Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada is a Japanese writer who made her home in Germany at the age of nineteen. She has written powerfully about her status as an immigrant, about the challenges of operating in a foreign language, and about the privileges and perils of being an outsider. Her book Opium für Ovid combines her response to Ovidian myth with a reworking of the Japanese pillow books. The result is a book in which East meets West, and where the characters from Ovidian myth, such as Daphne, Salmacis, and Leto, have metamorphosed into a hybrid of the original myth and into girls who walk the streets of contemporary Hamburg. Through their stories Tawada probes issues such as racism, homelessness, body image, and educational constraints.