Book Description
From Japan to Vietnam to Amsterdam to the Canary Islands, these three new tales by master storyteller Yoko Tawada float between cultures, identities, and the dreamwork of the imagination.

When he watched Michael Jackson's videos, every cell in Tamao's body started to seethe: he even felt his appearance begin to change. His friends all said plastic surgery was in bad taste. But didn't everyone harbor a secret desire for a new face? His own was as plain as a burlap sack, so he put it out of his mind and studied hard to compensate for how dull he looked. He told himself that fretting over one's appearance was a job for women. But deep down, doesn't every man who lacks confidence in his looks yearn for that moment when the Beast turns into a handsome young man?—from Facing the Bridge

Reading Yoko Tawada becomes an obsession, like watching the films of Catherine Deneuve. In Facing the Bridge, Tawada's second story collection with New Directions, obsession becomes delight as the reader is absorbed into three tales where identities flicker and shift within borders as wide as the mind. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"Fiction should feel like a borrowed coat softened by many wearings."
Though the characters of these three mesmerizing novellas are all looking for "bridges," they face personal voids instead, gaps between their perceptions of past and present, and dislocations in time and place.Each of the characters has traveled to a new place from the "homeland" where s/he was born, and each now lives in a new culture into which s/he does not quite fit.As each deals with the disconnections in his/her life, the author creates almost mystical scenes--not quite real and not quite nightmare, with fantasy and reality overlapping, both for the characters and for the reader.The miscommunications and lack of communication that occur among people living in foreign cultures add to the burdens each faces.

The two main characters of "The Shadow Man" are so similar psychologically that they might be considered to be two aspects of the same person, though they come from different backgrounds and times.Amo, based on a historical personage, was brought to Germany from Africa in a "huge floating temple" occupied by Bad Spirits, who seized him at the age of seven and brought him to Germany as a slave. Though Amo becomes the first African to obtain a PhD degree from a European university, his attempts to fit into eighteenth century German society are hesitant, and his shyness with women makes relationships tenuous at best.Interjected with Amo's story (and introduced without any transitions) is the story of Tamao, a contemporary Japanese national studying in Germany, who finds that he belongs neither to the Japanese nor German cultures.

"In Front of Tran Tien Bridge" tells of Kazuko Minamiyama, a Japanese living in Berlin who travels to Vietnam shortly after the "American" war. A friend has seen someone in Vietnam who looks just like her.Since Kazuko regards being a tourist as a job, she is careful to behave exactly as tourists behave, a quiet satire which is well integrated with author Tawada's themes of miscommunication and alienation. Throughout the trip, Kazuko discovers women who look exactly like her, with more and more of them appearing the longer she stays in Vietnam.

Set in the Canary Islands, "Saint George and the Translator" features a speaker who is working on a translation about St. George and the Dragon.There, she finds herself unable to work or to see the fragments of the manuscript as a whole.Quotations of the story of St. George and the Dragon are interspersed with the action, and symbolic questions arise about the nature of St. George and, more importantly, the nature of the dragon, and where the translator fits between them.Eventually, she befriends an abusive ice cream vendor, with whom she finds herself "trapped in the embrace of St. George."

As the characters constantly re-examine their roles in alien societies and among alien people, they also contribute to the alienation through their behavior, intentionally or not.An aura of sexuality pervades the stories--though it is distanced, almost chaste in its expression--and the reader observes that in this, as in other areas, communication does not take place as one might expect. Featuring characters who are solitary, either by nature or through the circumstances of their lives, these stories bring each character to the point at which s/he must begin to "face the bridge."nMary Whipple
... Read more

Book Description
In these three narratives, an ingenious story-teller has created a new kind of fantasy, playful yet vaguely sinister, laced with her own brand of humor, which reviewers have labeled variously as "funky," "mischievous," "weird," and "hilarious."

The author was in her early thirties when the title story won her country's highest literary award. In The Bridegroom Was a Dog, an offbeat cram school teacher tells her pupils a story about a little princess whose hand in marriage is promised to a dog as a reward for licking her bottom clean; only
to have her own life turned upside down by the sudden appearance of a dog-like man with a predilection for the same part of her anatomy. When rumor-mongering housewives try to force them into a more respectable relationship, both escape into new relationships of their own...

With its publication here, alongside two other equally offbeat but plausible fantasies, readers in the West can now discover for themselves a writer whose inventions are as strange and exhilarating as the best of dreams. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Hmmmmmmmmmm
This is a surreal book that children will love.If you like bum liking dogs this is the book for you.If you like stories about snot.This is the book for you.It`s a short story filled with dirty and unusual behavior.I must say I have never read anything like it.Read this book.It`s great.

Creative and disturbing
I'm thankful to have some translations of this amazing writer of Japanese fiction.These stories provide a rich and surreal reflection on gender and cultural identities and the final story is one of the best depictions of feeling out of place, whether living with a new family or in a new country (in this case both).Sorry to see that this is out of print, but happy that "Where Europe Begins" is now out.

Wonderful Book!
If you love good writing, you will love this book. As Kafka was rebuked by the first readers of his day only to become one of the most influential writers of this century, so too Tawada is walking an unmarked road that will eventually gain the accolades it deserves.

Is this really the same book in English?
Bride Groom was a Dog? Is this really the translation of Inumukoiri? That mythical modern-day fairy tale that won the Akutagawa Award? Even the title sounds lousy. What happened to the sense of mystery, the portent, themagic? This is the worst translation I have seen since the Japanese versionof the lyrics to "A Hard Day's Night" !!

Lousiest book I couldn't finish reading this year...
This book was so bad that I couldn't even bring myself to get past the third page.The attempt at stream-of-conscience prose failed, along with the faery-tale style.An absolute waste of my time, and money. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by Thomson Gale on January 1, 2006. The length of the article is 2739 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The postcommunist eye: an interview with Yoko Tawada.
Author: Bettina Brandt
Publication: World Literature Today (Magazine/Journal)
Date: January 1, 2006
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 80Issue: 1Page: 43(3)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Book Description
A gorgeous collection of fantastic and dreamlike tales by one of the world's most innovative contemporary writers.

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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Imagery Beyond the Ordinary
Tawada strikes at the very heart of the careful, selective, appreciative reader. As a Comparative Literature major, I enjoy these stories for their provocative use of words, something she is very careful to use.

"The Bath" is a reflection of my childish ambition to be a simultaneous translator, yet an ambition that allowed (or forced) me to learn 7 (so far) languages other than English...with smatterings in several others.

Language on this small planet is so fragile. Tawada understands that.

Writing that lives
These are beautiful stories of great imagination and warmth, and sometimes of great insight. How a person can say a bad thing about these stories is beyond my understanding. In "Storytellers without souls" Tawada writes: "Even my writing lives", which in her case is true. Like any good art: when her ideas enter us they become a part of us.
Her handling of dreams, as well as her dreamlike narratives and enlightening reinterpretations of the world we all have to live in, connect her work very strongly with surrealism. Her characters' transitions between the very different languages of Japan and Germany confuse their manners of communicating with the world and with other people, and this is sometimes described in Tawada's narratives as an actual loss of language.
One thing i do have a problem with is the translation of some of the texts. A number of the stories deal with the narrator's outsider relationship with the German language, but Susan Bernowsky translates the specified German words into English so the subject is lost on us. If Tawada is trying to describe to us interpretations of the German language, then why are we reading about interpretations of the English language? Original text with footnotes is always better translation than rewriting.

FANTASTIC!!!
Don't listen to the Jerseyite who wrote the two-star review. Pick up this book and you'll want to carry it around forever. Very unusual, Tawada is at the forefront of experimenting with the short story form. Like the paintings of Leonora Carrington, these stories offer us a fresh way of thinking about the world. I won't ruin with plot details, but the title story that takes place on a train is gorgeous.

Creamery dreamery butter
Short stories these ain't. Some of them aren't all that short, either (up to 61 pages). One of the backcover blurbs gushes that Tawada "leaves beautiful shards of old storytelling to hover against a new and astonishing narrative field." Sorry, but nothing new or terribly exciting going on here. The old shards are just that-fragments of myths or fairytales that Tawada generally pastes on-nothing nearly as subtle as weaving occurs except in the title story (the longest). As for that new narrative field, I suppose the blurber means the lack of any discernible plot, the lack of any motivation on the part of any of the characters and the surreal imagery which isn't bad at times but doesn't add up to much. For example: "One by one the hairs on her head turn into writing brushes and begin composing letters. The envelopes bear no addresses. I try reading the letters with my telescope but the moment each one is finished, a policeman wearing pyjamas comes in to take it away. Not for purposes of censorship. This country has no such laws. There is no paper in the bathrooms, so everyone uses letters instead. And afterwards they are illegible."
Even if you forget about the whole surrealist movement this is Jamaica Kincaid territory ("At the Bottom of the River" in particular). Or, if you want the same sort of meta-reality with language a whole lot more striking, far more cohesive and embedded in a narrative that adds up by the time you turn the last page, Robert Coover is loads defter, funnier, more clever. Not to mention a dozen small-press authors whose writing is featured in off-beat publications such as Air Fish and Rampike, the best of whom is probably Richard Gessner.
As another reviewer pointed out, Tawada's surreality is not wholly without rhyme or reason. Tawada's narrators, who always seem to be a version of the author (a Japanese woman living in Germany) have a kind of phobia related to language, a fear of being unable to read, of not be able to speak or to understand. Through most of the first story, for example, the narrator, who happens to be a translator, somehow loses her tongue. In another, one of the other characters deprives her of her ears. In another, she becomes a giant tongue. "I was a tongue. I left the house just as I was: naked, pink and unbearably moist. It was easy to delight people I met on the street, but no one was willing to touch me." One of the themes in "Canned Foreign" is illiteracy. In the last story the narrator sees an ear doctor who peers into the ear that hurts and sees "a stage in a theater" and "a building near a harbor, an officer and several women." Later in this piece, the voice of an audio novel takes over her apartment and she has trouble writing and even reading.
In the end, this is a lot of dreamy prose that lacks the meat to be called essays and really doesn't qualify for fiction either; if I had to pick one I would say essays. The books primary flaw is that the writing has so little impact on the world the rest of us inhabit, you tend to forget what you've read almost as soon as you put the book down. ... Read more

Book Description
As Japan sped through modernization and technological advancement in the late twentieth century, complex influences shaped its Modern and contemporary art. Chikaku mixes media and generations in exploring that history through themes of time and memory. It includes work from Yayoi Kusama, Daido Moriyama, Yoko Ono, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Miwa Yanagi. ... Read more

Product Description
The Cornell East Asia Series presents the first volume of Annotated Japanese Literary Gems, which makes available representative examples of annotated Japanese short stories and novellas from Meiji to the present. This multi-volume set of books - six volumes are planned - provides rubi for nearly all kanji at first use. Each story is also included in a plain-text version. Along with the extensive annotations provided, the collection serves as a resource for students of modern Japanese literature and can also be used as an intermediate to advanced language text. The volume is printed Japanese-style, with pages ordered from right to left. The present volume, the first in the collection, introduces stories by three important postwar authors:Readers on the Train, A Dictionary Village,andA Town Called Zfrom Fox-Possessed Moon, by Tawada Yoko; My Friend, by Hayashi Kyoko; and Trees and Grass, by Nakagami Kenji. Tawada Yoko lives in Hamburg and publishes in both German and Japanese with insight into how individual languages and the spaces between them work. Hayashi Kyoko is a Nagasaki author who spent her childhood years in wartime Shanghai and has written about both A-bomb and colonial experiences. Nakagami Kenji, a native of Shingin Wakayama, and the first Japanese author to identify himself as burakumin, concentrates on the themes of burakumin and their heritage. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on January 1, 2000. The length of the article is 504 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Bridegroom Was a Dog.(Review)(Brief Article)
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2000
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: 74Issue: 1Page: 244

Article Type: Book Review, Brief Article

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more