The Space Between languages
VanessaWatkins Heart the Lover by Lily King Grove Press, 2025. Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, by Yoko Tawada, translated by Lisa-Hoffman-Kuroda, New Directions, 2025. Lisa-Hoffman Kuroda’s translation of Yoko Tawada’s first book of essays into English is an exquisite gem, a privilege to read. Born in Japan and living in Germany since 1982, Tawada has published novels, poetry and short stories in Japanese and German since 1987. Her surreal speculative fiction concerns the erosion of boundaries between languages and cultures, a theme she carries over to her nonfiction as she pays homage to the wonders of translation and exophonic writing. Tawada has been awarded twenty-four literary prizes, including the 2018 National Book Award she shares with translator Margaret Mitsutani for The Emissary. Exophony:Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and nominated for the Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize. Relevant and illuminating to the general readership, Tawada’s first book of essays is especially fascinating to exophonic writers whose creative juices circulate between more than one language. According to Kuroda, Exophony is the author’s “own reckoning