Translation as a play of surfaces, as hyperattentiveness to form and literality, lies at the heart of Japanese writer Yoko Tawada’s aesthetic probing of German culture. Tawada, who lives in Germany and writes in both German and Japanese, often uses fictional Japanese narrators to filter the German cultural manifestations they encounter through a pseudo-Japanese perspective back into a strange kind of German, thereby revealing the artificiality of the ways they perceive both German and Japanese culture in her texts. She presents intercultural encounters as translation problems with infinite potential solutions, because she does not regard translation as a means of replicating an original meaning (for example,“Tawada Yǀko Does Not Exist"). Rather, she sees it as a way to bring language to life and to call cultural conventions into question. Her translation of the surfaces of language–that is, her focus on letters, sounds, discrepancies between words and images, and on other aspects of linguistic form–ultimately makes both German and Japanese enigmatic, animated, and multivalent. Her approach to translation reworks ideas about the relationship between source and translated language and links her writing to current debates about the cultural dimensions of translation, such as the role of the translator in mediating between cultures. Surface translation as presented in her fiction, essays, and interviews questions the concept of a source, or native, language and, by extension, the distinction between native and foreign culture. The translator plays a central role in this process by attending to the sensual play of aesthetic forms on the body. Tawada’s translating figures gain both strength and pain by focussing on the ways meaning attaches to and detaches from form. Critics praise Tawada for her creative exploration of language, culture, and (mis) communication. They focus on how her works show heterogeneous identities and new subject positions (Breger; Fischer; Kraenzle; Schestokat) and how she preY sents being foreign as a process that transforms perceptions and the body (Arens; Ervedosa; Laudenberg; Matsunaga; Weigel). Others address the ways in which she emphasizes the strangeness of language (Esselborn; Ette; Grond; Kloepfer