On a blender - Becca Rothfeld in TLS:

‘Yoko Tawada seldom writes wholly in a single language – and, when she does, her books are often dreams of the multilingualism they fail to realize.
Born in Japan in 1960, the frequent Nobel prize tip emigrated to Germany in 1982 and has since published fiction and poetry in German, Japanese, and sometimes both at once. A note at the beginning of her novel The Naked Eye (2004; 2009 in English translation) describes the method she deployed as she was working: “She started the novel in German”, writes Susan Bernofsky, who translates Tawada’s German books into English, “but then parts of the story began occurring to her in Japanese, and so she continued writing sections of the book now in one language, now in the other, later translating in both directions until she arrived simultaneously at two complete manuscripts.” The resulting book is even more exuberantly multilingual than its author. Its protagonist is an unnamed student in Ho Chi Minh City who speaks Vietnamese at home and studies Russian at school. When she travels to Berlin for a conference and finds herself shuttling from one European country to another, she encounters characters who speak German, French and English.’

(…)

‘As Hiruko and Knut set off across Europe in search of other Japanese- speakers, they accumulate a band of sidekicks – the sort of gang that the lovable hero in a children’s movie tends to fall in with. By the end of Scattered All Over the Earth, they are travelling with Akash, a trans woman from Pune, India, who is studying in Germany; Nora, a German employee at the Karl Marx House in Trier; and Nanook, a Greenlander who works as a sushi chef and masquerades as a Japanese expat until Hiruko unmasks him as a non-native speaker.’

(…)

‘Archipelago features a parade of dead writers, among them the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz and the Finnish playwright Hella Wuolijoki, but Tawada has dragged them out of the grave for no good reason. They make a couple of pregnant pronouncements, then shuffle off again.’

(…)

‘The risk of writing exophonically is that, instead of rendering one’s native language dangerous, one may end up rendering even foreign languages domestic. Hiruko defangs the Scandinavian languages by fusing them into Panska, and Tawada has done the same with an even wider range of languages. It is as if she has tossed Danish, Japanese, English, German, Greenlandic and Marathi into a blender and puréed them into a drink that is smooth, soothing and flavourless. It goes down well enough, but after you’ve finished it, you can no longer remember the taste.’

Read the review here.

Don’t throw too many languages in a blender.

Don’t do it if you are an author, don’t do it if you are a traveler.

Three languages in the blender, that’s it.

And of course, never drag dead of authors of the grave if you don’t have a good reason to do that.

The impostors are among us. Based on the review I would say that Tawada is writing about that. But I might be mistaken, somewhere in 2026 I will do further research.