‘akzentfrei’ (‘accent free’) by Yōko Tawada (Review)

Despite the name, German Literature Month isn’t limited to one country or culture, and over the years I’ve covered a wide variety of books from all over Europe, as well as by writers whose original home was outside the continent.  That’s the case again today, courtesy of an interesting collection of essays by a writer who takes advantage of her outsider status to examine matters others might overlook.  Yes, GLM belongs just as much to the newcomers as it does to the classic writers, even if there’s a slightly different sound to what’s being written – as you’re about to find out 😉

*****
Yōko Tawada should be a familiar name to my regular readers.  She’s written a number of works in both Japanese (e.g. The Last Children of Tokyo) and German (e.g. Etüden im Schnee, AKA Memoirs of a Polar Bear), so I was interested in trying another of her books for this year’s GLM.  The one that immediately caught my eye was akzentfrei, a collection of essays from 2016, and having finished it, I can say that it was worth the effort, an interesting mix of takes on some familiar topics, but seen from a slightly different perspective.

The book is divided into three sections, and the first, ‘In einem Neuen Land’ (‘In a New Country’) contains six essays with a focus on language.  Here Tawada plays with words, noticing connections between ideas and then teasing them further apart to see what else she can discover.  In ‘Setzmilch’ (‘Soured Milk’), she muses on the connection between yoghurt, milk and cultures (both of the ethnic and Yakult kind) while ‘Ein ungeladener Gast’ (‘An Uninvited Guest’) has us pondering the linguistic puzzle of singular and plural nouns, with the writer asking whether it really matters if it’s one apple or more.  And while we’re at it:

Als ich in München zum ersten mal Mal die Begrüßung ‘Grüß Gott!’ hörte, fragte ich mich spontan: Welchen Gott soll ich grüßen?  Es gibt ungefähr acht Milliarden Götter in Japan, aber keinen einzigen Artikel.
‘Ein ungeladener Gast’, p.46 (konkursbuch Verlag, 2017)

When I heard the greeting ‘Grüß Gott!’ for the first time in Munich, I immediately asked myself: which god am I supposed to greet?  There are approximately eight billion gods in Japan, but not a single article. ***
(my translation)

That’s certainly a unique way to approach a simple greeting…

Throughout this first section, the essays are marked by Tawada’s deceptively simple style and her stance of an outsider seemingly bewildered by what native speakers would consider commonplace.  The title of the collection is taken from comments in ‘Akzent’ (‘Accent’), where the writer wonders what the idea of being ‘accentless’ or ‘accent free’ says about a person, or what it even means.  Her sensible conclusion is that despite claims to the contrary, there’s no such thing as being ‘akzentfrei’.

The intercultural wordplay continues in ‘Transsibirische Rosen’ (‘Trans-Siberian Roses’), where the writer notices some familiar flowers on a trip to the island of Sylt.  A little research shows that a rose is not just a rose, whatever the name, and her discovery leads her down a rabbit hole concerning the tyranny of labels:

Ich kann ein bedrohliches Wort entkräften, indem ich es absichtlich schräg übersetze.  Meine Übersetzung von ‘Art-Bastard’ lautet: ‘die Kunst der Vermischung’.
‘Transsibirische Rosen’, p.21

I am able to weaken a threatening word by deliberately translating it awry.  My translation of ‘Art-Bastard’ is: ‘the art of commingling’. ***

Again, this is a clever play on words, turning the supposedly neutral term for a hybrid plant into a far more palatable expression.

The second section, ‘Nicht vergangen’ (‘Not Gone Away’) covers a slightly wider range of topics.  ‘Halbwertzeit’ (‘Half-Life’) is a stream-of-consciousness affair that starts when Tawada wonders what a question she’s asked (Wie geht es Ihnen? = How’s it going?) really means, while ‘Wort, Wolf und Brüder Grimm’ (‘Word, Wolf and Grimm Brothers’) has more word play, this time centred around fairy tales.  Meanwhile, ‘Die Unsichtbare Mauer’ (‘The Invisible Wall’) is a breezy piece on the concept of walls, both physical and metaphorical, that revisits the journey the writer took on the Trans-Siberian Express in her youth (one you may recognise from an earlier work, Where Europe Begins).

While I enjoyed most of what akzentfrei has to offer, it’s a mixed bag at times, and I wouldn’t say everything here is a success.  The third section, ‘Französischer Nachtisch’ (‘French Dessert’), consists of two essays on French writers Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss that are played a bit straighter and seem rather tacked on, possibly to up the page count.  There’s also a piece in the second part, ‘Ein Loch in Berlin’ (‘A Hole in Berlin’), that starts off simply enough before morphing into a bizarre text that isn’t quite sure whether its a story or an essay, and ends up being neither.

However, the good far outweighs the iffy, and my favourite essay, unsurprisingly, is one that again shows a light touch, this time in its handling of Japanese literature.  ‘Namida’ is the Japanese word for ‘tears’, and in the longest essay in the collection, divided into six parts, Tawada examines the role of tears and weeping in Japanese culture, with reference to artistic works throughout the ages.  It’s an entertaining and informative ride and perfect for any J-Lit aficionado, with nods to many a familiar piece.

We begin with a poem from The Tales of Ise, a tearjerker about not knowing what you’ve got until it’s gone (or, in this case, until you regret abandoning your wife…), and continue with an examination of manly weeping in The Tale of the Heike.  As Tawada wryly points out:

Man hat den Eindruck, dass Samurai ein feuchter Beruf war.  Nicht nur das Blut, sondern auch die Tränen waren Flüssigkeiten, die den Bund zwischen Männern verstärkten.
‘Namida’, p.100

You get the impression that being a samurai was a damp occupation.  Not only blood, but also tears, were liquids that strengthened the ties between men. ***

Anyone who has read the older classics and noticed the number of times the heroes ‘weep into their sleeves’ will undoubtedly agree with her on this one.

It’s not just classic texts that Tawada examines, with mentions of more modern stories across various media.  She dissects a touching scene from the movie Tampopo and uses an Akutagawa story to show what happens when tears are repressed.  There’s even a look at anime, in the form of sports cartoons such as the baseball classic Kyojin no Hoshi (Star of the Giants), where we learn tears are OK as long as they’re shed from frustration at losing, or the world-famous Astro Boy, in which our mechanical friend shows his human side by being the only robot who can cry…

Despite the odd dull piece, akzentfrei is an entertaining mix of essays, one I’m glad I stumbled across, and with several earlier collections similar to this one, I may well be going back for another look at Tawada’s slant on the world.  Sadly, I very much doubt this will make it into English any time soon, but given Tawada’s style is far from that of writers like Sebald or Hilbig, for example, if your German is at all proficient, this shouldn’t be too difficult, particularly as many of the essays are fairly short.  All in all, it’s a nice example of a different side of G-Lit – one where the accent really doesn’t matter 🙂