Yoko Tawada. Text und Kritik; Zeitschrift für Literatur, vol. 191/192 (review)

For close to fifty years the name of Heinz Ludwig Arnold, who died in November of 2011, has been firmly associated with the contemporary German literature scene, especially with Text und Kritik, a journal that the editor founded when he was twenty-three years old. A true connoisseur of contemporary literature, he was also editor of the monumental Kritisches Lexikon zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (KLG) as well as the Kritisches Lexikon zur fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (KLfG).

The very first issue of Text und Kritik, published in 1963, examined the works of Günter Grass, who at that point had written Die Blechtrommel as well as the novella Katz und Maus, but was still thirty-some years away from winning the Nobel Prize. The list of authors featured in Text und Kritik over the years is long. It includes prominent contemporary avant-garde authors like Ingeborg Bachmann (vol. 6), Arno Schmidt (vol. 20), Thomas Bernhard (vol. 43), Franz Mon (vol. 60), Alexander Kluge (vol. 85), Ernst Jandl (vol. 129), and Herta Müller (vol. 155, almost a decade before she was awarded the Noble Prize), as well as earlier modernist authors (Fleisser, Döblin, Kracauer, Lasker-Schüler, Canetti) who were reintroduced to the postwar German reading public through this channel.

Arnold had a great nose for rising (new and old) stars: the dedication of an issue of Text und Kritik to a particular author has always been the sign that she or he has actually made it (back) on the German literary scene. Issue 191/192, the last issue of Text und Kritik that Heinz Ludwig Arnold handled before his untimely death, is dedicated to the writings of Yoko Tawada (1960–). This sophisticated and highly prolific author, who has written more than twenty titles in German and twenty different ones in Japanese, has been on the radar of a select group of readers of contemporary literature since the nineties. Writing in a variety of genres (prose fiction, poetry, literary essays, and plays) and collaborating with a variety of artists, Tawada has seen her readership steadily on the rise in the last decade, not least of all because of the six hundred–odd readings that the author has given to date.

Two recent publications are markers of her growing international recognition: Yoko Tawada: Poetik der Transformationen, a hefty edited volume published by the German Stauffenburg Verlag, and a special issue of the journal Études Germaniques, based in Paris. The 191/192 issue of Text and Kritik dedicated to Yoko Tawada is similar to and yet different from these 2010 publications. Like the others, this issue contains new texts by Yoko Tawada: a short piece called “Vierundzwanzig”—inspired by Tai Chi forms—and a piece entitled “Der Handwerker,” a philosophical rumination about a typical Tawada topic: a crack in the window. The volume also comprises contributions by nine scholars of Japanese and German literature, most of whom have published about Tawada before, though voices of what might become the very newest generation of Tawada scholars (like that of Hannah Arnold, daughter of Heinz Ludwig Arnold) are included as well. Of these academic essays, those of Sigrid Weigel (“Europa als Schauplatz der Geburt des Schreib-Ichs aus dem Nichts”) and Corina Caduff (who addresses a still underexamined topic in Tawada studies: her collaboration with two musicians) are particularly thought-provoking. Inspiring also are the essays in this issue that focus on Tawada’s 2006 novel Schwager in Bordeaux: those by Bernard Banoun—editor of the Études Germaniques issue and translator of Tawada’s German writings into French—Julia Genz, and Peter Waterhouse. For a general introduction to Tawada’s Japanese writings, Matthew Königsberg’s essay (“Nachtzug nach nirgendswohin”) is valuable. For thoughts about the form of Tawada’s German writings, Linda Koiran’s essay (“Offen und ent-ortet”) is recommended. Most noticeable about this issue, though, may be the personal reflections about Tawada’s writings...