Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue is a book whose focus is dispersed across genres, languages, audiences, and moments in time. Its author, the Tokyo-born Berlin-based Yoko Tawada, is best known as a major contemporary writer of fiction and essays whose work is shaped by an unusually rigorous and creative multilingual practice: rather than merely thematizing linguistic displacement, she has long written in both Japanese and German, addressing distinct literary publics and publishing contexts across two languages that occupy powerful positions in world literature. This book, new to English, but available in Japanese since 2003, consists of a series of brief, self-contained chapters, many named for a world city or place, often linked to an occasion (a lecture, a reading, a residency) that Tawada attended or remembered, and each unfolding its own anecdote or linguistic reflection. Its itinerant structure – its drift from Dakar to Seoul, Cape Town to Los Angeles, Oku Aizu to Moscow and further, complemented by a second part titled “Adventures in German” – means that the book can often seem disjointed and a bit repetitive: a strange collection of occasional pieces whose local logics accumulate rather than synthesize.

What emerged in our discussions was a shared sense that Exophony gains meaning through context. It is a book that becomes richer when read alongside Tawada’s broader body of work, and when situated within the early-2000s moment of world literature in which these essays were written. Reading it now also means seeing Exophony as a text that uncannily anticipates contemporary concerns in translation studies, multilingual writing, and world literature – concerns that have been taken up not only in criticism but in Tawada’s recent fiction. Several of us found that familiarity with Tawada’s novels deepens the experience. Exophony is not fiction, but it reads retrospectively like an announcement or seedbed for themes that would later become central to her stories: linguistic estrangement, animism, self-othering, playful misalignment between bodies, languages, and categories.

Three of us, in particular, had been reading Tawada’s recent speculative trilogy alongside Exophony, beginning with Scattered All Over the Earth. The trilogy appears in English translations by Margaret Mitsutani, a long-established and widely lauded translator whose work has done much to shape how anglophone readers encounter Tawada’s fiction. In the first novel, Tawada imagines a near-future world in which Japan has vanished and its former citizens wander through a linguistically fractured landscape, inventing new speech forms and improvising new communities. The book’s multiple narrators and episodic drift create a world where language is unmoored from nation, where belonging is provisional, and where translation becomes less a professional activity than a condition of survival. Its continuation in Suggested in the Stars (and Archipelago of the Sun) extends these questions in stranger, more expansive directions, exploring disappearance, diaspora, and the fragile infrastructures of communication.

What is striking, too, is that these novels have arrived in English at roughly the same moment as Exophony. In the anglophone world, Tawada’s early essays and her recent speculative fiction have thus become contemporaneous, even though the essays were written decades earlier, and specifically for a Japanese audience. Part of this synchronicity reflects the care with which two different translators have helped bring Tawada’s work into English, both under the aegis of New Directions. Exophony is translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, whose Translator’s Note is itself an education: an afterword that patiently reconstructs the linguistic ground on which Tawada is writing, from the interplay of Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji to the book’s invented portmanteau words. Hofmann-Kuroda makes newly visible what Tawada could assume for her Japanese readers, and she does so with an attentiveness to both the comedy and the ethical weight of exophony, including Tawada’s insistence, in “Seoul,” that “people have no right to proselytize about the joys of exophony if they have never been forced to speak in a language not their own” (52). Translating these essays into English is therefore not simply a matter of carrying Japanese into another tongue, but of mediating a multilingual text saturated with German intertext and its unique place vis a vis Japan, Chinese characters, and the politics of linguistic aspiration. Its particular political-cultural amalgam,  of (modern) Japan and Germany, also posits the essays at a somewhat oblique angle against currents in contemporary translation theories/politics, often dominated by concerns linked to anglophony: on her account here, “power” isn’t to be ignored, but is more aleatory, less given to crushing.

Part of what makes Exophony  resistant to summary is its range. The essays are quirky, time-stamped, and place-specific, capturing a particular snapshot of early-2000s literary culture, including writers and institutions connected to transnational circuits. This looseness is part of the book’s appeal. Tawada advances her ideas through humor, anecdote, and estrangement rather than in a manifesto spirit, offering example after example without it being rammed down our throats.

As a group with varied linguistic expertise, we were especially attentive to the book’s multilingual dimensions: the German passages, the Japanese contexts, the shadow of Chinese characters, and the fact that these essays were written for a Japanese readership. This makes the English translation, and the translator’s framing of it, particularly significant. It is all the more interesting to encounter Tawada’s reflections on German and Japanese in English, tracing the artful way Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda translates Tawada’s examples, some originally in Japanese and some originally in German, without – seemingly – dropping a ball (even while feeling it bounce).