Scattered Leaves: Artist Books and Migration, A Conversation with Yoko Tawada

The following conversation centers on a rare book: Ein Gedicht für ein Buch or A Poem for a Book (1996), a collaboration between Yoko Tawada (1960–), author, Stephan Köhler (1959–), photographer and papermaker, and Clemens Tobias Lange (1960–), book artist and designer.¹ Robert Rainwater, former curator of the New York Public Library's Spencer collection which houses one of the 45 editions, described A Poem for a Book as "a perfect marriage between the Japanese handmade book and the more recent European tradition of livres d'artistes," and lauded it as "a paean to the act of reading and to the art of the book."² Recently, the book was prominently displayed at the New York Public Library as part of the exhibit Ehon: The Artist and the Book in Japan.

Yoko Tawada, who writes in Japanese and in German, was born as or Tawada Yôko in Tokyo, Japan, in 1960. She established residency in Germany twenty-two years later and has been living there ever since. Tawada has published collections of poems, short stories, radio plays, texts for the theater, novels, literary essays, and experimental performance pieces.³ In the following dialogue—a revised version of a podium discussion that took place in conjunction with the exhibit—Yoko Tawada and Bettina Brandt discuss the relationship between artist books and migration.

BB: How can we connect the exquisite A Poem for a Book with the rest of your versatile German and Japanese oeuvre?

YT: I am quite intrigued by books as objects, but I myself would not have had the skills to make such an intricate book by hand, even if I had tried very hard. Quite often, though, other types of artists, pianists or composers in particular, contact me to discuss a possible artistic collaboration. In the case of A Poem for a Book, I was approached by Clemens Tobias Lange, a book artist, and Stephan Köhler, a photographer and papermaker. At the time, all three of us happened to be in Hamburg, Germany, by chance. Stephan, who is originally from Hamburg, was actually living in a small papermaking village in Japan, but he also spent a lot of time in Italy where he ran a papermaking school and taught papermaking workshops together with Tobias. In the particular part of Italy where the school was located grows a certain plant from which Japanese paper can be made. The three of us had a friend in common, Stefano Polizzi, an Italian physicist. Without this physicist we would have never been able to make this book!

As a writer, I found it at first rather difficult to come to terms with the idea that only forty-five copies of a particular poem would be printed. That would mean that only forty-two people could read the poem! Forty-two readers are perhaps a lot of readers for a poem of mine but because the book is so expensive I was afraid that those who have the money to buy the book are surely not the ones who want to read the poem. Tobias then said that as an artist you create art simply because you want to create it. Whether the work then vanishes is not important at all. There is also only one copy of an oil painting. It took me at least a whole year until I was content with the project for my own writerly purposes.

BB: I read that quite a few of the earliest illustrated Japanese books, such as the Buddhist sutras for instance, were made as votive offerings or were hidden at sacred places where they served as protective talismans, and were never supposed to be read at all! Others, like the "Sutra of the Great Incantation of Undefiled Pure Light," for instance, were published in an edition of one million copies only to be consequently hidden out of sight in so-called Prayer Towers which look nothing like a book at all!⁴

YT: When Clemens, Stephan and I got together before I wrote the poem yet, we started discussing what kind...