Most of the characters in Yoko Tawada’s novels are unhurried nomads whose curiosity extends to the Roman ruins in Trier, the composition of exotic dishes, and, above all, the aura, sound and meaning of foreign words. The author herself has explored her decades-long excursions into the realm of “exophony” – ever since she arrived in Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1982 and mastered the German language with a playful sense of its peculiarities and untapped possibilities. In her new novel Eine Affäre ohne Menschen (trans. A Story Without Humans, 2025), set in the neo-fascist milieu of angry citizens in former East Berlin, Tawada deciphers the symbols of the conspiratorial far-right community like a semiotician: the wolf, the swastika, the letter K and other coded objects that stand for their ideology, while their left-wing or environmentally conscious opponents have created their own vocabulary of instantly recognised signs. What both sides have in common, however, is that the mobile phone has replaced their biological palm.

Claudia Steinberg “Reality wants to be described,” you once said, and in your new book it is exclusively objects that speak, rather than remaining, as is customary, in the passive role of the described. The first object the reader encounters is a showerhead; the arrangement of the small water holes is irreverently compared to the seating arrangement in the European Parliament. Thus, politics comes to the fore right away, in this case playfully and relatively harmlessly. As products of our society, objects reflect not only our needs and desires but also our worldview: you present them as effective means of communication, both culturally eloquent and ideologically present.

Yoko Tawada  We react intuitively to the form of an object, like the showerhead or a staircase, or the dimensions of a room, and this reaction goes beyond the object’s mere function. Even supposedly empty or abstract forms can be laden with meaning that we perceive only intuitively or unconsciously: I find it fascinating which forms we register and how we interpret and emotionally process them. What is absent from this novel is the human face. It’s too common an impulse to read the face involuntarily from a multitude of signs, since our perception is automatically attuned to those forms. Just as automatically, I saw the seating arrangement of Parliament in the showerhead. My perspective in this book is probably extreme, but fundamentally I tend to perceive the world this way, especially when it comes to plants: to me, a tree always looks like a person, just as a flower does, but sometimes this is also true of objects, particularly when they move. I can only understand them when I view them through an anthropomorphic lens. The table naturally has four legs; I see it as an animal or a human on all fours.

German remained the most important foreign language in Japan until the end of the First World War

CS You have developed a fine ear for the German language. You once said that one falls in love with a new language while remaining faithful to one’s mother tongue. Has German changed your perspective on Japanese?

YT Absolutely. If you only move or think in one language and write a novel, then thinking and writing are identical. But you can distance yourself a little from each language when you have two. Then, you can think beyond language about what atmosphere you want to convey, or what the rhythm might be, independent of Japanese or German. And because I now have enough distance from Japanese, when I come across a banal word like “dining table”, I ask myself how it sounds, what words it resembles. You can’t do that when you’re stuck in your native language, because the meaning dominates.

CS In your book Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (2025), the reader learns astonishing facts about German-Japanese relations, such as a fondness for Heinrich von Kleist, which you also share. Or you mention the fact that anatomy was taught in German at the University of Tokyo, and that the Japanese military modelled itself after the German example. I was surprised that a foreign language had become so deeply ingrained in a very distant culture.

YT Very specific things happened there, including coincidences in global history that you’re not really aware of if you only know the present. There were French colonies in Asia; that’s usually all people know. But when it comes to Japan, there’s a lot to tell – for example, it was completely isolated and had almost no contact with the outside world from 1600 to 1853. During that period, only the Dutch were allowed to come to Japan because they wanted to trade and not proselytise. The Dutch didn’t behave in a colonialist manner; they were very modest, and some Dutch people learned Japanese and even wrote haikus. And so, back then, the Japanese imported European culture mainly through the Netherlands. This included medical books, for example: at the time, only Chinese medicine was practised in Japan. People wondered why Chinese medicine was so different, whether Europeans might have completely different bodies. Then the country was forced open by the Americans because they needed a stopover for whaling. The Americans threatened military intervention if Japan did not open its borders. Since then, Japan saw the necessity of militarising very quickly. Neither England nor France were seen as models, because they took a long time to develop their militaries, while Prussia had developed a strong military in a short time. For the Japanese, German was accessible because it was very similar to Dutch. In this way, German remained the most important foreign language in Japan until the end of the First World War.

CS Of course, the German neo-fascists don’t know  =anything about this – perhaps they’d be proud of their country’s long-lasting influence on another culture. In their homeland, they live, as you put it, in an “exclusive” counterworld” full of symbols, such as the omnipresent wolves, which also play a sinister role in László Krasznahorkai’s novel Herscht 07769 (2024) about right-wing extremists in the former GDR. Can you explain the right-wing fascination with wolves? Do they sympathise with these animals, gathered in packs, whom no one loves but everyone fears? Romulus and Remus were, after all, raised on wolf’s milk.

YT First, it must be said that the wolves don’t deserve this at all. But if the far right is looking for a symbolic animal, there aren’t that many candidates that come into question. It certainly can’t be the cat or even the mouse; they’re simply too weak. I’m thinking more of the bear; after all, it is Germanic. But because the bear is so lovable in children’s literature, people sympathise with it, even though the real bear is much more dangerous than the wolf, who doesn’t actually attack humans. But in fairy tales and children’s books in general, it is portrayed as an evil creature. And for the far right, it’s very important
to trigger people’s fear.

A swastika has a power that never weakens
– it is strong because it is meaningless

CS You also explore the fascination with codes in the far-right milieu, where people seem to long for a close-knit, exclusive kind of community – a brotherhood, whereby membership is expressed through certain symbolic objects and insignia. Did this form of fetishisation inspire you to develop your sociogram told through objects?

YT Yes, I think so. With slogans like “Germany for the Germans!” these groups want to prevent foreigners from being let in, but the slogan is hollow and the more it is repeated, the clearer that becomes. Symbols, on the other hand, are silent, so they do not lose their power. A swastika has a power that never weakens – it is strong because it is meaningless. I find this contradiction interesting; it explains why the symbol is so important to the far right, and why it must be banned. When you think about it, it is strange that a law bans a symbol. But music and symbols have more power than language, which only conveys ideological content and much less emotion.

CS In other words, silent visual communication is more powerful than language, yet it too plays a daily role. Customers at the newsstand save their small change by consuming the headlines presented in screaming capital letters with bated breath. They don’t want in-depth news, they just want to feed their anger instead. A bold headline like “Party meeting at the Renowned Brothel” offers a whole world of outrage.

YT In that context, language also becomes symbolic. The headlines consist of huge letters, and the font itself is also more important than the words themselves. This directly appeals to people’s emotions: often fear is stoked, impending dangers are painted on the wall and the willingness to fight back is activated. It’s also true that the right-wing press follows a simple principle: information is short and free. Solid, well-reported truth is expensive and takes time; propaganda is free and quickly digested. I still really like the radio in Germany: public stations regularly invite specialists on a specific topic, and these people then explain, for example, why they consider Covid-19 dangerous and why vaccination is necessary. They don’t just speak down to people; instead, these scientists explain things analytically and they take plenty of time. You don’t have to believe what they say, but it helps you make sense of things – who reached this conclusion, what field of science they come from, and what they’ve done so far. On the internet, people usually just quote a single line from reputable publications, and in an emotionally charged way. Substance requires many sentences.

CS But these right-wing extremists don’t want nuance. They want chaos to vent their frustration and gain attention through provocative, forbidden messages delivered from their palm reader, as you call the mobile phone, evoking a highly unreliable form of divination based on the lines of the hand. An entirely coded world opens up, where contemporary technology spreads ancient myths from which the marginalised craft a heroic identity. How does one counter this?

YT I believe that some issues must first be considered at the national level. For example, if it is not yet possible to phase out nuclear plants at the EU level, then one country must take the first step for the world. We cannot do without the nation yet, which makes it even more important that no one is infected by nationalism. The EU level is very important for this change, as it operates precisely between the national and international levels. It may be that the EU’s political influence is weak at the moment, but in terms of its fundamental principles, it is stronger than any alliance of the world’s most powerful nations. And as an author, I think universally, that is, beyond the international level. I want to include not only people, but also the animals and plants of our universe. Cosmopolitan is a beautiful word because the word “cosmo” reminds me of the cosmos – so we can include the stars as well. .