| Abstract
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Despite the vast body of scholarship on Yoko Tawada, an author who writes in both German and Japanese, her work has not been examined in light of the question of modernity. Through a close reading of her play Kafka Kaikoku and an examination of recent world literary theories, this paper situates Tawada’s work in relation to a complicated nexus that features as protagonists two contemporaneous authors, Franz Kafka and Izumi Kyōka, engaging with their migrations between pre-modern and modern pasts. How does this complicated temporal dimension re-imagine putative divisions between East and West in relation to modernity and modernities, and how does that affect our understanding of world literature? My paper proposes the notion of “interlaced modernities” to address these questions and reflects on its implications for world literature. Despite the vast body of scholarship on Yoko Tawada, an author who writes in both German and Japanese, her work has not been examined in light of the question of modernity. Through a close reading of her play Kafka Kaikoku and an examination of recent world literary theories, this paper situates Tawada’s work in relation to a complicated nexus that features as protagonists two contemporaneous authors, Franz Kafka and Izumi Kyōka, engaging with their migrations between pre-modern and modern pasts. How does this complicated temporal dimension re-imagine putative divisions between East and West in relation to modernity and modernities, and how does that affect our understanding of world literature? My paper proposes the notion of “interlaced modernities” to address these questions and reflects on its implications for world literature.
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