World Books Review: Start Making Sense

In Yoko Tawada’s latest novel alienation becomes downright alienating.

The Naked Eye. By Yoko Tawada
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. New Directions, 256 pages, $13.95.

Review by Tommy Wallach

A reviewer courts considerable danger when he or she condemns a book that is densely surreal or murkily allegorical. Complaining that the story’s symbols are foggy may invite charges that subtleties in the plot were missed; objections to the lack of a clear narrative will lead some to think that the book’s deeper political or moral themes were ignored. But promises of profundity are no defense for rampant obscurity; I read Yoko Tawada’s “The Naked Eye” in constant suspense, convinced that at any moment it must start making sense. It never did.

This may be a matter of taste, or a lack of patience with arty difficulty for its own sake. The prolific Tawada has a considerable reputation in Europe: her writing — novels, plays, poems, essays, and short stories — has garnered a number of awards, including the Akutagawa Prize and the Goethe Medal.

As far as I can discern, her latest novel revolves around a Vietnamese teenager (known sometimes as Anh Nguyet, or “the pupil with the Iron Blouse”; for clarity’s sake, I’ll just refer to her as “the girl”) who is invited to give a speech on Communism at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. The time period is unclear, as is the duration of the novel (trying to parse the passage of time in the book turns out to be as frustrating as trying to locate the hour on a Dalí wristwatch). Once in Berlin, the girl meets Jörg, a German radical who is either her boyfriend or her kidnapper. She fails to show up for her speech and then decides to go back to Vietnam by way of Moscow. Unfortunately, when a stranger lies down in front of a train to stop it, the girl gets on and ends up in Paris. Here, she takes up with a French prostitute named Marie, and becomes obsessed with the films of Catherine Deneuve.

This is where the novel really starts to get weird.

Each chapter in “The Naked Eye” is titled after a different Catherine Deneuve movie, from Repulsion to Dancer in the Dark. The girl spends her days watching the same films over and over again: “…the silver screen was the bedsheet upon which I did all my living and sleeping.”

As the book progresses, the content of the chapters becomes more and more related to the chapter’s title film, until we are left reading what feel like essays written for an undergraduate cinema studies class. The girl’s philosophy, a childlike regurgitation of Ho Chih Minh’s propaganda, proffers the only readerly fun in these long and tortuous critiques. Upon meeting a prostitute for the first time, the girl isn’t scandalized by the thought of sex being sold for money, but by the fact that rooms are rented out to facilitate the sex. Renting rooms, after all, is a capitalist crime.

Describing a scene from Les Voleurs, the girl narrates, “Juliette is surrounded by many male eyes. The eyes of the policeman Alex are windowpanes made of frozen tears; the eyes of his brother are glasses filled with golden whiskey.” It’s a beautiful image, and there are more than a few of them served up in Tawada’s descriptions, but a couple of trenchant or evocative takes on obscure French cinema does not a satisfying novel make.

“There was no longer any woman whose name was ‘I,’” the girl gushes to the imaginary Deneuve in her head. “As far as I was concerned, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist.”

The prolific Yoko Tawada

This points out one of the major flaws in the book. The nameless protagonist really doesn’t exist. She has no agency, and is content to wander the streets of Paris watching films and suffering. She takes a job as a test subject for beauty products, but the position’s dramatic potential is wasted. She nurses certain homosexual fantasies, but never acts on them. When we find out at the end of the book that she has gone blind, though still goes to the movies just to experience the sounds (“In a film without images, most people are merely footsteps.”) the irony is supposed to be affecting. But we have learned nothing about her, really, and so can’t summon up any empathy.

Tawada asserts in the forward of the novel that she wrote the book simultaneously in Japanese and German (her two native tongues), and then translated backwards to produce two full texts, one in each language. She explains that she began in German, but then “certain parts of the story began occurring to her in Japanese.” This is unconvincing as well as pretentious. A story is a story, and language is language. A story never arrives in words; it must be translated. Perhaps if Tawada had been more concerned with creating a narrative, rather than deconstructing one, the language wouldn’t come off as so forced. Whatever the explanation, Tawada is every bit as culpable as translator Susan Bernofsky for sentences such as this one, to be found three lines into the first chapter: “The gaze of the nameless lens licks the floor like a detective without grammar.” Come again, please?