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...

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...

Dreamy, meditative, and filled with the gritty everyday perils of a person living somewhere without papers (at one point Anh is subjected to some vampire-like skin experiments), The Naked Eye is a novel that is as surprising as it is delightful each of the thirteen chapters titled after and framed by one of Deneuve s films. As far as I was concerned, the narrator says while watching Deneuve on the screen, the only woman in the world was you, and so I did not exist. By the time 1989 comes along and the Iron Curtain falls, story and viewer have morphed into the dislocating beauty of...

Eine Frau sitzt vor dem Spiegel und vergleicht ihr Bild mit einem Portrfoto, eventuelle Differenzen werden durch Schminke korrigiert. Sie entdeckt Schuppen auf ihrer Haut, steigt ins Bad, reist als Schuppenfrau durch traumartige und alltgliche Sequenzen sie trifft Xander, der sie fotografieren mchte, als Dolmetscherin verschwindet sie mitten in einem Geschftsessen und begegnet einer unheimlichen Frau in der Nacht, die sie am Tag nicht wiederfindet ...

Diese Texte bringen die deutsche Grammatik zum Tanzen. Yoko Tawada mit raffinierten, sprachspielerischen und vergnügten Gedichten und Prosa.

Eine wunderschöne Geschichte rund um das Thema Sehnsucht.Ein Tag, der Tag einer Ankunft. Eine Frau ist von Hamburg nach Bordeaux gereist.Sie soll vom Schwager ihrer Freundin am Bahnhof abgeholt werden.Wieder gelingt es der Autorin, uns so vergnügt wie verwegen (FAZ) in eine Welt hinter die Absurditäten unseres Alltagslebens zu führen. Die beiden Hafenstädte sind Orte, an denen verschiedene Arten der Sehnsucht entstehen und verschwinden. Der Text spielt zugleich mit Ideogrammen. Jedes Zeichen symbolisiert eine Sekunde der Erinnerung.

Ein poetischer Bericht über die Metamorphosen im Leben von 22 Frauen, die sich mitunter begegnen, eine Erotik jenseits von Beziehungen, Verwandlungen des Körpers, nicht als "Verlust" an Schönheit oder Jugend erzählt, sondern als sinnliches, traumhaftes Ereignis ...

Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language prose text by Yoko Tawada entitled 'Portrait of a Tongue' 'Portrat einer Zunge', 2002]. Yoko Tawada is a native speaker of Japanese who learned German as an adult.

Portrait of a Tongue is a portrait of a German woman--referred to only as P--who has lived in the United States for many years and whose German has become...