Margaret Mitsutani

cover image of the book Suggested in the Stars

Suggested in the Stars

by Yoko Tawada

Translated by Margaret Mitsutani

It’s hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than Scattered All Over the Earth—Yoko Tawada’s rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change—but its sequel, Suggested in the Stars, delivers exploits even more poignant and shambolic.

As Hiruko—whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue—and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko. Amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature), they empower each other against despair. Coping with carbon footprint worries but looping singly and in pairs, Hiruko and her friends hitchhike, take late-night motorcycle rides, and hop on the train (learning about railway strikes but also packed-train yoga) to convene in Copenhagen. There they find Susanoo in a strange hospital working with a scary speech-loss doctor. In the half-basement of this weird medical center (with strong echoes of Lars von Trier’s 1990s TV series The Kingdom), they also find two special kids washing dishes. They discover magic radios, personality swaps, ship tickets delivered by a robot, and other gifts. But friendship—loaning one another the nerve and heart to keep going—sets them all (and the reader) to dreaming of something more. Suggested in the Stars delivers new delights, and Yoko Tawada’s famed new trilogy will conclude in 2025 with Archipelago of the Sun, even if nobody will ever want this “strange, exquisite” (The New Yorker) trip to end.

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cover image of the book Three Streets

Three Streets

by Yoko Tawada

Translated by Margaret Mitsutani

The always astonishing Yoko Tawada here takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street. In “Kollwitzstrasse,” as the narrator muses on former East Berlin’s new bourgeois health food stores, so popular with wealthy young people, a ghost boy begs her to buy him the old-fashioned sweets he craves. She worries that sugar’s still sugar—but why lecture him, since he’s already dead? Then white feathers fall from her head and she seems to be turning into a crane . . . Pure white kittens and a great Russian poet haunt “Majakowskiring”: the narrator who reveres Mayakovsky’s work is delighted to meet his ghost. And finally, in “Pushkin Allee,” a huge Soviet-era memorial of soldiers comes to life—and, “for a scene of carnage everything was awfully well-ordered.” Each of these stories opens up into new dimensions the work of this magisterial writer.

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cover image of the book Scattered All Over the Earth

Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yoko Tawada

Translated by Margaret Mitsutani

In Scattered All Over the Earth, the mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, the world’s climate disaster and its attendant refugee crises is viewed through the loving twin lenses of friendship and linguistic ingenuity.

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.”

As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France and Stockholm, and in a series of mesmerizing scenes encounters an umami cooking competition, a dead whale, an ultranationalist, Kakuzo robots, and much more—each scene more vivid than the last.

With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really it’s just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.

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cover image of the book The Emissary

The Emissary

by Yoko Tawada

Translated by Margaret Mitsutani

After suffering a massive, irreparable disaster, Japan cuts itself off from the world. Children are born so weak they can barely walk; the only people with any get-up-and-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his always worried great-grandfather Yoshiro, and they carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time. Mumei may be frail and gray-haired, but he is a beacon of hope: full of wit and free of self-pity. Deftly turning inside out the dystopian scenario, Yoko Tawada creates an irrepressibly funny, playfully joyous novel, with a legerdemain uniquely her own.

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cover image of the book The Bridegroom Was a Dog

The Bridegroom Was a Dog

by Yoko Tawada

Translated by Margaret Mitsutani

The Bridegroom Was a Dog is perhaps the Japanese writer Yoko Tawada’s most famous work. Its initial publication in 1998 garnered admiration from _The New Yorker, _ which praised it as a “fast-moving, mysteriously compelling tale that has the dream quality of Kafka.”

The Bridegroom Was a Dog begins with a schoolteacher telling a fable to her students. In the fable, a princess promises her hand in marriage to a dog that has licked her bottom clean. The story takes an even stranger twist when that very dog appears to the schoolteacher in real life as a doglike man. A romantic — and sexual — courtship develops, much to the chagrin of her friends, who have suspicions about the man’s identity.

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