Customer Reviews

Where Europe Begins (New Directions Paperbook)

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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.

As the acclaimed director Wim Wenders points out at the forward, this book could have only been written by a Japanese. And a great book it is.
Where Europe Begins is a collection of short stories that someone, anyone really, could call postmodern. Dream and reality, fantasy and life, legend and history seem to be bounded together in harmony in these narrations. The author seems to be playing games with us and her heroes, winking an eye every now and then and saying: Nothing really is what it seems.
The collection opens with The Bath, a story where the main characters change roles or maybe costumes all the time; as if they are only faces distorted by the mirrors of reality or, in a strange way, just like puppeteers.
The Reflection, which follows, is extremely poetic and talks about the drowning of Buddhist monk in a small lake and a young girl's connection to him.
In Spores, the writer seems to find herself in an acrobatic exhibition, walking the tightrope of words, meanings, dreams and reality, while in the Canned Foreign we start on a journey to language and its wealth, with the precious help of Sasha and Sonia.
Gilda, a woman full of fears and insecurities, is the main character in The Talisman. She does nothing but collect talismans, which will supposedly protect her from the alien that hides inside her own body, or in the computer, or even in her soup.
Raisin Eyes is a story that sounds funny but it's not. It's the story of a girl, whose father became a woman after eating some fresh bread.
Storytellers Without Souls is more like an essay about language, hearing and narration, than a short story. Written in a kind of light way it's a pleasure to read.
The title of the next story tells it all: Tongue Dance. Through this weird story the writer allows us to take a look into a world of total paranoia, where we meet a girl that dreams that she's been transformed into a giant tongue.
One of the very best (if not the best) stories in this collection is the one that gives it its title. A young woman starts off from Japan for a long sea and land journey towards Europe; or rather towards Where Europe Begins. The narrator starts writing her traveling journals even before the trip begins, in order to know what to say next. The narration here seems fractured, constructed by bits and pieces that hold it together lightly, moving forth and back all the time, mixing myth with reality. During the long journey we come to learn a few things about the Sleeping Land (Siberia), its people and their traditions.
We come to the end with A Guest, which tells the story of a woman that visits the doctor because of a severe pain in the air, only to find out that she's pregnant. As if that's not enough she then goes on to buy a book, which turns out to be tapes. In these tapes someone is reading the book so that's not too bad after all. Or is it? As it seems it actually is, since sooner than later the sound of that voice will start driving her crazy. She'll hear it all the time, whether she plays the tapes or not, day and night. Left with no other option and in her struggle to survive she's trying to do the only thing she can do; abolish the alphabet. In this story every boundary seems to be coming tumbling down and one can no longer tell what is real and what is not.
Where Europe Begins is one of the best short-story collections I've read lately and Yoko Tawada is in her own special way a superb storyteller. Highly recommended.

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.