Facing the Bridge (New Directions Paperbook) [Paperback]

Yoko Tawada (Author), Maragret Mitsutani (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 28, 2007 | Series: New Directions Paperbook

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 one's appearance was a job for women. But deep down, doesn't every man who lacks confidence in his looks yearn for that moment when the Beast turns into a handsome young man?—from Facing the Bridge

Reading Yoko Tawada becomes an obsession, like watching the films of Catherine Deneuve. In Facing the Bridge, Tawada's second story collection with New Directions, obsession becomes delight as the reader is absorbed into three tales where identities flicker and shift within borders as wide as the mind.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

The three stories in Tawada's second book in English (after The Bridegroom Was a Dog, 1998) depict the horrors of deracination. "The Shadow Man" regularly shifts focus from a brilliant black man in eighteenth-century Europe (a genuine historical figure, he had been, when a seven-year-old captive, "adopted" by a slaver captain) to a contemporary Japanese student in Germany; both youths try to fit in, only to become more alien. The 35-ish Japanese woman in "In Front of Trang Tien Bridge," who considers herself "a member of the tourist race" but whom Berliners mistake for Vietnamese, suddenly flies to Vietnam, where she meets a Caucasian man who insists he is Japanese; traveling with him eventuates in the fragmentation of her identity. In "St. George and the Translator," a reclusive, paranoiac Japanese woman hiding in the Canary Islands, laboriously translating two pages of German about the great dragon slayer, cracks up as she anticipates being found by a real George. Tawada's chilling evocations of disorientation are the peers of Paul Bowles' most chilling stories. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

A writer of scrupulous intensity. -- Kirkus Reviews

Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within. -- The New York Times

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: New Directions (May 28, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081121690X
• ISBN-13: 978-0811216906
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #541,114 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Fiction should feel like a borrowed coat softened by many wearings.", May 29, 2007

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Facing the Bridge (New Directions Paperbook) (Paperback)

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