Animating the Unforeseen: Yoko Tawada’s Post-Disaster Poetics

Recent ecocriticism has been informed by the new materialisms, which call for a foregrounding of material things and a reconfiguration of our concept of matter, taking into account matter’s agentic nature. One literary writer who explores the agentic properties of matter in particularly productive ways is Yoko Tawada, whose animistic perspective is intrinsically linked to her concept of ‘language magic’ – bringing things to life through language. This paper argues that Tawada’s attention to the unexpected potential of language and matter can help to highlight some of the absurd ways in which politics operates, and how this affects responses to environmental crisis. Since the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Tawada has imaginatively explored life in a future Japan that has been ravaged by environmental disasters as well as by oppressive political regimes. This paper examines Tawada’s recent novel ‘The Last Children of Tokyo’ (2018, Japanese original, Kentoshi, 2014), alongside her post nuclear disaster stories ‘The Far Shore’ and ‘The Island of Eternal Life’, as well as situating these within the context of her wider work. Tawada writes in both Japanese and German, and is known particularly for her playful approach to language and cross-cultural (mis)communication. In her post-disaster texts, language and place are also prominent: she explores the linguistic shaping of attitudes as well as the global politics of environmental policy-making. Tawada’s work offers an ‘eco-cosmopolitan’ approach that suggests ways of moving towards a less anthropocentric and agent-centric perspective through its attention to the surprising interactions and creative potential of language and matter.