VISUAL ASPECTS OF THE WRITTEN SIGN IN YOKO TAWADA’S OEUVRE 1 Monica Tamaș 2 Abstract: As a bilingual writer and constant traveler between cultures, Yoko Tawada has shown a keen curiosity with regard to what changes beyond borders and what is left between. For Tawada, the transformative experience of traveling is inextricably entwined with the experience of language and signs, for culture itself is such a system. Her protagonists act as passive observers of an almost incomprehensible spectacle of reality, which they try to decipher one sign after the other. The images displayed all around contain strange letters and ideograms, for the road traveled is too often encoded in a new language. In this study, I analyze Tawada’s use of written characters as poetic devices that multiply the possibilities of written language. In her oeuvre, Tawada complicates the semiotic relationship through cultural intersections and transfer of meaning, reinterpreting the visual sign. Keywords: Yoko Tawada, transnational literature, written signs. Writing in both Japanese and German, Yoko Tawada has found inspiration in the cultural intersections encountered throughout her journeys around the world, as well as in her adoptive country, Germany. Born in Tokyo, Tawada studied Russian literature at Waseda University, then moved to Germany immediately after her graduation, seeking the experience of how it feels to live immersed in a foreign language. It is there that she became aware of the peculiarities of the two languages she was thinking and writing in, and began to explore their dynamics in her writing as well. She made her debut in Germany, taking advantage of the special position she was in, as a transnational and exophonic writer. Her first published book, entitled anata no iru tokoro dake nanimo nai / nur da wo du bist da ist nichts (Tawada, 1997) contains a short story and several poems, presented both in their original Japanese version, as well as in the German translation signed by Peter Pörtner. In 1991 Tawada made her debut in Japan and started writing in German as well, publishing Wo Europa anfängt. To this date, she has been awarded all important literary prizes in both Germany and Japan, like the Akutagawa Literature Prize (1993), the Adelbert-von-Chamisso Prize (1996) or the Goethe Medal (2005), as well as the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United States in 2018, for The Emissary, Margaret Mitsutani’s English translation of Tawada’s dystopic novel Kentōshi (Tawada, 2014). With a keen curiosity for language and cultural differences, Tawada documents her experiences as a foreigner in Germany and as a traveler around the world, in her fiction as well as in her essays. Most of her characters are likewise travelers trapped in a No-Man’s-Land between cultures, acting as passive observers of an almost incomprehensible spectacle of reality. Like a camera that renders the image making use of a controlled aperture, so does the character’s fixed gaze symbolically possess the This article is part of my PhD dissertation, "Illusory Identities in Yoko Tawada’s German and 1 Japanese Novels", which I am completing at the Center for Excellence in Image Study at the University of Bucharest, under the supervision of Professor Alexandra Vrânceanu. Publishing current paper was financed through „Entrepreneurial Education and Professional Counseling for Social and Human Sciences PhD and Postdoctoral Researchers to ensure knowledge transfer from the field of Social Sciences and Humanities to the Labor Market” Project, co-financed from European Social Fund through Human Capital Programme (ATRiUM, POCU/380/6/13/123343). University of Bucharest, monicatamash@gmail.com. 2