For any academic in the Japan field who has had the experience of attending a non–geographically defined conference, such as that of the Modernist Studies Association, for example, and has been discouraged to find that the sole Japan-focused panel drew only their Japan field colleagues, Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, edited by Doug Slaymaker, presents a welcome opportunity for dialogue outside the channels of area studies. This volume of twelve essays, the first English collection on Tawada's writing, nicely enacts Tawada's project of unmooring language from identity through her off-kilter and humorous experimental fiction; because she writes in both her native Japanese and her distinctly non-native German, it is possible to include criticism from both scholars of Japanese and German literature.

One of this collection's significant contributions is that it crafts a space within the Western academy from which Japanese literature can be understood as participating in the conversation on globalization, not as so much cultural cache for increasingly cosmopolitan consumers, but as a literature that is itself commenting on the globalizing process. Largely organized around the productive possibilities of the exophany, in contrast to the euphony, that is produced when the naturalness of language is stripped away and the forced labor to which words are put is explored, Voices from Everywhere presents, as contributor Yasemin Yildiz writes of Tawada's work, “a perspective on multilingual translational encounters as positive and productive rather than as a site of loss or grievous alienation” (p. 80). Christina Kraenzle echoes this when she discusses how, in a world of collapsing difference and increasing uniformity of space, Tawada's surrealist ethnography tells another story “where regionalisms and nationalism flourish” (p. 107). Bernard Benoun supports his claim that Tawada is neither pulled by “the hazy horizons of globalization” nor “the siren calls of a withdrawal into identity” (p. 133). Slaymaker's smart editorial decision to include a foreword by Marjorie Perloff, perhaps the most highly acclaimed scholar of American avant-garde poetics, strengthens the claim that Tawada's writing is indeed relevant “everywhere.”

The volume opens with a surrealist-inflected piece by Tawada herself that ponders the connections between national identities, linguistic traditions, and physical bodies, titled “Tawada Yoko Does Not Exist.” The essays that follow by Keijiro Suga, Margaret Mitsutani, and Christina Kraenzle all ruminate, in their individual ways, on the opportunities that translation and travel offer for understanding the machinations of language as words are plucked out of their “natural” environs. Slaymaker's and Yildiz's essays pose Tawada's literary experiments as portals to imaginaries that transcend borders of all sorts. The surrealist impulse that so often makes the quotidian appear strange in Tawada's writing is explored in the contributions of Bertina Brandt, Bernard Banoun, and Hiltrud Aren. And finally, Suzuko Mousel Knot and Reiko Tachibana situate Tawada's narratives in the specific histories of Japanese and German literature.

Discussing the ways in which Tawada's fiction lightens the cultural burdens that language accrues, many of the contributors comment on Tawada's frequently expressed sentiment that she would rather dwell in the gap that exists between two languages than traverse that gap. When faced with such intriguing declarations, it is tempting to merely recast Tawada's manifesto-like statements and more or less repeat their general promise. This is a temptation that the contributors largely ignore. Keijiro Suga brilliantly illuminates the Tawadian desire to inhabit the ravine between languages and writes that when Tawada figures translation as “pebbles falling down,” the agitation that produces the crumbling rock is generated by “constantly going through the available phonetic and semantic resources in (at least) two languages” (p. 27). Suzuko Mousel-Knott and Reiko Tachibana similarly contribute to a fuller understanding of Tawada's mission as they delve into the national and masculine literary figures against which Tawada so often positions her narrators. Read together, Mousel-Knott's and Tachibana's essays exemplify the principle of multiple entrances, in this case from two different literary traditions, which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari establish as a criterion for the development of a “minor literature” as a dynamic agent of change. “We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever,” they write in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3), “none matters more than another, and no one entrance is more privileged.”

Scholarly attention to Tawada's work has, until now, been far greater in the field of German literature than in the field of Japanese literature, and thus Voices from Everywhere serves the dual purpose of introducing Tawada's work to English readers and establishing her Japanese writing as a legitimate object of scholarship. Collecting essays from scholars of two distinct linguistic and cultural traditions helps clarify Tawada's project of laying bare the assumptions that language-users bring to the narratives they encounter. Readings of Tawada's narrators as contestatory ethnographers or racialized “others,” by no means absent in criticism by scholars of Japanese literature, seems to have a louder resonance in analysis done by scholars of German literature. When reading Tawada's Japanese-text Gotthard Railroad, for example, Mousel-Knott references Edward Said's Orientalism and identifies the placing of a doll in a male body as a moment when the female narrator is stripped of her agency and likened to the “stereotyped image of the Japanese women” (p. 145). Tawada has elsewhere, however, expounded on the specific legacy of kokeshi dolls as historical substitutes for female babies killed at birth. So while Mousel-Knott's chosen point of departure produces a reading informed by postcolonial theory, an analysis that follows the thread of the historic kokeshi could read the placement of a murdered baby girl inside a man's abdomen as a rewriting of bodily maps and a questioning of the specifically female nature of reproductivity.

Voices from Everywhere creates a transcultural framework in which these multiple readings are encouraged to cross-fertilize and open up beyond the parameters of its pages and invites a sharing of theoretical sources across area studies borders. Some repetition is perhaps inevitable in a collection of essays on one author, and certain exemplary moments of Tawada's praxis and facts about Tawada appear in multiple essays. Regardless, this collection remains a timely introduction to a unique and exciting writer.