Where Europe Begins: Stories

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 & letters, dreams, & every-day reality, Tawada’s work blurs divisions between fact & fiction, prose & poetry. Often set in physical spaces as disparate as Japan, Siberia, Russia, & 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 & the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a woman traveling on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Tawada playfully makes the experience of estrangement–of a being in-between–both sensual & bewildering, & as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things while telling a fine story.

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Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, & then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese & German, & has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, & the Goethe Medal. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) & Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, & The Emissary.