Where Europe Begins presents a collection of startling new stories by Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. Moving through landscapes of fairy tales, family history, strange words and letters, dreams, and every-day reality, Tawada's work blurs divisions between fact and fiction, prose and poetry. Often set in physical spaces as disparate as Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany, these tales describe a fragmented world where even a city or the human body can become a sort of text. Suddenly, the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author and the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a woman traveling on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Tawada playfully makes the experience of estrangement -- of a being in-between -- both sensual and bewildering, and as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things while telling a fine story.
Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes. Last year her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.
Show moreWhere Europe Begins presents a collection of startling new stories by Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. Moving through landscapes of fairy tales, family history, strange words and letters, dreams, and every-day reality, Tawada's work blurs divisions between fact and fiction, prose and poetry. Often set in physical spaces as disparate as Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany, these tales describe a fragmented world where even a city or the human body can become a sort of text. Suddenly, the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author and the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a woman traveling on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Tawada playfully makes the experience of estrangement -- of a being in-between -- both sensual and bewildering, and as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things while telling a fine story.
Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes. Last year her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.
Show moreYoko Tawada (March 23, 1960 - Present) is a Japanese writer currently living in Hamburg, Germany. She was born in Tokyo, received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, then studied at Hamburg University where she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature. She received her doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich. In 1987 she published A Void Only Where You Are, a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition. Tawada's Missing Heels received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, and The Bridegroom Was a Dog received the Akutagawa Prize in 1993. In 1999 she became writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four months. Her Suspect on the Night Train won the Tanizaki Prize and Ito Sei Literary Prize in 2003. Tawada received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, and the Goethe Medal in 2005.
"An undeniably superb, even breathtaking short story collection
about life spent in the in-between by the Japanese-born,
German-domiciled, multi-dimensioned Tawada."
*Asian Week*
"Tawada's slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable
potency. Each one sustains a masterly balance between the tenuous
but meaningful connections of dreams and the direct, earthy
storytelling of folk tales. "
*The New York Times*
"A spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and
multiplying cities."
*Victor Pelevin*
"Only the most profound reverence, I felt, could do justice to this
writer and this work."
*Wim Wenders*
"In Tawada's work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a
mythology that is not one's own."
*Rivka Galchen - The New Yorker*
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