Where Europe Begins

A gorgeous collection of fantastic and dreamlike tales by one of the world's most innovative contemporary writers. 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 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 estrangementof a being in-betweenboth sensual and bewildering, and as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things while telling a fine story. Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German. She has lived in Hamburg for over ten years, received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in Japan, and in Germany the Chamisso Prize (the highest honor for a foreign-born writer of German). She was writer in residence at MIT and has published several books in Japanese and German, including two plays performed on German and Austrian stages.