Yoko Tawada writes in both German and Japanese. A native of Tokyo, she studied German literature in college. At 22, she moved to Hamburg, and has now lived in Germany for the bulk of her life.

Why write in two languages? When Ms. Tawada writes in Japanese, she says, she feels that she is writing in translation. Yet when writing in German, her daily spoken language, she suddenly feels restrained. If we take her word for it, both languages present difficulties unknown to monolingual writers.

We can imagine Ms. Tawada choosing her language each time she sits down to write. “Whether to write in German or in Japanese depends on what language allows me to play or experiment more freely,” she has said.

Reading in English, I cannot point to any broad stylistic difference between the translated German and the translated Japanese. Whatever freedom a particular language affords, it does not surface in a separate set of themes or narrative strategies. In either language, Ms. Tawada writes a dreamlike story, filled with bold and sometimes powerful imagery. Her impersonal characters are powered by cute superstitions and a musing thoroughness.

So is Ms. Tawada merely interested in obfuscation? She has a play, “Till,” published in 1998 in German but performed in both countries, about Japanese tourists in Germany. They speak Japanese, while the people around them speak German — alternate halves of the cast are intelligible, depending on what continent the play is performed. Only a bilingual tour guide, apparently, keeps the play coherent.

Japanese culture naturally finds its way into her German work. Much of this is collected in “Where Europe Begins” (New Directions, 208 pages, $14.95), which reads more like Japanese literature than German. The title story begins with a folktale. “For my grandmother,” the Japanese narrator begins, “to travel was to drink foreign water. … There was no need to be afraid of foreign landscapes, but foreign water could be dangerous.” There follows a tale about a talking serpent and a Fire Bird.

Several stories take up the problems of translation directly. “The Bath,” translated from the Japanese, concerns a simultaneous translator, living in Germany, who suffers a breakdown. She lives with her boyfriend, a German-language instructor, and the two communicate in the third person, using puppets. A new volume of all-Japanese writings, “Facing the Bridge” (New Directions, 192 pages, $14.95), includes “Saint George and the Translator.” The translator has taken a house on the Canary Islands in order to complete a project, but it is not going well:

“I noticed there were ‘O’s scattered across the first page. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the page was full of holes eaten away by the letter ‘O.’ There was a wall behind formed by the white page. … I colored the insides of all the ‘O’s black with my fountain pen and felt a slight sense of relief.”

Here, Ms. Tawada’s imagination seems ready-made for academic interpretation.

Her best moments, though, have to do with more than language. The only way to take her bilingual approach is to accept it as natural. Ms. Tawada finds herself in what seems like a very contemporary situation: She calls two very different cultures home. Her finest stories dramatize the fate of the individual in mobilized world.

For example, in “The Shadow Man,” Ms. Tawada interpolates a historical fiction about Wilhelm Amo, the Ghanaian who became a professor during the German Enlightenment, with the story of Tamao, a Japanese exchange student in modern-day Wolfenbüttel. A classic portrait of undergraduate fecklessness, Tamao’s character also shows what is common between the classic student and the classic immigrant: Cultural cues are jealously horded. When Tamao is asked whether he likes music, he answers that he likes Wagner. This displeases his liberal German professor. So he tries another answer — Michael Jackson — which horrifies him.

The new volume’s title story, “In Front of Trang Tien Bridge,” follows Kazuko, a Japanese-German on a tour of Vietnam. Her friends expect her to swing by Japan on the way: “Why talk about thousands of kilometers when Asia was all in the same place,” she sarcastically wonders. But Ms. Tawada goes beyond retort. She describes herself as “a member of the tourist race.” On the story’s last page, Kazuko finds herself on a busload of herself, a swarm of alternate identities. Ms. Tawada’s point is subtle: We travel not in order to find ourselves, but to sort out our multiples selves.