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 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.
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
Only the most profound reverence, I felt, could do justice to this writer and this work.
—Wim Wenders
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
A spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and multiplying cities.