Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman.--Rivka Galchen "The New York Times Magazine"

Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half-remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.-- "The New York Times"

Tawada's strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity, and what it means to own someone else's story or one's own.-- "The New Yorker"
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Kleist, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes as well as the Goethe Medal. In 2018 her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.

Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada (sharing her National Book Award) and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan?s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).