Exophony

An electrifying new side of the National Book Award Winner Yoko Tawada: her first book of essays in English

"Tawada’s strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity, and what it means to own someone else’s story or one’s own."

"Magnificently strange. Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman."

"A polyglot’s travelogue, steeped in the joys and peculiarities of exploring a foreign language."

"The beauty of Tawada’s work is that she treats the uncertain footing of the second language learner—and of the native speaker looking back on their first language with new eyes—not as a source of anxiety, but as a source of boundless creative potential."

"Tawada explores the fertile ground of intermingled languages in this scintillating essay collection. Playful and erudite, these essays offer valuable insights into Tawada’s own writing and her readings of classic world literature."

"National Book Award–winning Tawada’s enigmatic essay collection—her first in English translation—arrives meticulously enabled by Hofmann-Kuroda, who impressively renders Tawada’s inventive linguistic acrobatics. For audiences familiar with Tawada’s recent novels, Exophony is an ideal complement, illuminating, exploring, and experiencing ‘the space between languages…the poetic ravine between them.'"

"Exophony, of course, offers no answers to the condition of writing outside one’s mother tongue…. Rather, Tawada collects luminous tales and tidbits: lanternfish illuminating unexplored depths."

"In its collisions of anecdote, history, and linguistic inquiry, Exophony advances a quietly radical theory of literature. Tawada’s essays unfold like tidepools—shallow at first glance, but teeming with unpredictable life."

"Exophony, in which Tawada curates an essay collection like a many-grafted sapling, like a museum honeycombed with mural-painted galleries, like an ocean swirling with whirlpools of linguistic potential energy."

"Careful and capacious."

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the National Book Award. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Emissary, Scattered All over the Earth, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, Suggested in the Stars, and forthcoming in autumn 2025 is Archipelago of the Sun, the final novel in her Scattered trilogy.   Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda is a literary translator. Born in Tokyo, raised in Texas, she currently resides in New York City.