A novel about Paris, sex – and a love affair with Catherine Deneuve

Telegraph

13-03-2025

Our narrator and protagonist is a student from Vietnam. She has been a model pupil throughout her youth – or at least one who 'gave the impression of being difficult to seduce' – and so, this being the 1980s, she's chosen to visit East Berlin to speak at a Communist youth conference. The broad gist of what follows, in Yoko Tawada's slippery new novel, is this: the narrator is kidnapped and transplanted to Bochum in West Germany, where she lives briefly with her captor-cum-lover, before she escapes and, in trying to flee to Moscow, accidentally ends up in Paris instead. There she enters a semi-rhapsodic – and of course one-way – relationship with Catherine Deneuve.
Plot, in The Naked Eye, is secondary. Tawada's interest is in emotional weather, the slippage of names and identities needed to survive various border crossings, and our relationship with iconic figures we'll never meet. Each chapter is framed by one of Deneuve's films, and our protagonist loses herself in cinematic fantasies – 'the silver screen was the bedsheet upon which I did all my living and sleeping' – even as her actual life becomes one of lodging in a sex worker's basement before she's taken in by a couple and lives out an on-the-nose colonial metaphor.
This sort of writing runs on dream logic: it blurs the mundane and the implausible. Tawada has written in both Japanese and German, but as her translator Susan Bernofsky explains, The Naked Eye was effectively written in both languages, given that 'parts of the story began occurring to her in Japanese.' (The novel was then published in German, from which this English version is translated.) Such a mixture of languages is apt for a novel that's sharply rendered at some points, frustratingly elusive at others.
With fake identities piling up and her illegal status severely limiting her options, the narrator gets to a point where, she tells us – and Deneuve, her constant addressee – 'if I were to reveal my real name now, it would appear to me like the name of a fictional character'. The Naked Eye is full of such arresting moments, insights into the notion that a person can be a product, and those who lack agency can end up with non-speaking parts in other people's dramas. Still, as you read Tawada's novel, you might wish that the stage on which you were watching it all was a little easier to see.