Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Yoko Tawada's latest trilogy (2018-2022). By focusing on linguistic themes, it explores how the novelist questions national borders and belongings, while opening up alternative, utopian spaces for living otherwise as an ongoing, experimental language questioning and learning.

Paper long abstract:

Yoko Tawada is arguably one of the leading cosmopolitan writers in the world literature market: while writing in two languages, her native Japanese and non-native German, she destabilizes the privileged status of national languages and invents playful styles to have socially marginalized figures speak for themselves. In recent years, especially after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, she has been increasingly drawn to the questions of post-disaster worlds, devastated by ecological crises, natural-human disasters, and socio-political changes which are all so palpable in the contemporary world. What is unique about her literary exploration of post-disaster imagination is that she articulates the questions of nation state and national identity along utopian possibilities of language. Her latest trilogy--Scattered All Over the Earth (2018), Seduced by Stars (2020), and the Sun Islands (2022)--is a case in point: six main protagonists speak in turn and move around Nordic and Eastern European countries together, where language learning plays a central role. One female protagonist, an involuntary Japanese exile, invents an artificial language by mixing Nordic languages, which interests a Danish student of linguistics and brings them together as close companions; a young Inuit teaches himself Japanese, apparently a dying language in the trilogy where the country of Japan ceased to exist, and with his imperfect but functional Japanese, he enjoys disguising his ethnic identity; and another Japanese exile belonging to an older generation, stubbornly keeps silent, as if suffering from aphasia, and yet, once he breaks his silence, he almost hypnotizes the others with the manipulative power of his ominous words. The trilogy may be understood as a linguistic adventure, full of linguistic reflections, whose aim is to put together individual perspectives in a disjointing manner. This paper attempts to explore the ways in which Tawada questions national borders and belongings through playful linguistic exchanges that verge on nonsensical puns as well as on mythical associations; it also seeks to focus on strange cosmopolitan ties of affective love and asexual friendship elaborated throughout the trilogy, exploring how Tawada opens up alternative, utopian spaces for living otherwise as an ongoing, experimental language questioning and learning.