Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue | 2025 | Yōko Tawada | Buy |
Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue collects Tawada’s essays on what it means to write in a second language. The word “exophony” refers to literature written outside one’s native tongue, and Tawada uses her own bilingual practice as the starting point for wider reflections on translation, creativity, and the gaps between words and meaning.
The book is useful for anyone interested in multilingual writing or translation studies, but it is also personal and readable, not just academic. Tawada writes about her own surprises and frustrations with German and Japanese, and the essays have the same playful intelligence as her fiction.