This week, Tawada's latest novel, 'The Emissary,' translated by Margaret Mitsutani, won the inaugural National Book Award for translated literature. 

  The Danish writer Dorthe Nors lives alone with a black cat in a house so far west on the Jutland peninsula that she’s practically in Scotland. It’s not far from the rural parish community where she was born, in 1970, and raised by a carpente…