Japan!, Culture and Hyper Culture

The first sentence in the brochure for the performance Saturday night at the Kennedy Center read, "The poet and novelist Yoko Tawada is a writer of the world." This is a zen statement to me. I read that again with million smiles.

I cannot resist the tempation to see her performance at the Kennedy Center. I cannot resist the chance to absorb the intensity and the richness in the simplicity of the language of the world, the creative thoughts, of Yoko. I know there will be magic in her words.

The performance consisted of her poetry readings and Aki Takase provided the jazz piano as a background to set the tone and shape the mood. Language can go as deep as you can imagine. Thoughts can be as diversified as you have the language to express.

The poet Yoko has a distinctive voice and she continues to color the literary world with her works, which have lead numerous commentators to compare her to Franz Kafka. She is native Japanese but has spent more than 20 years in Germany and writes both Japanese and German.

The natural merging of different cultures generates a vibrant fabric of words in the world.

I was very impressed by her thoughts described in a collection of essays from 2002, in which Tawada describes the experience of "exophony," a term she has coined for travelling outside of the circle of one's mother tongue, which is akin to giving oneself over to strange music. Exophony is turning one's ears to a new symphony.

She further elaborated that learning to hear new sounds, new languages, and new ideas was essential. Her concluding thought reaffirmed my believe. She voiced the thought that, "if one lives in unquestioning belief of the 'naturalness' of one's native language, no true interaction with that language can develop; without such questioning, there would be no contemporary literature."

She is known as a transnational writer, a multilingual writer and she fits like a glove in this increasingly globalized world.

Her poetry performance was only 90 minutes, and the time flew by, but I gained a stronger sense of literacy inspiration from this famous Japanese-German transnational writer. I almost walked to say hi to her after the show but instead I let the crowd quickly line up. I appreciated her from my corner table in awe after the show.

My husband and I walked hand in hand. We are content to be in a transnational stage. The world is both deep and wide, with so many things to explore.

There is culture, hyper-culture, transnational life, words, thoughts and questions that add volume into the days. I am enjoying my days in America a bit more now and then.

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TAN