As a student fifteen or so years ago, I was employed as a copy clerk and errand girl for the German department, which was housed in the same building as Romance languages and Slavic studies and a few other languages as well. The German department had two departmental secretaries with whom I worked, and both of them had husbands exactly seventeen years younger than they were, and each husband called at a scheduled hour every day and I never knew what to make of this coincidence. It seemed meaningful, especially because the women were otherwise quite different from one another. One day I was chatting at the copier with one of these two secretaries—one had a dog that came to work with her every day and the other did not have a dog who came to work with her, and I was slightly closer to the one with the dog—and I told her that I was thinking of signing up for a seminar down the hall, a seminar titled Latin American Literature in Translation, with Professor I_\_, and did she think that was a good idea? Gretchen—she had a genuinely German name like that—knew all the professors in the various language departments, and knew a lot in general, and I was in the habit of soliciting her unshy opinions. “Oh, Professor I__,” she said. “He was one of the first people to translate Borges. You’ll meet him and you’ll be thinking, How did a man who is so boring come to translate Borges?”

I signed up for the seminar. Some students were reading the assigned texts in the original Spanish or Portuguese or Aymari, and some (including me) were reading them in English. Professor I___ was not boring, but he was half-deaf. Not half-deaf in the sense that he heard half of what was said, or at half-volume, but instead half-deaf in the sense that if you sat at the long seminar table to his left, he heard what you said, and if you sat to his right, he didn’t hear what you said. The way this played out in class was that only half of the room existed. If you sat to his right, you were invisible and speechless. Even trickier: if you sat to his left, he listened to you with doubled intensity, and the effect was that it made your own words seem to be not your words, but instead strange vessels washing up on the shores of you, after having travelled to God knows where, and this made the shores of you, which had once seemed carefree and clear, now seem polluted with unidentifiable marine life that might just be soft plastics; it was weird. We were eleven women and one man, and the stories we read were already eccentric, and the translations of uneven quality, and all this pushed the situation of the two hours further along its natural distortion. What the hell am I saying?, we students would think twice as often as usual, under Professor I___’s intense gaze. Maybe all this accounts for why that literature seminar remains the most memorable of all that I have taken.

That long not-quite-anecdote is the best way I can think of to give a sense of what it is to read (in English) the work of Yoko Tawada, a Japanese writer who has lived most of her adult life in Germany. New Directions has put out three of her books in English, and a fourth, “The Bridegroom Was a Dog,” translated by Margaret Mitsutani, will be published in November. Tawada’s work—which one might compare to that of Bruno Schulz, Silvina Ocampo or Franz Kafka—is characterized by concordances one doesn’t know what to make of and perceptions that may or may not need to be discounted. A narrator’s own sounds and experiences often shapeshift in ways alien to her, and everything feels haunted—often somewhat comically—with almost readable significance, and often with irony.

Tawada writes about … well … it’s not easy to give a “whatness” to her writing. But language and perception are always central, problematic and vivid. Consider Tawada’s short story, “Where Europe Begins” (the title story of one of her collections). In it, the narrator, a foreigner living in Germany, starts off the story with an earache, which a doctor later diagnoses as a pregnancy; at a flea market, she picks up a book, which the vendor says is not a book but a mirror, and then when she brings the object home, it turns out to be a box containing four cassette tapes—a book on tape. She plays it. She “tries to listen to the voice without losing my distance from it. But I couldn’t. Either I heard nothing at all, or I was plunged into the novel.“

Often in Tawada’s work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one’s own. This is, of course, precisely what it feels like to speak in a non-mother tongue. It also is, in fact, often what is happening in Tawada’s stories: in one story a woman seems to be turning into a fish and in another a monk leaps into a pond to embrace his own reflection. But the mythologies mix with more familiar tropes. And often in Tawada’s work, sights or sensations we are accustomed to start to seem like traces of alien stories: “In this city there are a great many women who wear bits of metal on their ears,” Tawada writes in her short story, “The Talisman” (also from “Where Europe Begins”). “They have holes put in their earlobes especially for this purpose. Almost as soon as I got here, I wanted to ask what these bits of metal on people’s ears meant. But I didn’t know if I could speak of this openly. My guidebook, for instance, says that in Europe you should never ask people you don’t know very well anything related to their bodies or religion.”

This does not always feel charming and benign. Her narrator in “Where Europe Begins,” a Japanese woman living in Germany, tells of coming home with a new radio one day and then finding, in one of the buttons, a splinter of a fingernail. “Probably someone working on the assembly line had been attacked by a machine and lost a fingernail, or even a whole finger. The attack was probably classified as an accident.” That’s not how most of us would interpret her finding; yet it makes its own compelling sense.

Consider another scene from the same story: the foreign narrator has finally made it to the ear doctor—it wasn’t easy, she gets delayed by “riddles” such as “A pair of ice skates and a clock lay side by side, as though challenging me to guess their relation. I stood before them until I had found a solution: ice skates and clocks, both turn in circles”—and she intends to tell the doctor that she feels “as if” there’s a flea in her ear, but instead she finds herself saying, “There’s a flea living in my ear.” (The loss of the subjunctive—as-ifs often are actual—is a recurrent mood in her work.) Then, when, after looking in her ear, the doctor tells her that she’s pregnant, the narrator says, “Could you have confused a flea with an embryo?” Later she pushes further, saying to the doctor, “What do you see?”: