The Naked Eye

“The Naked Eye” plunges readers into the disorienting odyssey of a young Vietnamese woman, codenamed Anh, whose journey begins with a supposed scholarly conference in East Berlin. Her initial academic purpose—presenting on “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism”—is violently interrupted when she is kidnapped and dragged across the Iron Curtain to West Berlin. There, she endures a bizarre interlude of domesticity and “sexual boredom” with her captor, a period marked by profound alienation. Her eventual escape lands her not in Moscow as intended, but adrift in Paris, a city utterly foreign to her. Stripped of identity, language, and resources, Anh navigates the city’s fringes, encountering a diverse cast of characters from sex workers to fellow Vietnamese immigrants and a nomadic theatre troupe. At the heart of her surreal existence is a growing obsession with the French film icon Catherine Deneuve, whose cinematic presence offers both a refuge and a distorted mirror to Anh’s fragmented self. Tawada masterfully explores themes of displacement, cultural shock, the fluidity of identity, and the power of art to both shape and dislocate reality, creating an incandescent narrative that blurs the lines between dreams and nightmares in a rapidly shifting global landscape.