11 - Metamorphic Becomings: Yoko Tawada’s Opium Für Ovid: Ein Kopfkissenbuch Von 22 Frauen

Summary

IT WOULD BE DIFFICULT to overstate the significance of metamorphosis for Yoko Tawada’s literary oeuvre. From the author’s earliest prose, poems, and plays of the late 1980s and 1990s that attend to the corporeal and linguistic transfers involved in the move between continents, to her Tubingen poetry lectures entitled Verwandlungen (Metamorphoses, 1998) that formulate a poetic program centrally concerned with textual translation and transfer, to novels, plays, essays, and short prose of the new millennium that prove increasingly preoccupied with inhabiting other perspectives and species in the age of the Anthropocene, Tawada’s works manifest consistent formal and thematic preoccupations with metamorphic modes. Her experimental texts frequently challenge and frustrate attempts to categorize them according to genre, instead demanding to be interpreted and conceptualized in radically new terms, as they question the borders between languages and generate reflexive re-embodiments of linguistic and geographical spaces as new sites of cultural encounter.

Tawada writes in both German and Japanese and has received highprofile literary awards for her work in both languages. On the one hand, the mutating bodies and creatures encountered in her writings might appear to come straight out of Japanese mythology with its manifold legends and shape-shifting deities. On the other, for the Tokyo-born author who has established herself as a significant and original voice within the modern German literary canon, this ongoing textual preoccupation with metamorphosis can simultaneously be read as an extended dialogue with an experimental German-language tradition that finds paradigmatic expression in Franz Kafka’s modernist tale of nightmarish transformation, Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis). In the context of this volume’s focus on the contemporary German-language short story, in this chapter I will examine Tawada’s metamorphic literary practice following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s seminal reading of her modernist predecessor in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975). Their study famously interprets Kafka’s Prague German as a minoritarian appropriation and deterritorializing subversion of the major tongue, identifying metamorphosis—as opposed to metaphor—as crucial to the “asignifying intensive utilization of language” in his work.