Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Goethe Medal. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, and The Emissary.

Photo credit: Nina Subin

Three Streets

Fiction by Yoko Tawada

Translated from the Japanese 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 .…
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Scattered All Over the Earth

Fiction 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.…
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The Emissary

Fiction by Yoko Tawada

Translated from the Japanese 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.…
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Memoirs of a Polar Bear

Fiction by Yoko Tawada

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers. Famous stars of the literary world, the circus, and the zoo, they happen to be polar bears who move human society. In part one, the matriarch, enjoying “the intimacy of being alone with my pen,” accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography in the Soviet Union. In part two, her daughter Tosca moves to East Germany and pioneers a thrilling circus act.…
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The Bridegroom Was a Dog

by Yoko Tawada

Translated from the Japanese 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.…
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The Naked Eye

A precocious Vietnamese high school student — known as the pupil with “the iron blouse” — in Ho Chi Minh City is invited to an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. But, in East Berlin, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on “Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism,” she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town in West Germany. After a strange spell of domestic-sexual boredom with her lover-abductor — and though “the Berlin Wall was said to be more difficult to break through than the Great Wall of China” — she escapes on a train to Moscow .…
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Facing the Bridge

Fiction by Yoko Tawada

Amo, an African kidnapped to Europe as a boy, and Tamao, a Japanese exchange student in Germany, live in different countries but are being followed by the same shadow…Kazuko, a young professional tourist, is lured to Vietnam by a mysterious postcard…On the Canary Islands, a nameless translator battles a banana grove and a series of Saint Georges… These three new tales by master storyteller Yoko Tawada cross cultures and histories with a sensuous playfulness as sweet as a box of candied hearts—even Michael Jackson makes an appearance.…
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Where Europe Begins

by Yoko Tawada

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky

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.…
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Scattered All Over the Earth and Three Streets are exceedingly original works by an artist who never ceases to challenge her readers to see the world differently. When taken as inroads into Tawada’s singular mind and larger conceptual project, both books must be not only understood as literature, but literature of an inimitable sort. We can only hope for more.
—Reed McConnell, The Baffler
The world is close to our own, suggesting that soon our boundaries will radically change. Tawada reminds us that we, too, might become refugees from lands that no longer exist—obliterated by nuclear mishaps, rising water levels, or arbitrary lines drawn in history textbooks.
—Emma Heath, Cleveland Review
Reading Tawada you feel her subtle authorial presence, simultaneously guiding the reader ashore and casting us out to sea; paradoxically, both lead to a single destination. Where do we — along with Hiruko, Knut, Akash, Tenzo, Nora and Susanoo — end up? It can only be described as somewhere soft and strange and new.
Financial Times
This dystopian novel is riveting, bizarre as can be, and like nothing else I’ve ever read. I’m terrified not enough people will read it.
—Kamil Ahsan, NPR
These stories reinvent familiar landmarks and artworks, giving readers an imaginative and hopeful way to grapple with the history that’s written into the urban landscape.
Publishers Weekly
Tawada’s stories agitate the mind like songs half-remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within
The New York Times
Tawada’s strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity, and what it means to own someones else’s story or one’s own.
The New Yorker
Magnificently strange. Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman.
—Rivka Galchen, New York Times Magazine
Everywhere in the Japan of Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, strange mutations unfold. In the years (perhaps decades, or perhaps generations) since an environmental catastrophe, the basic tenets of biology have broken down. Children are born weak, with birdlike bones and soft teeth. The elderly, in turn, are youthful, athletic, seem to have been ‘robbed of death’. Men begin to experience menopausal symptoms as they age. Everyone’s sex changes inexplicably and at random at least once in their lives…Tawada has gifted us a quiet new magical realism for the Anthropocene.
The White Review
A mini-epic of eco-terror, family drama and speculative fiction. Tawada’s interest is satirical as much as tragic, with public holidays chosen by popular vote (Labour Day becomes Being Alive Is Enough Day) and a privatized police force whose activities now centre on its brass band. It’s this askew way of looking at things amid the ostensibly grim premise, and a sprightly use of language that makes The Emissary a book unlike any other.
The Guardian
Like sashimono woodwork, Tawada needs no exposition to nail down her dystopia. The Emissary achieves a technically impossible balance of open-hearted fable and cold-blooded satire.
Financial Times
Only the most profound reverence, I felt, could do justice to this writer and this work.
—Wim Wenders
Tawada is a great disciple of Kafka’s.
—Parul Sehgal, The New York Times
Tawada masterfully transports the reader to this place approaching transcendence, where language—so distinctly human, we suppose—brings us into imaginative intimacy with another kind of being.
—Nathan Goldman, Full Stop
Tawada asks us to see writing from an unusual perspective: it is like balancing on a ball, or hunting. Thus we’re forced to see writing not just as a cerebral art but a physical one, as well.
—Chad W. Post, Three Percent
Tawada bears out the truth that tongues can also bring inventive thoughts to vibrant life.
—Steven G. Kellman, The Boston Globe
What propels Tawada’s stories is the unassailable logic of dreams and fairy tales, coupled with verbal energy. Tawada’s images resonate simultaneously on different levels.
The Village Voice
Tawada’s chilling evocations of disorientation are the peers of Paul Bowles’ most chilling stories.
Booklist
When reading Yoko Tawada…one is struck less by the resemblance of her fiction to that of other authors than by its utter originality.
The Japan Times
Tawada’s stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.
The New York Times
A writer of scrupulous intensity.
Kirkus Reviews
In Tawada’s work, one has the feeling of having wandered into a mythology that is not one’s own.
—Rivka Galchen
Tawada’s stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within.
New York Times
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