Yoko Tawada, author of “magnificently strange, profoundly empathic” novels, will give a talk in Manila on July 9. Everyone is welcome.
Yoko Tawada during a reading in front of the sculpture of Knut at Berlin’s natural-history museum. Credit Photograph from Yoko Tawada
We’re doing a Bibliophibians Reading Group for her novel, Memoirs of A Polar Bear, beginning on Monday, July 2. You can join the discussion by posting in Comments.
Then we will do an interview with Ms Tawada during her visit. Our conversation will be posted on the Bibliophibians YouTube and IGTV channels, which we will launch very soon.
Thank you to our friends at Goethe Institut and the Japan Foundation Manila for making the arrangements.
Often in Tawada’s work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one’s own. This is, of course, precisely what it feels like to speak in a non-mother tongue. It also is, in fact, often what is happening in Tawada’s stories: in one story a woman seems to be turning into a fish and in another a monk leaps into a pond to embrace his own reflection. But the mythologies mix with more familiar tropes. And often in Tawada’s work, sights or sensations we are accustomed to start to seem like traces of alien stories: “In this city there are a great many women who wear bits of metal on their ears,” Tawada writes in her short story, “The Talisman” (also from “Where Europe Begins”).
Read Yoko Tawada’s Magnificent Strangeness by Rivka Galchen in The New Yorker and Imagine That: The Profound Empathy of Yoko Tawada in the New York Times Magazine.
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