility. In English this is visible in some recent fiction by Kazuo Ishiguro and J.M. Coetzee, but one of its most extreme manifestations is the work of Yoko Tawada, a Japanese writer who lives in Germany, and whose work is split between Japanese and German. Her first book, a poetry collection, was published in a dual German and Japanese edition in 1987. Since then she has published novels, novellas and essays in both languages, a series of works that have made language and translation the subjects of their investigations.

For a long time I’d heard of Tawada as a kind of mythical hero who could write with equal assurance in two languages. And it was almost enough for me that she existed as a rumour, a totem of linguistic chutzpah. This year, however, I’ve been reading her more and more. Three works have recently appeared in English: her early Japanese novella The Bridegroom Was a Dog (1993); her German novella Spontaneous Acts (2020); and her Japanese novel Suggested in the Stars, also from 2020, the second book in a trilogy. I had assumed that there might be big differences in the way the novels worked, as if a language would be far more powerful than a style. But there’s much less disturbance than I’d expected. Instead of operating as some ontological divide, the two languages offer different opportunities for Tawada’s style to exploit.

A precondition of Tawada’s writing is that reality and language exist in extravagantly fluid relation. At the start of The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Miss Mitsuko Kitamura, who runs the Kitamura School for children, tells her pupils a story about a princess and a dog:

Once upon a time there was a little princess who was still too young to wipe herself after she went to the lavatory, and the woman assigned to look after her was too lazy to do it for her, so she used to call the princess’s favourite black dog and say, ‘If you lick her bottom clean, one day she’ll be your bride,’ and in time the princess herself began looking forward to that day.

The ending to the tale is obscured by the children’s conflicting memories – of the dog kidnapping the princess and marrying her, or of both the princess and the dog being exiled to a desert island by her appalled parents. But everyone remembers ‘the part about the black dog obeying the lazy woman and licking the princess’s bottom clean’.

What happens next is that the story of the princess and the dog merges with the story of Miss Kitamura. A man who says his name is Taro appears before her and announces that he’s here to stay. With equally insouciant authority he slips off her shorts, gets on top of her, then flips her over and starts licking her arsehole like the dog in the fable:

The sheer size of his tongue, the amount of saliva dripping from it, and the heavy panting were all literally extraordinary; and besides, even in this sweltering heat, the huge hands that gripped Mitsuko’s thighs neither trembled nor grew the least bit moist no matter how long they held her that way, and when at last he gently pulled her up into a sitting position, the dark eyes that gazed into hers were tranquil, without so much as a droplet of sweat on the forehead or nose, and since his hair was as neat as ever, she reached out without thinking and touched it, only to find it as coarse as the bristles of a scrubbing brush, the skin beneath as smooth and strong as cowhide, and while she sat there as though in a trance, stroking his head, the man quietly, seriously, returned her gaze, until on a sudden impulse, leaving Mitsuko still naked from the waist down, he ran into the kitchen and started stir-frying some beansprouts.

It’s the texture of this chimera – the coarse hair and the smooth skin – that’s so startling. If a story were to acquire its own reality and enter your life, you begin to think, then of course it would busy itself stir-frying beansprouts.

In its comic sensual impossibility, this fantasia makes you realise that Tawada has absorbed not just a Japanese tradition of magical narration, but a German-Jewish tradition of transformation. Taro is some relation of Gregor Samsa (Tawada has translated Metamorphosis into Japanese), or even of this helpless person sketched briefly in one of Kafka’s notebooks: ‘He felt it at his temple, as the wall feels the point of the nail that is about to be driven into it. Hence he did not feel it.’ Somewhere in that blithely logical word ‘hence’ a person has transformed from a human to a wall, or from one half of a simile to the other.

An even larger presence in Tawada’s imagination, however, may be Paul Celan. She once planned on writing an academic essay on him; instead, he became the absent subject of Spontaneous Acts (published in the US as Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel). The novella is so waywardly digressive that it’s hard to describe it as having anything so definite as a subject. A research assistant called Patrik is wondering whether to go to a conference in Paris to deliver a paper on Celan. His hesitation is due in part to his having been asked to state his nationality: ‘He wrote to the organisers that he didn’t wish to participate in this conference given the emphasis being placed on national origins.’ Occupying the space between this initial rejection and Patrik’s eventual decision to fly to Paris is a series of conversations with a man who suddenly appears at his table in a café. His name is Leo-Eric Fu and he looks, to Patrik, ‘very Trans-Tibetan’.

You might think that a novelist who works in more than one language would want language itself to become conceptual, to allow for its smoother transposition across borders. But Tawada is fascinated by the materiality of individual words and enjoys their specificity. It’s there in that term ‘trans-Tibetan’, which Celan coined in one of his poems and which here seems to stand for a kind of mischling promiscuity, just as other words from Celan’s poetry are braided into the sentences (even if in the original German title the angel is chinesische, or Chinese). To Patrik, ‘the word kissing, for example, tastes like dill pickle salad.’ His ‘stomach is full of words he finds he cannot digest. This morning for breakfast he ate the word bread.’ He also likes to count the letters in words, or to find repetitions of letters – all of which, in translation, must be either recreated or abandoned: ‘Shirt and pants have five letters each, as does the brain he wore as a hat. Hat, hair and hand all begin with h.’

Celan claimed that he didn’t believe in bilingualism in poetry, and that after the Holocaust he had no way of escaping the problem of being a Jew whose first and therefore only language was German. But Patrik, who won’t be restricted by nationality, won’t accept Celan’s self-characterisation either. ‘Celan was writing in the middle of the world of multilingualism. In my opinion, he didn’t just translate, he sang in his translations. He sang in Romanian, Russian, French, Hebrew and English until he had no voice left.’ In this universe invented by Tawada, Celan becomes gentler and less anguished, an experiment in ventriloquism. His idea of the poem and the ‘meridian’ (‘I find something – like language – immaterial yet earthly, terrestrial, something circular, returning upon itself by way of both poles,’ he said in a speech in 1960, ‘I find … a meridian’) is here aligned with the twelve meridians of Chinese acupuncture, which can themselves be aligned with the twelve organs of the Kabbalah. In the same way, an emphasis on the specifics of a language isn’t meant as a refusal of transposition or translation. In this world, ideas of the original, like those of the national, become so blurred as to be irrelevant – and a person’s foreign accent can prove, as Tawada has observed, that ‘every deviation should be seen as a chance for poetry.’

In essays and interviews Tawada often meditates on why she writes in two languages. One of the explanations she gives is that to inhabit two languages affords you freedom from both, but especially from your first. ‘If you know another language, then the distance between yourself and your mother tongue can be sensed. You aren’t so much under the power of language. It’s a form of freedom, and that’s when you can become bold.’ Her latest and most extended experiment in formal bravura is her Scattered All over the Earth trilogy, two parts of which have so far been published in English: Scattered All over the Earth, first published in Japanese in 2018, and Suggested in the Stars. Its central character is Hiruko, whose country – an unnamed ‘archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia’ – seems to have sunk into the sea while she was studying in Scandinavia. She’s unable to contact her family. And so she sets out on a journey through Europe to find someone who might speak her first language, a Japanese that is never named as Japanese.

In this quest Hiruko is accompanied by an eccentric and expanding band of companions. Her best friend is a linguistics student called Knut, who sees her on Danish TV describing her desperate situation and decides to join her. Their first stop is the German city of Trier, where they meet an Indian student called Akash, who is in the process of transitioning, and Nora, a German woman. Nora tells them about her friend Tenzo, who is possibly from the same country as Hiruko, and who is currently taking part in a cookery competition in Oslo. In Oslo they discover that Tenzo’s real name is Nanook, and that he is in fact from Greenland. He mentions a man called Susanoo, working as a sushi chef in Arles, who he thinks may speak the same language as Hiruko. But Susanoo, when they find him, doesn’t speak any language at all: he is absolutely silent. Seeing Hiruko’s disappointment at this failed connection, Knut suggests bringing Susanoo to Copenhagen to meet a friend of his, a doctor who specialises in speech loss.

The first novel ends there. Suggested in the Stars follows these characters on their journey to Copenhagen and in their efforts at the hospital to encourage Susanoo to speak. It culminates in their decision not just to find other speakers of Hiruko’s language, but to travel by boat to the Pacific Ocean to see if they can find her vanished country. It’s an old-school picaresque, with each chapter narrated by a different character. The suspense should be in this search for a speaker of Hiruko’s language, but that quest keeps dissolving into indirection or hitting an exhausted dead end. Its movements aren’t so much directed by the characters as by language. A phrase can create a reality:

‘I wonder why we’ve stopped. Maybe a herd of cows is crossing the tracks. But we’re not in India, are we?’ Akash joked as he poured me another cup of chai. Just then we heard some thorny static, as if someone was rubbing the mic with a cactus, and then a voice that announced: ‘A herd of cows is now crossing the track, so we cannot move. Please wait a little while longer.’

Just as in The Bridegroom Was a Dog, the texture of this reality is conditioned by accidents of words. If a German woman considers transforming into the moon, she is blocked by the dictates of her language: ‘But “moon” is a masculine noun in German, so that’s out. What about a gust of wind, strong enough to flip the car over? No, “wind” is masculine, too.’ Or a person can be terrified by misapprehending the workings of synecdoche: ‘“Brussels is on the verge of collapse,” someone behind me said … I felt as if a hand had reached in and grabbed my heart. What if our only possible destination had been destroyed? From fragments of the following conversation … I realised that “Brussels” meant the EU.’

The possibility of desire seems to be blocked or cancelled: everyone is strangely evasive, either about their feelings for some other character or their sense of their own past. Instead, the novel rotates through a series of allusions or motifs. There’s the vanished Roman Empire, figured in the locations of Trier, Arles and Koblenz, a reminder of a previous moment in history when a language disappeared. Then, more obliquely, there is Lars von Trier and his Danish TV series The Kingdom, which takes place in the same hospital where Susanoo is now being examined for aphasia. Tawada borrows distorted versions of some of its characters: Dr Velmer is a version of Dr Helmer in the show, with his hatred of voodoo and his masonic allegiances.

But the status of these allusions is uncertain, as if Tawada admires the whimsical not just in the connections between events but also in her references. If I had to hazard a reason for the presence of von Trier’s series in these novels, it might be its interest in ghosts and mystic correspondences, its insistence on other worlds. The Kingdom would therefore offer a Northern European analogue to these characters, who are perhaps more strongly shadowed by counterpoints from Japanese mythology. At various points Hiruko seems to be an avatar of the Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu, who has two brothers: Tsukuyomi, the moon god, and Susanoo, god of the sea and stars. Hiruko says that she has no siblings, but towards the end of the novel she seems to tell the story of Amaterasu as though it is her own: ‘Though I’d said them myself, these words upset me. For this was not my own story. It wasn’t me who was abandoned, nor was I the one with two younger brothers. I was telling someone else’s story. I’d never had a brother. So why did this story slip out so easily?’ The governing logic of the trilogy, however, may turn out to be not just mythological but astral, since a story emerges in the final pages about the star Altair (known in Japanese as Hikoboshi), who is looking for Vega (or Orihime, ‘a woman, a weaver’) but separated from her by the Milky Way.

Suggested in the Stars is a novel about voicelessness, but it takes place in a universe saturated in language. It offers the possibility that what appears meaningless – like the movements of stars, or the pre-verbal sounds made by infants – is in fact just a form of language whose meaning we don’t know. And however much it’s based on the search for Hiruko’s lost language, it also tries to assert forms of connection and community that go beyond the tribal or the national. When Susanoo finally talks, he rejects the idea that he might want to go back to his so-called country: ‘But did you ever once ask me if I wanted to go back to that homeland, if I missed it, or wanted to get in touch with people there, to talk to them again? No, you assumed I must, because it’s only natural, so you all barged in – I call that nationalism.’ This seems to hurt Hiruko, because later she begins to doubt the enterprise entirely: ‘“My home country?” she asked quietly. “What country? Is there any meaning in looking for it, or not?”’ She says something similar in the earlier novel: ‘When I found out we didn’t share a mother tongue, I wasn’t disappointed in the least. In fact, the whole idea of a mother tongue no longer seemed to matter; this meeting between two unique speaking beings was far more important.’

As I read​ these novels about language and loss of language, the myth of Tawada hovered in the background. One rumour I’d heard was that she writes simultaneous manuscripts of some books, in both German and Japanese. Another was that she prefers the English translations of her Japanese work to be made from the German version, since that already represents a switch into a Western language. I don’t know Tawada’s process, but the precise nature of the original felt less and less important – as though any tremors or frissons that might occur through the movement into English would only be local, not major. The imposing fact was the consistency of Tawada’s method. And yet I began to feel that these novels of voices were written in an implacable monotone.

A charge levelled against global or world literature is that it somehow represents an analogue to the transnational movement of capital. Perhaps the idea of a literature that might somehow inhabit a space between languages or outside language remains suspect because it isn’t easy to think with or produce. Another objection, less political and more aesthetic, might be to the kind of abstraction that Tawada’s novels sometimes drift into, a surface that can feel overly clean. Certainly there were times, as I read the first two novels in the trilogy, when I worried that the effort to produce fiction that refused the idea of the national was reducing the work’s density. I missed from her earlier fiction, say, Taro’s giant tongue and bristles and manic love of beansprouts. But maybe this is to see a connection – between linguistic multiplication and abstraction – where none exists. As soon as writing tries to be literature, after all, it’s already in an invented language. And so a work’s value may be in the (translatable) images it manages to leave behind: not just a dish of beansprouts, but bombs falling like whales or, in the final sentences of Suggested in the Stars, a procession of passing feet on a pavement, observed from a semi-basement window.