Her publisher counters that a mother is a mother, even if you never speak with her. “I’ve never spoken with my mother,” she protests. When the bear tells her publisher that she wants to begin writing in German herself, rather than having it translated from Russian, she is told that part of the appeal of her work is that it’s written in “her mother tongue.” She doesn’t like that. The novel’s matriarch polar bear also begins her book in a language other then German. Tawada wrote “Memoirs” in Japanese, then translated it into German on her own. “Memoirs” is actually three memoirs: the first narrated by Knut’s circus-performing Russian grandmother, the second by Knut’s mother and the final by Knut.

“But by the time I knew him,” Tawada said, “it was later in his life, when people complained that he was less cute.” He became a celebrity, photographed by Annie Leibovitz for a cover of Vanity Fair, and lines to visit Knut formed daily for his scheduled appearances. The tale of the real-life Knut is at once moving and outlandish: His mother, Tosca, a retired performer from the German Democratic Republic circus, rejected Knut at birth, so he was raised instead by a male zookeeper “mother.” When an animal rights activist commented in a German newspaper that the zoo’s ethical responsibility was to let Knut die, children protested and the world fell in love with the poor animal. Tawada had brought me to the Berlin Zoo because she had visited its famous polar bear, Knut, regularly while working on her 2014 novel, “Memoirs of a Polar Bear,” which will be published in English in November. Tawada received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, a German award to foreign writers in recognition of their contribution to German culture, and the Goethe Medal in 2005.It was a gray and drizzly afternoon when Yoko Tawada and I crossed under a green-and-gold paifang to meet with mammals much larger than ourselves. Her Suspect on the Night Train won the Tanizaki Prize and Ito Sei Literary Prize in 2003. In 1999 she became writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four months. Tawada's Missing Heels received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, and The Bridegroom Was a Dog received the Akutagawa Prize in 1993.

In 1987 she published Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts-Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (A Void Only Where You Are), a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition. She received her doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich. Tawada was born in Tokyo, received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, then studied at Hamburg University where she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature. Yōko Tawada ( 多和田葉子 Tawada Yōko, born March 23, 1960) is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yōko Tawada