Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and was educated at Waseda University and the University of Hamburg.

She made her debut as a writer with Missing Heels, which was awarded the Gunzo Prize for new writers in 1991. In 1993, she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog (which was published in English in 2003).

She writes in both Japanese and German, and in 1996, she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award granted to foreign writers for their contribution to German culture.  Where Europe Begins, a collection of stories translated from both languages, was published by New Directions in 2002.

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The Post-National Writer


Hair Tax (Translated from German)
"After months of controversy, the new hair tax was approved. The Hamster Lovers' Guild was said to be the driving force behind the reform. The Guild had always found it objectionable that the tax levied on mammals was the same for a hamster as for a German shepherd. They proposed that the tax be recalculated in accordance with an animal"s surface area. The tax agency accepted this compromise, but then chose to avoid the term "surface area,” which might have been construed as discrimination against the obese. A person who speaks of the size of a body’s surface is lacking in political sensibility."

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