Yoko Tawada writes novels in Japanese and novels in German, and she has spent her career living between the two. Born in Tokyo, she moved to Hamburg at twenty-two and has lived in Berlin since 2006, and she has built one of the most unusual bodies of work in contemporary fiction: a polar bear who writes her memoirs, a Japan that has sealed itself off after a disaster, a woman whose home country has vanished and who invents a language to replace it. English readers can follow both halves of that career, because nearly all of her books in translation come from a single publisher, New Directions, and two long-standing translators.
This guide covers the Yoko Tawada books available in English, which language each was written in, and where to start. The Emissary is also discussed on the best Japanese novels list. What follows is drawn from critics, her publishers and her own essays, since I haven’t read Tawada myself.
Where to Start
Start with The Emissary, her most honored book in English, which is short and approachable despite its strangeness. If you prefer comedy and animals, Memoirs of a Polar Bear is the more playful introduction. Readers ready for a longer commitment can move on to the Scattered trilogy, and anyone interested in language itself should go straight to Exophony, her book of essays.
It helps to know which language a book comes from. The Japanese books are translated by Margaret Mitsutani and the German ones by Susan Bernofsky, and the difference in voice is part of the pleasure of reading across her work.
Two Languages, and a Word for It
Tawada was born in Tokyo in March 1960. She studied at Waseda, then moved to Germany in 1982, where she took a master’s degree at Hamburg and a doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich, and she began publishing in both languages almost at once: her 1987 debut was a collection of poems issued as a bilingual Japanese and German edition.
She has a term for what she does, and she did not invent it. In Senegal she heard the word exophonic, used for writing outside one’s mother tongue, and it stuck to her because the alternatives, immigrant literature or creole literature, described a status rather than a practice. Her essay collection Exophony is the book where she works that through, and it explains the whole shelf: the defamiliarization, the puns that only exist between languages, the interest in accents as sediment rather than error.
The prizes reflect the double career. In Japan she has won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the Akutagawa Prize in 1993 for The Bridegroom Was a Dog, and the Tanizaki and Ito Sei prizes in 2003. In Germany she has won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, given to foreign-born writers for their contribution to German culture, the Goethe Medal, and the Kleist Prize. Finally, in the United States she took the 2018 National Book Award in the translation category. She spent four months as writer-in-residence at MIT in 1999.
The Bridegroom Was a Dog
1993 · translated by Margaret Mitsutani
In the title novella, a teacher at a suburban cram school tells her students a folktale about a princess who promises herself to a dog, and shortly afterward a strange man turns up at her door, moves in, and behaves in ways that make the folktale look less metaphorical than anyone would like. The collection won her the Akutagawa Prize, and it is the early Tawada in concentrated form: folklore, bodily oddness, deadpan comedy, and a narrator who declines to be shocked.
It’s the shortest way to find out whether her sensibility works for you, and at novella length the strangeness never has time to become a system.
Where Europe Begins
stories · translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden
An early collection of stories and prose pieces, drawn from her writing in both languages, about travel, language, and the experience of being a foreigner, with a preface by the filmmaker Wim Wenders. The title piece follows a Japanese narrator on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a journey west through a landscape that keeps turning into myth.
It’s the best introduction to Tawada’s fascination with how a new language changes the person speaking it, and to her habit of treating travel as a linguistic rather than geographic event.
The Naked Eye
2004 · translated by Susan Bernofsky
A young Vietnamese woman traveling to a youth conference in East Berlin is abducted, taken west against her will, and ends up adrift in Europe, living in Paris without papers or language and finding refuge in cinemas, where she watches the films of Catherine Deneuve over and over. Each chapter is named after one of Deneuve’s films.
It’s disorienting by design, a portrait of someone watching a world she cannot read, and Tawada wrote it in both German and Japanese, which makes it the purest example of her double practice.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear
2011 to 2014 · translated by Susan Bernofsky
Three generations of polar bears tell their stories. The grandmother, in the Soviet Union, becomes a celebrated author and attends writers’ congresses. Her daughter Tosca is a star of an East German circus, where a human trainer puts her head in the bear’s mouth. Her grandson is Knut, raised by a zookeeper in Berlin, and the novel came out of Tawada’s response to the real Knut, the orphaned cub who became a global celebrity at the Berlin Zoo.
It’s Tawada at her most playful, a book about performance, captivity, exile and writing that manages to take talking bears completely seriously, and it is also her most sustained joke about literary life: the first bear’s problem is her publisher. Bernofsky’s translation won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
The Emissary
2014 · translated by Margaret Mitsutani
After an unspecified catastrophe, Japan has closed itself off from the world. The old live on with surprising vigor, some of them past a hundred, while children are born frail, unable to stand for long or eat solid food, and a centenarian named Yoshiro cares for his great-grandson Mumei, whose name means nameless. British readers will find it under a different title, The Last Children of Tokyo.
Mitsutani’s translation took America’s National Book Award in its translation category in 2018, the prize that made Tawada’s name there. The best Japanese novels list covers it in more depth, including how it reads after Fukushima.
The Scattered Trilogy
2018 to 2022 in Japanese · translated by Margaret Mitsutani
In Scattered All Over the Earth, Hiruko comes from an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia that has vanished from the face of the earth, remembered now as the land of sushi. A climate refugee in Denmark, she teaches immigrant children in Panska, a pan-Scandinavian language she invented herself, and sets out to find anyone who still speaks her mother tongue, gathering companions as she goes: Knut, a Danish linguistics student, Akash, a trans woman from India, Nora, a German who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier, and Nanook, a Greenlander who has spent years passing as Japanese.
Suggested in the Stars continues it. The group finds a sushi chef from Hiruko’s country, and he has lost the power of speech, so an aphasia specialist becomes her last hope of hearing her own language again. Archipelago of the Sun closes the trilogy, published in English in 2025, following Hiruko onto a mail boat around the Baltic.
The first book was a National Book Award finalist. Start with Scattered All Over the Earth and read in order, because the companions accumulate and the pleasure is partly in the crowd.
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue
translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda
Her first collection of essays in English, and the key to everything else. Tawada writes about learning unfamiliar sounds with her tongue, about the traces a foreign word leaves in an accent, and about what she calls the poetic ravine between languages, the space a bilingual writer works in.
It was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2025. Readers who came to her through the novels will find the ideas behind them stated plainly here, and readers who have ever learned a second language will recognize more of themselves than they expect.
The Rest of the Shelf
Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, translated from German by Susan Bernofsky, follows a Berlin man recovering from a long illness who becomes absorbed in the poetry of Paul Celan, another writer working at an angle to German. Facing the Bridge collects three novellas translated by Margaret Mitsutani, and Three Streets gathers short pieces set in Berlin.
Worth knowing what isn’t here: Suspect on the Night Train, which won her the Tanizaki Prize in 2003, has not appeared in English, and neither have many of her plays and poems in either language.
The Full English List at a Glance
From Japanese: The Bridegroom Was a Dog · Facing the Bridge · The Emissary · Three Streets · Scattered All Over the Earth · Suggested in the Stars · Archipelago of the Sun
From German: Where Europe Begins · The Naked Eye · Memoirs of a Polar Bear · Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel
Essays: Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue
Where to Go Next
The other great fable of disappearance in recent Japanese fiction is covered on The Memory Police page. Tawada’s long engagement with German literature makes the Franz Kafka guide a natural companion, and the Hiromi Kawakami guide covers another Japanese writer who moved from the everyday into speculative fiction.
