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 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.

New York Times

Tawada's slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency.

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.