Where Europe Begins

Translators’ Note

Yoko Tawada’s work straddles two continents, two languages and cultures. Born in Tokyo in I960, she moved to Hamburg at the age of 22 and became, simultaneously, a German and a Japanese writer. She has since published a good ten volumes in each language, won numerous literary awards (including Japan's prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 1993 and, in 1996, Germany’s Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the highest honor bestowed upon a foreign-born author), and established herself, in both countries, as one of the most important writers of her generation.

Tawada’s poetry, fiction, essays and plays return again and again to questions of language and culture, the link between national and personal identity. If the languages we speak help define us, what happens to the identity of persons displaced between cultures? “The interesting,” she once said in an interview, “lies in the in-between.” And so her characters are constantly in motion, journeying between countries, languages and modes of being — providing us with “travel narratives” full of glimpses into the interstices of the world in which the structure of all experience is revealed.

Of the stories contained in this volume, two (“The Bath” and “Spores”) were written in Japanese, and the rest in German. Three of the shorter German pieces (“Storytellers without Souls,” “Canned Foreign” and “The Talisman”) appeared in the collection Talisman, which inspired the essay by Wim Wenders.

Tawada’s most recent books in German are Opium für Ovid (Opium for Ovid and Überseezungen (Foreign Tongues), and in Japanese, Hinagiku no cha no baai (If It’s Camomile) and Hikari to zerachin no raipuchihhi (The Leipzig of Gelatin and Light). She was the Max Kade Writer in Residence in the German department at MIT in 1999, has had three plays performed on major stages in Germany and Austria, and has recently gone on a reading/performance tour with jazz pianist Aki Takase.