Ein Wort, ein Ort, or How Words Create Places: Interview with Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada, who writes and publishes both in German and in Japanese, is one of the most important "foreign" authors writing in Germany today. Tawada discusses in her poems, plays, stories, essays, and novels not only questions of national and cultural identity but also questions of gender. The following interview focuses on the use of different languages in Tawada's writing and their relationship to such topics as metaphor, creativity, childhood, collecting, art, metamorphosis, and the material world.