Paper short abstract:

The presenter will discuss the experimental transcriptions and wordplays in Tawada’s poem collection "Dead Umbrella and My Wife" (2006) by comparing them with her other works, and analyze the constellation of figures from a gender perspective.

Paper long abstract:

Tawada Yoko's "傘の死体とわたしの妻(Dead Umbrella and My Wife)" (2006) is an enigmatic work. While the story of the two women's encounter, marriage, and attempts at artificial insemination are told in sequence, the tension of the language is extremely high, and the scene with the two women is extremely deformed by leaps, breaks, and unnatural line breaks. Tawada published a number of poems in her early German publications, which can be read in Japanese and German (translated by Peter Pörtner in the beginning). This 2006 book is Tawada's first collection of poems in Japanese.

The title of the book is already unique, and the meaning of the word "umbrella" is not explained in the book. The content clearly deals with same-sex marriage, but it is not clear whether this is legally recognized. Rather, it seems that "my wife" has various ties and that her marriage with "me" was not consummated after all. It is interesting to note that the first person "I" is placed in parentheses at the beginning of the text, and the second person "you" (used for the wife) is rendered as "穴た”. Tawada's word play with kanji has been seen frequently in her other works, but here the use of personal pronouns changes as the relationship between the two changes. In the final section, the relationship between the two figures is dissolved, and they arrive at a place where there is no longer an "I" or "you," but rather an individual, "each one of us is one of us”. The entire collection is full of energy and drama, like a single swell.

It is interesting to compare this change in personal pronouns with Tawada's German poetry collection “Die Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik”. In this collection, the personal pronouns, as grammatically interchangeable symbols, are easily removed from the objects to which they refer, while we can still catch a glimpse of the feelings toward “du” that persist in the poems.