[5] She left the business to study at Hamburg University, and in 1990 she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature.
[6] In 2000 she received her doctorate in German literature from the University of Zurich, where Sigrid Weigel, her thesis advisor, had been appointed to the faculty.
[9] Tawada's writing career began in 1987 with the publication of Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts—Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (Nothing Only Where You Are), a collection of poems released in a German and Japanese bilingual edition.
[10] Arufabetto no kizuguchi also appeared in book form in 1993, and Tawada received her first major recognition outside of Japan by winning the Lessing Prize Scholarship.
[11] An English edition of the three-story collection Inu muko iri, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, was published in 1998 but was not commercially successful.
[5] New Directions Publishing reissued the Mitsutani translation of the single Akutagawa Prize-winning novella in 2012 under the title The Bridegroom Was a Dog.
[14] In 1997 she was writer in residence at Villa Aurora, and in 1999 she spent four months as the Max Kade Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[22] In 2005, Tawada won the prestigious Goethe Medal from the Goethe-Institut for meritorious contributions to German culture by a non-German.
In 2016 she received the Kleist Prize,[33][34] and in 2018 she was awarded the Carl Zuckmayer Medal for services to the German language.
Scholars of her work have adopted her use of the term exophony to describe the condition of writing in a non-native language.
[41][42] Her writing uses unexpected words, alphabets, and ideograms to call attention to the need for translation in everyday life.
By imagining children as going back to an earlier stage rather than ever improving – a meandering that is reflected in the novel’s non-linear, associative narration – Tawada terminates their ties to futurity, and with it the capitalist myth of continuous progress.