Facing the Bridge, by Yoko Tawada

Translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani

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

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

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.

YOKO TAWADA was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and to Berlin in 2006. She writes in Japanese and German,and has published several books -- stories, novels, poems, plays, essays --in both languages. Her numerous awards include the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal. "A writer of scrupulous intensity" (Kirkus).

Date of publication: May 2007

Paper, 224pp., $14.95
(CAN $18.50)

ISBN 978-0-8112-1702-6

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Also by Yoko Tawada - NOW IN PAPER

Where Europe Begins

Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky; Translated from the Japanese by Yumi Selden
Introduction by Wim Wenders

"A spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and multiplying cities." --Victor Pelevin

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 estrangement--of a being in-between--both sensual and bewildering, and as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things while telling a fine story.