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Paper short abstract:

Tawada and On, writers of exophonic transcultural works, expose the unity of nation, cultural identity and national language as an ideology and aim at deconstructing it. They highlight not just the plurality of national standard languages, but also the diversity within each language itself.

Paper long abstract:

Tawada Yoko writes in Japanese and German and lives in an in-between sphere of languages. On Yūjū, born in Taiwan, writes her literary works in Japanese because she grew up in Japan. This incongruity of nationality and mother tongue causes her and her protagonists many problems and shows that even our globalized world is still defined by the assumed unity of nationality and the national standard language.

In some respects On already left her assumed Taiwanese mother tongue (as Tawada has always wanted). However, this in-between world proved not a free space for creativity. On the contrary, problems arose just from this polyphonic situation. For a long time, On had to justify her poor Chinese. Similar to the Japanese-Korean writer Lee Yangji (I Yanji) who had to study Korean as her assumed mother tongue (but actually a foreign language for her), On also had to learn her expected mother tongue Chinese.

Through the experience of the foreign, Tawada attempts to gain distance and thus freedom from both what is foreign to her and what is her own. The experience of the foreign becomes the medium and the method for separating herself from the binding attachment to any culture — both her own and the foreign. Through this distance she accesses a new space of freedom, creativity, and play. Here — beyond established cultural forms — it becomes possible to explore new forms of expression and writing.

This paper will analyze Tawada's and On's struggle in their respective attempts to transform their bi- or even multilingual situation into their own literary expressions. Through their works they expose the nationalistic, monolingual manner of thinking that is still prevalent even in today's globalized and multilingual world. Their literary works offer many possibilities to reflect on the complex relations between language, literature, national and cultural identity. Analyzing their writing can yield important suggestions concerning cultural (self-)translation, transcultural und transdifferent writings and heteroglossia and it can help show how these new strategies change traditional Japanese literature.