The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada tells the story of a character trapped between cultures and languages. The unnamed narrator, a girl from Vietnam, travels to East Berlin for an international communist youth conference and winds up getting stuck in Paris. Although she doesn’t speak a word of French, she becomes an avid moviegoer and soon falls in love with Catherine Deneuve, whose films are then interwoven throughout this intriguing story of multiple displacements.

Japanese-born Yoko Tawada has lived in Germany since 1985 and has published a dozen books (stories, novels, poems, plays) in each of the two languages she writes in . The Naked Eye is her first book to have been written simultaneously in German and Japanese. This translation is based on the German version of the novel.