In Tawada’s dreamlike travelogue “Where Europe Begins,” an early short story, a young Japanese woman travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway tries to identify where, exactly, one continent shades into another, but none of the passengers can agree. Most of the time, the borders themselves occupy a borderland between real and unreal. Tawada’s novella “The Bridegroom Was a Dog,” a slim erotic fable, concerns a schoolteacher whose suitor may or may not be a dog. In other cases, the divide is metaphysical. In her short story “The Shadow Man,” Tawada imagines the philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo’s journey from enslavement in Ghana to the courts of eighteenth-century Europe, pausing over the long ocean crossing. Sometimes these boundaries are geographic. “I don’t want to get familiar with one language.” The constant shuttling has more to do with existential displacement than with cross-cultural exchange: Tawada, as the new novel’s English translator, Margaret Mitsutani, has observed, is “not nearly as interested in crossing borders as she is in the borders themselves.” “I have to let my German go when I work with Japanese,” she has said. Her odyssey becomes a fairy-tale test of the commonplace idea that, as one character puts it, “the language of a native speaker is perfectly fused with her soul.” Tawada has been described as the world’s leading practitioner of “exophonic literature,” or writing in a foreign language, a description that her unique practice has made applicable to nearly all her work. Stranded in Denmark, a refugee named Hiruko searches for fellow-survivors, torn between longing for her mother tongue and the desire to fashion a new one. Tawada’s latest novel, “Scattered All Over the Earth” (New Directions), imagines a world in which Japan has disappeared.

“Even one’s mother tongue,” she maintains, “is a translation.” Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even natural, about the way we use words. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. But their creator-a novelist, a poet, and a playwright-has chosen her estrangement. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero.

3 Streets by Yōko Tawada