Yoko Tawada

A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel about friendship, language, love, and climate change by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award

Scattered All Over the Earth

In a near-future when the old live almost-forever and the young are swept away by strange new ailments, an elderly man fights to keep his beloved great-grandson alive.

The Last Children of Tokyo

Yoko Tawada's new novel is a breathtakingly light-hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her "brilliant, shimmering, magnificent strangeness"

The Emissary

"The Memoirs of a Polar Bear is a novel that stars three generations of talented writers and performers who happen to be polar bears. The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in The New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"--Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous, both as circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In Chapter One, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In Chapter Two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son--the last of their line--is Knut, born in Chapter Three in a Leipzig zoo, but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away... Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen.""--

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear

"Tawada's slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency."--Michael Porter, The New York Times

The Naked Eye

Yumi Selden

A collection of writings by the award-winning author includes fairy tales, family histories, letters, dreams, and everyday observations on such topics as the ghost of a burned woman, a woman traveling on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, and a monk who leaps into his own reflection.

Where Europe Begins

Tokyonun Son Cocuklari

A collection of sexual tales by a Japanese writer. The title story is on an affair between a woman and a man-dog, while The Gotthard Railway is on the adventures of a Japanese woman in Europe.

犬婿入り

Yoko Tawada--winner of last year's National Book Award--presents three terrific new ghost stories, each named after a street in Berlin

Three Streets

*From the author of The Last Children of Tokyo* A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference and what it means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist. Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): 'homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'. Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels searching for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue: Knut, a graduate student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier. All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull fight. Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada.

Time Differences

On the heels of SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH, Yoko Tawada’s new and irresistible SUGGESTED IN THE STARS carries on her band of friends’ astonishing and intrepid adventures.

It’s hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH—Yoko Tawada’s rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change—but its sequel, SUGGESTED IN THE STARS, delivers exploits even more poignant and shambolic.

As Hiruko—whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue—and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko. Amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature), they empower each other against despair. Coping with carbon footprint worries but looping singly and in pairs, Hiruko and her friends hitchhike, take late-night motorcycle rides, and hop on the train (learning about railway strikes but also packed-train yoga) to convene in Copenhagen. There they find Susanoo in a strange hospital working with a scary speech-loss doctor. In the half-basement of this weird medical center (with strong echoes of Lars von Trier’s 1990s TV series The Kingdom), they also find two special kids washing dishes. They discover magic radios, personality swaps, ship tickets delivered by a robot, and other gifts. But friendship—loaning one another the nerve and heart to keep going—sets them all (and the reader) to dreaming of something more. SUGGESTED IN THE STARS delivers new delights, and Yoko Tawada’s famed new trilogy will conclude in 2025 with ARCHIPELAGO OF THE SUN, even if nobody will ever want this "strange, exquisite" (The New Yorker) trip to end.

Suggested in the Stars

A moving story about friendship, illness, and the poetry of Paul Celan, described as "bewitching" (Judith von Sternberg, Frankfurter Rundschau) and "incredibly dreamlike... a brilliant literary event" (Torsten Flüh, Night Out @ Berlin)

Paul Celan and the Trans-Siberian Angel

Bir Kutup Ayisinin Anilari

A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.” As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm. With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.

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

Facing the Bridge

Sändebudet

Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue

Exophony

The highly anticipated new novel from award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist Yoko Tawada. Patrik, who sometimes calls himself "the patient," is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't manage to get past the first question on the registration form: "What is your nationality?" As Patrik attempts to find a connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him, he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik . . . Yoko Tawada's mesmerizing new novel unfolds like a lucid dream in which the solace of friendship, reading, conversation, music, of seeing and being seen weave a life together across decades, languages, and cultures, and reaches out to all of us who find meaning and even obsession in the words of those before us. Previous praise for Tawada: 'Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return.' Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing 'Something about the way Tawada writes . . . allows the reader to take the most surreal and fantastical elements of the work completely seriously.' Lucy Scholes 'Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things.' Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither

Spontaneous Acts

Die Heldin der Erzählung ist ein Mädchen aus Saigon, das 1988, sie ist 16 und geht noch zur Schule, in die DDR eingeladen wird. Dort wird sie von einem Studenten aus Westdeutschland 'entführt' er denkt, dass ein westliches Land besser für dieses begabte Mädchen sei. Und nimmt es mit seine Heimatstadt Bochum. Sie spricht nur Russisch, und fühlt sich sehr einsam in dieser Stadt. Irgendwann hört sie davon, dass die alte Bahnstrecke von Moskau nach Paris durch Bochum führt. Sie findet zwar die Bahn, aber keinen Bahnhof. Eines Nachts, in einem Traum springt sie auf den Zug Richtung Moskau auf. Sie hofft, dass sie über Moskau zurück nach Vietnam kommen kann, da ihr Cousin dort studiert. Aber sie nahm den Zug in die falsche Richtung, und kommt stattdessen in Paris an. Dort bleibt sie bei einer Frau aus Vietnam, die sie im Zug getroffen hat. Doch sie weiß nicht, was sie in Paris ohne Visum tun kann, sie fürchtet, von der Polizei festgenommen zu werden. So verbringt sie ihre Zeit im Kino. Sie versteht kein Französisch, aber die Filme begreift sie auf ihre Weise. Und versucht, ihr Leben zu meistern, indem sie in einen fiktiven Dialog mit der französischen Schauspielerin Catherine Deneuve tritt...

Yoko Tawada

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