Yoko Tawada Books

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." n Mary Whipple

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, the magic? This is the worst translation I have seen since the Japanese version of the lyrics to "A Hard Day's Night" !!

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.

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.