Where Europe Begins

Rating:
Summary: FANTASTIC!!!
Review: Don't listen to the Jerseyite who wrote the two-star review. Pick up this book and you'll want to carry it around forever. Very unusual, Tawada is at the forefront of experimenting with the short story form. Like the paintings of Leonora Carrington, these stories offer us a fresh way of thinking about the world. I won't ruin with plot details, but the title story that takes place on a train is gorgeous.

Rating:
Summary: Creamery dreamery butter
Review: Short stories these ain't. Some of them aren't all that short, either (up to 61 pages). One of the backcover blurbs gushes that Tawada "leaves beautiful shards of old storytelling to hover against a new and astonishing narrative field." Sorry, but nothing new or terribly exciting going on here. The old shards are just that-fragments of myths or fairytales that Tawada generally pastes on-nothing nearly as subtle as weaving occurs except in the title story (the longest). As for that new narrative field, I suppose the blurber means the lack of any discernible plot, the lack of any motivation on the part of any of the characters and the surreal imagery which isn't bad at times but doesn't add up to much. For example: "One by one the hairs on her head turn into writing brushes and begin composing letters. The envelopes bear no addresses. I try reading the letters with my telescope but the moment each one is finished, a policeman wearing pyjamas comes in to take it away. Not for purposes of censorship. This country has no such laws. There is no paper in the bathrooms, so everyone uses letters instead. And afterwards they are illegible."
Even if you forget about the whole surrealist movement this is Jamaica Kincaid territory ("At the Bottom of the River" in particular). Or, if you want the same sort of meta-reality with language a whole lot more striking, far more cohesive and embedded in a narrative that adds up by the time you turn the last page, Robert Coover is loads defter, funnier, more clever. Not to mention a dozen small-press authors whose writing is featured in off-beat publications such as Air Fish and Rampike, the best of whom is probably Richard Gessner.
As another reviewer pointed out, Tawada's surreality is not wholly without rhyme or reason. Tawada's narrators, who always seem to be a version of the author (a Japanese woman living in Germany) have a kind of phobia related to language, a fear of being unable to read, of not be able to speak or to understand. Through most of the first story, for example, the narrator, who happens to be a translator, somehow loses her tongue. In another, one of the other characters deprives her of her ears. In another, she becomes a giant tongue. "I was a tongue. I left the house just as I was: naked, pink and unbearably moist. It was easy to delight people I met on the street, but no one was willing to touch me." One of the themes in "Canned Foreign" is illiteracy. In the last story the narrator sees an ear doctor who peers into the ear that hurts and sees "a stage in a theater" and "a building near a harbor, an officer and several women." Later in this piece, the voice of an audio novel takes over her apartment and she has trouble writing and even reading.
In the end, this is a lot of dreamy prose that lacks the meat to be called essays and really doesn't qualify for fiction either; if I had to pick one I would say essays. The books primary flaw is that the writing has so little impact on the world the rest of us inhabit, you tend to forget what you've read almost as soon as you put the book down.

Rating:
Summary: Writing that lives
Review: These are beautiful stories of great imagination and warmth, and sometimes of great insight. How a person can say a bad thing about these stories is beyond my understanding. In "Storytellers without souls" Tawada writes: "Even my writing lives", which in her case is true. Like any good art: when her ideas enter us they become a part of us.
Her handling of dreams, as well as her dreamlike narratives and enlightening reinterpretations of the world we all have to live in, connect her work very strongly with surrealism. Her characters' transitions between the very different languages of Japan and Germany confuse their manners of communicating with the world and with other people, and this is sometimes described in Tawada's narratives as an actual loss of language.
One thing i do have a problem with is the translation of some of the texts. A number of the stories deal with the narrator's outsider relationship with the German language, but Susan Bernowsky translates the specified German words into English so the subject is lost on us. If Tawada is trying to describe to us interpretations of the German language, then why are we reading about interpretations of the English language? Original text with footnotes is always better translation than rewriting.