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...

Three bears. The first, a diligent memoirist whose unlikely success forces her to flee Soviet Russia. The second, her daughter, a skilled dancer in an East Berlin circus. The third, Knut, a baby bear born and raised in Berlin Zoo at the beginning of the 21st century. Here, then, is the enchanting story of three extraordinary bears, brought to life by one of Japan's most inventive and dazzling novelists.