The Culture Issue

It was a gray and drizzly afternoon when Yoko Tawada and I crossed under a green-and-gold paifang to meet with mammals much larger than ourselves. Tawada had brought me to the Berlin Zoo because she had visited its famous polar bear, Knut, regularly while working on her 2014 novel, “Memoirs of a Polar Bear,” which will be published in English in November. The tale of the real-life Knut is at once moving and outlandish: His mother, Tosca, a retired performer from the German Democratic Republic circus, rejected Knut at birth, so he was raised instead by a male zookeeper “mother.” When an animal rights activist commented in a German newspaper that the zoo’s ethical responsibility was to let Knut die, children protested and the world fell in love with the poor animal. He became a celebrity, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for a cover of Vanity Fair, and lines to visit Knut formed daily for his scheduled appearances. “But by the time I knew him,” Tawada said, “it was later in his life, when people complained that he was less cute.”

“Memoirs” is actually three memoirs: the first narrated by Knut’s circus-performing Russian grandmother, the second by Knut’s mother and the final by Knut. Tawada wrote “Memoirs” in Japanese, then translated it into German on her own. The novel’s matriarch polar bear also begins her book in a language other then German. When the bear tells her publisher that she wants to begin writing in German herself, rather than having it translated from Russian, she is told that part of the appeal of her work is that it’s written in “her mother tongue.” She doesn’t like that. “I’ve never spoken with my mother,” she protests. Her publisher counters that a mother is a mother, even if you never speak with her. “I don’t think my mother spoke Russian,” the polar bear says. The publisher is unpersuaded; she is discouraged. When, in another scene, a stranger presses the polar bear similarly about her language and origins, the stranger finally concludes: “Oh, I see, you’re a member of an ethnic minority, is that it? ... Minorities are fabulous!”

There were no polar bears out when we arrived at their enclosure. Instead there was just a sign noting that one of them didn’t like noise. “They used to say it was unfair that Knut had to live with three old ladies,” Tawada said. “They said the ladies bullied him.” The last time Tawada saw Knut was two days before he died unexpectedly, of an undiagnosed encephalitis. “One thing that interested me was that Knut’s mother had been a performer, but Knut didn’t have to perform — and yet he still performed. He really played to the crowds.”

I asked her if maybe that was the origin of her idea to write something from Knut’s perspective. She said: “I had memories of myself as a child, of how much I loved to use words to make not only my parents but also other adults smile. I don’t think of that as performing though. But it’s also the case that I wondered, as a child, and still: Was it also different for the animals, under communism and under capitalism?” She laughed. “I really did!”

As we walked the grounds, Tawada said, “You see most of these animals were born here in the zoo, even though their labels still describe other countries.” We came upon a large dark bird with a yellow face labeled “Schmutzgeier,” or “Dirty Vulture.” “Poor guy!” Tawada said with a giggle. “They didn’t give him a very nice name.” We wandered past a sun bear, who in the book teases Knut for referring to himself in the third person, although this day the sun bear was sleeping. Farther along, we passed Rüppell’s glossy starlings and Luzon bleeding-hearts. In the hazy light, the birds seemed touchingly overdressed. Nearby was the enclosure of the magnificent polar wolves, two dead birds visible within. In “Memoirs,” one of the wolves harasses Knut for not having a proper family. “I do not like these wolves,” Tawada said. “I do not like them at all.” Somehow these relatively mild words sounded like swearing.

“How can you not like wolves?” I asked.

“They’re beautiful, I know. But they’re fascists. Only the best woman is allowed to make children — no one else.”

Tawada and I looked together at the informational sign, which described the loyalty and family values of the wolves. In the novel, Knut notes: “The wolf was proud of the fact that the members of his family looked as alike as photocopies. But I revere Matthias [his human mother] for having suckled and cared for a creature like me who was not at all similar to him.”

It struck me that you can be offended by an animal only if you take it seriously, as you would a human. Tawada has written most often about foreigners and outsiders, but also about people who metamorphose into animals (“The Bath”) or have intimate relations with people suspected to be animals (“The Bridegroom Was a Dog”). An elementary-school teacher who tells her students to wipe with used Kleenex feels, in Tawada’s portrayal of her, as familiar and alien as a household pet. In “Memoirs,” when a polar bear walks into a bookstore or a grocery store, there are no troubles stemming from a lack of opposable thumbs. As with Kafka’s animal characters, we are freed to dislike them in the special way we usually reserve only for ourselves.

“All immigrants are artists,” Edwidge Danticat has said. Under pressure to make themselves legible, immigrants have no choice but to invent new ways of speaking. And in their reading of the world around them, immigrants uncover the alien that always abides in what seems, for the natives, most familiar. But some people are foreign regardless of geography; they are naturally nonnative, immigrant or not. Tawada is one of these. “Sometimes I think maybe I’m a little bit Jewish,” she joked, after telling me that the writers that mean the most to her are Walter Benjamin for his essays, Kafka for his fiction and Paul Celan for his poetry. This kindred feeling makes sense. Benjamin, Kafka and Celan all worked, like Tawada, in a German language that was in some ways hostile to them — and this hostility is an essential aspect of their thought.

The varied characters in Tawada’s work — from different countries, of different sexes and species — are united by the quality that Benjamin describes as “crepuscular”: “None has a firm place in the world, or firm, inalienable outlines. There is not one that is not either rising or falling, none that is not trading its qualities with its enemy or neighbor; none that has not completed its period of time and yet is unripe.”

One of Tawada’s earliest pieces, “The Talisman,” published in the early 1990s, begins:

In this city there are a great many women who wear bits of metal on their ears. 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 yet know very well anything related to their bodies or religion.

Another of her short pieces, “Canned Foreign,” also among her earliest stories, opens with: “In any city one finds a surprisingly large number of people who cannot read. Some of them are still too young, others simply refuse to learn the letters of the alphabet.”

Each opening is an accurate description that is nevertheless unsettling. In “Memoirs,” Tawada plays with this same effect through the simple drama of having her polar-bear narrator attending a conference — “how uninteresting the conference had been yet again” — and finding herself tripped into thoughts of her childhood by the topic of the day’s discussion: The Significance of Bicycles in the National Economy. (Tawada is very often very funny.) Here as elsewhere, Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman.

Tawada’s biography most likely amplifies her estrangements. Born in Tokyo in 1960, she moved to Hamburg in 1982 and has lived in Germany ever since. Her father worked as a translator of nonfiction books and eventually opened a bookstore specializing in academic books from abroad. Even today, she writes drafts sometimes in German, sometimes in Japanese and sometimes in alternating languages within the same novel. She reads in at least five languages. She has a different relationship than most of the rest of us do to words, to nations and even to taxonomy. One of her translators, Susan Bernofsky, remembers that Tawada asked her American press, New Directions, to work from the German version of “Memoirs,” not the Japanese one, “because she said she’d already translated it into a Western language.”

Tawada has been awarded the most prestigious literary prizes in Germany and Japan, including the Goethe Medal and the Kleist and Akutagawa Prizes. In those countries, she’s heralded. In the United States, she has been a visiting writer at prestigious universities, as well as the subject of several dissertations, but she is notably less well known, even though New Directions has been steadily publishing her fiction since 2007. “Memoirs” is in certain ways distinct from Tawada’s work to date in English: It is longer, and much more eventful. Circus managers are vetted by the secret police; Soviet polar bears go on strike over working conditions in a circus; a mother polar bear gives up her child to be raised by another animal; the Berlin Wall falls. But as in all of Tawada’s work, language is itself a character. When the matriarch polar bear finds herself aboard a train to leave East Germany, she thinks: “A fly bumped against my forehead, or wait, not a fly, a sentence: ‘I am going into exile.’ ” So even as “Memoirs” reads like a goofy comedy, it also reads as a profound meditation on alterity, labor conditions, language and love. Which is to say: It reads like classic Tawada.

You could argue that it’s always a historical moment of hating (and not seeing) the “other,” but the sentiment seems now at a particularly precarious crescendo. “Memoirs” offers its own version of “seeing the other.” It does this not so much by compelling us to see the humanity in polar bears; polar bears are easy to love. But Knut’s mother, Tosca, devotes most of her memoir to imagining the inner life of her animal trainer, Barbara. The empathic ask there is to look with love and understanding at humans — even as they are implicated in the structures of brutality and dominance, moved most by their own small-minded fears and dreams and, of course, are hastening the melting of the poles. Even we deserve understanding and love.

Tawada and I walked to Berlin’s Museum für Naturkunde, a predecessor of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. After the unexpected death of Knut in 2011, a sculpture of him was made, and it is now housed at the Berlin museum. When “Memoirs” came out in Germany, Tawada gave a reading in front of the glass-cased Knut. (“It was a little spooky,” she told me.) We were the only adults unaccompanied by children. We made our way past dinosaur bones, past gemstones. We stopped at an oversize Araneus diadematus specimen from 1951. Nearby, a catalog was open to the section for ordering glass mammal eyes. “I love these,” she said, calling my attention to the pages.

Then, abruptly, there was the famous Knut. He stood in the glass case next to a gorilla named Bobby. Bobby was also famous in his day; he died in the Berlin Zoo of appendicitis in 1935. Bobby and Knut, side by side, seemed like a stage duo playing for contrast. “Somehow it’s easier to imagine what Knut is thinking than to imagine what Bobby is thinking,” Tawada said. “Bobby looks too much like us.”

“I didn’t know Knut would look so skinny.”

“He was just an adolescent,” Tawada said. “I know, it’s very sad to see him. But it’s just a sculpture of his body, modeled by hand, and then with his real fur on it. It was important to people that Knut not be taxidermied. It’s a modern version of a stuffed animal.”

The first time I met Tawada was at a very crowded reading she gave at the Deutsches Haus of New York University. She read from fragments of prose-poetry written on a white glove she wore on her hand; she then took off the glove, turned it inside out and read what was written on the other side of the fingers. Barbara Epler, the publisher of New Directions, told me a story about seeing Tawada perform at the Goethe-Institut in New York with the avant-garde jazz pianist Aki Takase; Tawada’s role involved grating stale bread and throwing Ping-Pong balls onto the piano strings.

But the Tawada I spent the day with in Berlin was quite shy, and too gently considerate to be at all strange. Her performance self seems constructed to prevent her from having to pretend to be at ease — a way of exaggerating the unnaturalness of a performance, so as to avoid the lie of “naturalness.”

Tawada never particularly intended to move to Germany. “I was in university,” she said. “I loved the work of Dostoyevsky, of Bulgakov, also of Bruno Schulz, and so I wanted to go and study in the Soviet Union, or maybe Poland. But it was 1982 and not an easy time to go there.” With her father’s help, she found an internship in Hamburg with a business that was an intermediary between publishers and booksellers. Tawada already had some familiarity with German because she had studied it, along with English, in school. “Because of the 1968 student movement, there had been pressure on schools to offer more than just English,” she said. “The idea was, for example, if you wanted to learn about nuclear power and you were only reading in English, you were going to learn something very different than if you were reading in German.”

In Hamburg at the time, it was common for students to attend classes at the university without officially enrolling. “Living in Germany in the ’80s and ’90s was so, so cheap,” she said. “Some of us studied 10 or 20 years! Just working part-time jobs as typists or assistants.” She enrolled officially in the mid-1980s and met her German publisher, Konkursbuch, a small, brainy press that is otherwise known for publishing thrillers and high-end lesbian erotica. Konkursbuch published her first work, in a bilingual edition, in 1987, and she has stayed with that press ever since. Her first publication in Japan wasn’t until four years later.

Finally moving past the sad sculpture of Knut, Tawada and I made it over to a hippopotamus whose mouth was wide open; at the hippo’s side was a much smaller hippopotamus. Tawada said there was a famous German hippo, but she couldn’t remember if it was one of these: “The children know her from a book. She was saved from the zoo during the war.” Only 91 of at least 3,700 Berlin Zoo animals were rescued. “It’s very upsetting for children to learn that the wild animals, freed from the zoo, were shot,” she said. “We have a book in Japan about the Tokyo Zoo during the war. Maybe in a story about humans, it will always seem like the humans are at least somewhat guilty. But for the animals, the children can feel pure sadness.”

Like all animals, we eventually grew hungry. Tawada suggested that we eat at the cafe associated with the LiteraturHaus, in Wintergarten. As we headed there, we passed statues of two white bears. Then a blue bear. Then a multicolored bear. “They are the symbol of the city,” she said. “It’s funny, because they became popular again as a symbol at a time when there were no more bears in Germany. Just like the teddy bears became popular as real bear populations were falling,” she said, her voice trailing off. “But some wild animals have come back to Germany! After the Berlin Wall fell, some wolves started coming in from the formerly communist states. As if they understood what a border was. Though they didn’t need visas.”

Is it possible for a great work of literature to be strongly reminiscent of Don Freeman’s “Corduroy,” that old children’s story of the bear in a department store, searching for a button? Corduroy sees the escalator as a mountain, the furniture floor as a palace. “Memoirs” makes as much use of the naïveté of its bears as of their insight. When the matriarch bear arrives in the West — in our world — she describes the opaque (to her) phenomenon of window shopping: “The boredom of the passers-by was apparently considerable, since they scrutinized every product in the shop windows.” When shopping for smoked salmon in the supermarket, she makes the beautiful and precise observation that it is found “where the coldest goods were displayed in the brightest light.” And in another scene, in a department store selling records, she observes: “A gramophone stood on a pedestal, and right beside it, a life-size, black-spotted white dog made of plastic. You could see his image on each of the phonograph records, which I found pathologically excessive.”

Many books written for children are of no particular interest once you’re an adult, but the great works for children have the density of poetry and the depth of parable; very little in “adult” literature rivals it. The greatest animal characters come from kids’ books, and Kafka. Together they seem to suggest an alternative citizenship, that of the majorly minor, the brutally gentle. In that sense, Tawada’s work does seem to me to be fittingly that of and by and for a “child.”

So maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised when Tawada told me that she was in the middle of writing essays on 10 children’s books. A publisher in Japan invited her to write them after reading a piece Tawada wrote about a hike she took in Switzerland passing through the village of a famous children’s-book author. “When I was young, I wrote to a writer I loved, a children’s writer, K.M. Peyton,” Tawada told me. “I remember this well, because this was the first letter I ever wrote in a foreign language, in English.”

“Did she write you back?” I asked.

“She said she was very happy to get a letter from the end of the world! I thought Japan was the center of the world.”

For her essays, she wrote about Curious George, who sees the city from up above rather than from down below, and she wrote about the Russian fable “The Snow Daughter,” in which the main character disappears by jumping over a fire. She wrote about “The Hundred Dresses,” which describes a Polish girl in Connecticut being picked on for always wearing the same dress, and about “Bedtime for Frances,” a sweet story about a badger who doesn’t want to go to sleep. And she also wrote about “Oley the Sea Monster,” an almost unbearably sad tale about a harbor seal taken from his mother and mistaken for a monster before a benevolent aquarium keeper disobeys orders to kill Oley and instead returns him to the harbor. Each of the children’s books was, in a sense, a story of alternative perspective, and of vulnerability. The happy endings felt heavy with sadness, the sad seemed to promise light.

I wanted to say something to Tawada about how this reminded me of her work, but I felt as though English had turned into a language that was not my native one. Instead I asked Tawada if she had gone to the circus as a child. “I remember going once,” she said. Her parents took her to see a traveling Soviet circus when it visited Tokyo. “I remember there was a bear who rode a tricycle,” she said. “And that amazed me. And I knew even then that what was exciting was just that he was doing something normal, something even I could do.”

A few of the children’s books Tawada had mentioned I didn’t know. When I got home, I ordered the ones I could find in English. “Jeanne-Marie Counts Her Sheep,” by Françoise Seignobosc, was a numbers book about a little girl dreaming of how many lambs her sheep, Patapon, will have, and what Jeanne-Marie will be able to buy with the money she makes from the lambs’ wool. Jeanne-Marie imagines many lambs and many purchases. But it turns out there is just one lamb. Jeanne-Marie (who in the illustrations is now an old, hunched woman) is able to knit only one pair of socks. “But Jeanne-Marie tried to look very happy, anyway, for she did not want Patapon to feel sad. Patapon was so pleased with her one little Lamb!”

Was it a sad ending? Or a happy one?

I wrote to Tawada to ask what about the book had held her attention across so many years. She wrote that she loved its use of repetition, because “as a small child, the world won its shape repeating the same words and similar sentences.” But she also liked the ending. “The sheep is happy with only one child, that is not capital for her, but love.”

Rivka Galchen is the author of three books, most recently “Little Labors.” She last wrote for the magazine about the transformative power of lullabies.