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Where Europe Begins: Stories
A gorgeous collection of fantastic and dreamlike tales by one of the world's most innovative contemporary writers. Chosen as a 2005 Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Where Europe Begins has been described by the Russian literary phenomenon Victor Pelevin as "a spectacular journey through a world of colliding languages and multiplying cities." In these stories' disparate settings―Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany―the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author, or the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a traveler on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection. Through the timeless art of storytelling, Yoko Tawada discloses the virtues of bewilderment, estrangement, and Hilaritas : the goddess of rejoicing.
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 31, 1991
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About the author
Yōko Tawada
125 books1,031 followersYōko Tawada (多和田葉子 Tawada Yōko, born March 23, 1960) is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany. She writes in both Japanese and German.
Tawada was born in Tokyo, received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, then studied at Hamburg University where she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature. She received her doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich. In 1987 she published Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts—Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (A Void Only Where You Are), a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition.
Tawada's Missing Heels received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, and The Bridegroom Was a Dog received the Akutagawa Prize in 1993. In 1999 she became writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four months. Her Suspect on the Night Train won the Tanizaki Prize and Ito Sei Literary Prize in 2003.
Tawada received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, a German award to foreign writers in recognition of their contribution to German culture, and the Goethe Medal in 2005.
(from Wikipedia)
Tawada was born in Tokyo, received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, then studied at Hamburg University where she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature. She received her doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich. In 1987 she published Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts—Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (A Void Only Where You Are), a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition.
Tawada's Missing Heels received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, and The Bridegroom Was a Dog received the Akutagawa Prize in 1993. In 1999 she became writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four months. Her Suspect on the Night Train won the Tanizaki Prize and Ito Sei Literary Prize in 2003.
Tawada received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, a German award to foreign writers in recognition of their contribution to German culture, and the Goethe Medal in 2005.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 79 reviews
December 17, 2015
Most of the words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with how I felt. But at the same time I realized that my native tongue didn’t have words for how I felt either. It’s just that this never occurred to me until I’d begun to live in a foreign language.There are some works where I must be content with the single fish I have managed to catch. The flopping thing might not make much sense, or be very pretty, or in general be anything other than weird in a way I can't wrap my head around. I'd prefer being disturbed to this state of the uneasily vague, for disturbance implies something to disturb and eventually discover through the most sinister of echolocation. Instead, I have a fish, and as I have no interest in becoming fluent in both Japanese and German, the fish will suffice.
As in other museums as well, a power relationship is illustrated here: that which is represented is always something that has been destroyed.The word not being said that I may have found out quicker had I read the original Japanese/German (each story is in one or the other but whether I want to discover which is in what has not been answered with the affirmative) is reality. Metonymy's a popular concept these days but it is not often that the entire mediating principle is sidestepped completely, leaving the interaction between letter of story of culture of world of living and the body a direct impact rather than a muffled rationality. You can't talk your way out of this one.
“How did you get such an Asian face?”Before I dropped a class due to the professor changing their grading principle every time we met, we were looking at ads, murals, public property pictures built upon principles of patriarchal dominance where the theme song of a woman not getting into the higher echelons of art unless naked and splayed in ink and oil has changed very little in the intervening centuries. We are walking portraits of what others have continually registered as carefully constructed otherwise; I don't know about your language, but I'm having enough trouble with picking apart my androcentric context with my androcentric English without even thinking about taking on another.
“What are you talking about, Mother? I am Asian.”
“That’s not what I meant. You’ve started to have one of those faces like Japanese people in American movies.”
Apparently it was standard practice to retouch the photo of a suicide to make her look unattractive.There's blood and sex and death and giant tongues and drowning monks and maybe lesbians? It's less of a sexual attraction and more the voice of the gods, or however we each individually process our integrated In the beginning was the Word.
The human body, too, contains many booths in which translation are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul.I could continue my thought and take this as a references to my indoctrinated Catholicism, or I could take a second to step outside the process. Both at the same time and then some, though. That's the translation.
Most readers don’t like to read short texts because they have so little time. They would rather go for a walk in a long novel and not have to change. The short texts would go for a walk inside their bodies, which they would find exhausting.
January 17, 2019
This rating is partly my fault, and I fully acknowledge this. I don't know how I managed it, but for the first time in my life, I read a book wrong. I thought it was a novel, and it's actually a short story collection. Just so you know, the synopsis on the back of my edition is not the one on Goodreads and therefore doesn't explicity state that it is a short story collection. So I'm not THAT dumb. But gosh, I felt like it when I opened my mouth to discuss in that seminar. >.>
Anyway, after realising my mistake and revisiting the book enlightened on its contents, I did enjoy the short stories. Some of them were a bit too magical realist for me, a bit too whimsical, and lost me somewhere along the way. But a lot of them blew my mind a little bit. Because they were amazing, and the writing style perfectly suited the stories too.
The themes I really appreciated reading about in the collection were some of the ideas about the surreal, the themes to do with language and translation, of the body and movement, of feminism and of displacement. I think they were handled well and expertly woven into the stories.
As always, with a short story collection, this one was a mixed bag. Some ups, some downs. But a good collection.
Read for university.
Anyway, after realising my mistake and revisiting the book enlightened on its contents, I did enjoy the short stories. Some of them were a bit too magical realist for me, a bit too whimsical, and lost me somewhere along the way. But a lot of them blew my mind a little bit. Because they were amazing, and the writing style perfectly suited the stories too.
The themes I really appreciated reading about in the collection were some of the ideas about the surreal, the themes to do with language and translation, of the body and movement, of feminism and of displacement. I think they were handled well and expertly woven into the stories.
As always, with a short story collection, this one was a mixed bag. Some ups, some downs. But a good collection.
Read for university.
June 29, 2013
Interpreters are like prostitutes that serve the occupying forces; their own countrymen hold them in contempt. It's as if the German entering my ears were something like spermatic fluid.
*
I had decided not to read any writing on Sundays. Instead I observed the people I saw on the street as though they were isolated letters. Sometimes two people sat down next to each other in a café, and thus, briefly, formed a word. Then they separated, in order to go off and form other words. There must have been a moment in which the combinations of these words formed, quite by chance, several sentences in which I might have read this foreign city like a text.
// "Where Europe begins" Yoko Tawada
*
I had decided not to read any writing on Sundays. Instead I observed the people I saw on the street as though they were isolated letters. Sometimes two people sat down next to each other in a café, and thus, briefly, formed a word. Then they separated, in order to go off and form other words. There must have been a moment in which the combinations of these words formed, quite by chance, several sentences in which I might have read this foreign city like a text.
// "Where Europe begins" Yoko Tawada
April 27, 2024
als iemand zit te twijfelen of ze flw willen doen zou ik echt dit aanraden om te zien of ze ermee viben. Dit boek is echt gewoon tekstanalyse, cultural representation en wereldliteratuur ineen. Ik vond m super tof, snap er geen kut van tho but thats okay :)
March 9, 2016
Some passages from Where Europe Begins:
If they didn’t manage the operation properly and cut off some necessary part of her, she would not be completely back. If it came to that, I could donate a body part of my own. I could give at least one. Many of the body’s organs come in twos. I have two ears. Two lungs. I think there might even be two of the uterus, but I don’t remember now.
*
When talking to a large company over dinner, one is not so much looking for things to say as walking along a narrow road trying not to touch things one shouldn’t and somehow making one’s way forward.
*
To some extent, one has to forgive them on account of their youth, but I can’t forgive people who use their youth as an excuse to oppress others.
*
Most of the words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with how I felt. But at the same time I realized that my native tongue didn’t have words for how I felt either. It’s just that this never occurred to me until I’d begun to live in a foreign language.
Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.
*
But can one understand the language of cells at all? The question brings to mind the image of yet another cell: the booth for simultaneous interpreters. At international congresses you often see these beautiful transparent booths in which people stand telling stories: they translate, so actually they are retelling tales that already exist. The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various it’s difficult to believe they are all translating a single, shared text. And perhaps, it isn’t really a single shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate that this text is really many texts at once. The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul.
*
A theatre, for example, is often a place where the dead can speak. A simple example is found in Hamlet: the dead father comes on stage and tells how he was killed by his brother. That is the decisive moment in this play, without which neither Hamlet nor the audience would have access to the past. They would have to go on believing the story of the murderer, who claimed Hamlet’s father had been bitten by a poisonous snake. Through the dead man’s story we learn a bit of the past that otherwise would have remained obscure. The theatre is the place where knowledge not accessible to us becomes audible. In other places, we almost always hear only the tales of the living. They force their stories on us to justify themselves, and so that they will be able to go on living, like Hamlet’s uncle. The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.
.
If they didn’t manage the operation properly and cut off some necessary part of her, she would not be completely back. If it came to that, I could donate a body part of my own. I could give at least one. Many of the body’s organs come in twos. I have two ears. Two lungs. I think there might even be two of the uterus, but I don’t remember now.
*
When talking to a large company over dinner, one is not so much looking for things to say as walking along a narrow road trying not to touch things one shouldn’t and somehow making one’s way forward.
*
To some extent, one has to forgive them on account of their youth, but I can’t forgive people who use their youth as an excuse to oppress others.
*
Most of the words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with how I felt. But at the same time I realized that my native tongue didn’t have words for how I felt either. It’s just that this never occurred to me until I’d begun to live in a foreign language.
Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.
*
But can one understand the language of cells at all? The question brings to mind the image of yet another cell: the booth for simultaneous interpreters. At international congresses you often see these beautiful transparent booths in which people stand telling stories: they translate, so actually they are retelling tales that already exist. The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various it’s difficult to believe they are all translating a single, shared text. And perhaps, it isn’t really a single shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate that this text is really many texts at once. The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul.
*
A theatre, for example, is often a place where the dead can speak. A simple example is found in Hamlet: the dead father comes on stage and tells how he was killed by his brother. That is the decisive moment in this play, without which neither Hamlet nor the audience would have access to the past. They would have to go on believing the story of the murderer, who claimed Hamlet’s father had been bitten by a poisonous snake. Through the dead man’s story we learn a bit of the past that otherwise would have remained obscure. The theatre is the place where knowledge not accessible to us becomes audible. In other places, we almost always hear only the tales of the living. They force their stories on us to justify themselves, and so that they will be able to go on living, like Hamlet’s uncle. The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.
.
January 3, 2021
"In a book about Indians I once read that the soul cannot fly as fast as an airplane. Therefore one always loses one's soul on an airplane journey, and arrives at one's destination in a soulless state. Even the Trans-Siberian Railway travels more quickly than a soul can fly. The first time I came to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway, I lost my soul. When I boarded the train to go back, my soul was still on its way to Europe. I was unable to catch it. When I traveled to Europe once more, my soul was still making its way back to Japan. Later I flew back and forth so many times I no longer know where my soul is. In any case, this is a reason why travellers most often lack souls. And so tales of long journeys are always written without souls."
-Where Europe Begins
-Where Europe Begins
September 3, 2024
My rating probably isn't as detached as it ought to be. "Scattered All Over The Earth" and "Memoirs of A Polar Bear" are two of my favorite books ever. This one, I thought, indulged too much in whimsy and magical realism for my taste. I like her other books so much precisely because they locate, with pinpoint precision, the magical imminent in the mundane. This one had too many frills. Still, however, there were moments of brilliance.
🤷♂️
🤷♂️
September 9, 2011
A collection of awesomely fucked up fever dreams and fairy tales. Extremely surrealist, but highly controlled- it all ties together in its batshit crazy way. Obsessions with being in between languages/cultures and body parts don't become repetitive throughout these stories but ties them more deeply together. Great translations except for a few majorly awkward sentences in the Japanese translations, which can be overlooked by other translation choices (in the same story) that are brilliant and creative. A must read for those interested in great Japanese or surrealist writers
January 7, 2013
Finished this one on the chinatown bus back to New York and when I closed the cover I thought the bus might lift off the road
December 6, 2019
Re-read for class, still one of the all time greats
April 28, 2024
Sli sla slay? I guess? Idk ik begreep hem niet zo goed
April 30, 2024
Verneem de klanken die ik zing
en drink met mij de wijn
en drink met mij de wijn
August 27, 2019
Some brilliant pieces on language, dislocation, identity, death, some less good - but all worth coming back to.
May 1, 2024
Niet uitgelezen, want ik vond het idee echt geweldig alleen het was mij iets te experimenteel en raar.
July 7, 2021
“There was another flash. The camera was cutting time into thin slices, the way a knife slices ham.”
i wish i could give this 4.5 stars because the last story in this collection, “the guest,” dragged on a bit too long for me and didn’t capture my imagination in the same way as the rest of them, but the rest absolutely enthralled me, particularly “the bath.” i’ve never read something that more perfectly captures the feeling of being a woman who lives alone in a city and feels alienated from even her own flesh and thoughts. a fantastic pandemic read that nearly resurrects kafka from a unique perspective and speaks to both the horror and wonder of modern life.
i wish i could give this 4.5 stars because the last story in this collection, “the guest,” dragged on a bit too long for me and didn’t capture my imagination in the same way as the rest of them, but the rest absolutely enthralled me, particularly “the bath.” i’ve never read something that more perfectly captures the feeling of being a woman who lives alone in a city and feels alienated from even her own flesh and thoughts. a fantastic pandemic read that nearly resurrects kafka from a unique perspective and speaks to both the horror and wonder of modern life.
November 2, 2018
Took me almost four years to come back and finish this. Two stories (“Spores” and “The Bath”) translated from Japanese by Yumi Selden. Susan Bernofsky is the translator of the others—originally written in German.
March 16, 2024
My favorite theme was language — etymologies, translation, the relative opacity or transparency of different words. My favorite character was a tongue.
September 28, 2024
I had to read for my school. there's def a deep meaning in everything and every chapter, but I j don't really get it. I can feel that its v deep and supposed to have a lot of meaning
December 7, 2023
Bought this from a store in Surry hills while waiting to meet with alex. Picked it up bc I thought the cover looked like something from an old scott westerfield series mixed with a shot from kokkinos’ head on. Wasn’t anything like that though, I knew from one sentence it’d be surreal and good. It was. Also took me a minute to read bc it was so heavy with symbolism but in a good way. I didn’t like the introduction - texts like this don’t need one.
The titular story is objectively the best but I like the one where she eats her dad the most. I read the first few sentences from this one out to my sister and she just said “venison dad”. I liked how the mood lingers after the final sentence of each chapter/section.
Gonna start earnestposting on goodreads but keep it silly on letterboxed like a true creative writing/film studies grad.
The titular story is objectively the best but I like the one where she eats her dad the most. I read the first few sentences from this one out to my sister and she just said “venison dad”. I liked how the mood lingers after the final sentence of each chapter/section.
Gonna start earnestposting on goodreads but keep it silly on letterboxed like a true creative writing/film studies grad.
March 12, 2025
Incredible and maybe the first time I’ve stayed consistently engaged while reading short stories. There was a real continuity between them. I wanted to reread it as soon as I finished, and I’d love to read it in a book club. Storytellers without souls felt particularly relevant to me as I’ve spent the year living nowhere for long, fleeting and maybe fleeing. I borrowed this but maybe will get my own copy to return to.
January 8, 2024
it was so hard to get through this whole book. I feel like at some point tawada lost the plot and everything became so surreal that it was all meaningless. I see her vision but she was just too confusing...
March 7, 2023
At times beautiful but overall quite forgettable.
May 13, 2022
Als Tawada geen Nobelprijs wint, is dat hele ding niets waard.
October 12, 2011
As the acclaimed director Wim Wenders points out at the forward, this book could have only been written by a Japanese. And a great book it is.
Where Europe Begins is a collection of short stories that someone, anyone really, could call postmodern. Dream and reality, fantasy and life, legend and history seem to be bounded together in harmony in these narrations. The author seems to be playing games with us and her heroes, winking an eye every now and then and saying: Nothing really is what it seems.
The collection opens with The Bath, a story where the main characters change roles or maybe costumes all the time; as if they are only faces distorted by the mirrors of reality or, in a strange way, just like puppeteers.
The Reflection, which follows, is extremely poetic and talks about the drowning of Buddhist monk in a small lake and a young girl’s connection to him.
In Spores, the writer seems to find herself in an acrobatic exhibition, walking the tightrope of words, meanings, dreams and reality, while in the Canned Foreign we start on a journey to language and its wealth, with the precious help of Sasha and Sonia.
Gilda, a woman full of fears and insecurities, is the main character in The Talisman. She does nothing but collect talismans, which will supposedly protect her from the alien that hides inside her own body, or in the computer, or even in her soup.
Raisin Eyes is a story that sounds funny but it’s not. It’s the story of a girl, whose father became a woman after eating some fresh bread.
Storytellers Without Souls is more like an essay about language, hearing and narration, than a short story. Written in a kind of light way it’s a pleasure to read.
The title of the next story tells it all: Tongue Dance. Through this weird story the writer allows us to take a look into a world of total paranoia, where we meet a girl that dreams that she’s been transformed into a giant tongue.
One of the very best (if not the best) stories in this collection is the one that gives it its title. A young woman starts off from Japan for a long sea and land journey towards Europe; or rather towards Where Europe Begins. The narrator starts writing her travelling journals even before the trip begins, in order to know what to say next. The narration here seems fractured, constructed by bits and pieces that hold it together lightly, moving forth and back all the time, mixing myth with reality. During the long journey we come to learn a few things about the Sleeping Land (Siberia), its people and their traditions.
We come to the end with A Guest, which tells the story of a woman that visits the doctor because of a severe pain in the air, only to find out that she’s pregnant. As if that’s not enough she then goes on to buy a book, which turns out to be tapes. In these tapes someone is reading the book so that’s not too bad after all. Or is it? As it seems it actually is, since sooner than later the sound of that voice will start driving her crazy. She’ll hear it all the time, whether she plays the tapes or not, day and night. Left with no other option and in her struggle to survive she’s trying to do the only thing she can do; abolish the alphabet. In this story every boundary seems to be coming tumbling down and one can no longer tell what is real and what is not.
Where Europe Begins is one of the best short-story collections I’ve read lately and Yoko Tawada is in her own special way a superb storyteller. Highly recommended.
Where Europe Begins is a collection of short stories that someone, anyone really, could call postmodern. Dream and reality, fantasy and life, legend and history seem to be bounded together in harmony in these narrations. The author seems to be playing games with us and her heroes, winking an eye every now and then and saying: Nothing really is what it seems.
The collection opens with The Bath, a story where the main characters change roles or maybe costumes all the time; as if they are only faces distorted by the mirrors of reality or, in a strange way, just like puppeteers.
The Reflection, which follows, is extremely poetic and talks about the drowning of Buddhist monk in a small lake and a young girl’s connection to him.
In Spores, the writer seems to find herself in an acrobatic exhibition, walking the tightrope of words, meanings, dreams and reality, while in the Canned Foreign we start on a journey to language and its wealth, with the precious help of Sasha and Sonia.
Gilda, a woman full of fears and insecurities, is the main character in The Talisman. She does nothing but collect talismans, which will supposedly protect her from the alien that hides inside her own body, or in the computer, or even in her soup.
Raisin Eyes is a story that sounds funny but it’s not. It’s the story of a girl, whose father became a woman after eating some fresh bread.
Storytellers Without Souls is more like an essay about language, hearing and narration, than a short story. Written in a kind of light way it’s a pleasure to read.
The title of the next story tells it all: Tongue Dance. Through this weird story the writer allows us to take a look into a world of total paranoia, where we meet a girl that dreams that she’s been transformed into a giant tongue.
One of the very best (if not the best) stories in this collection is the one that gives it its title. A young woman starts off from Japan for a long sea and land journey towards Europe; or rather towards Where Europe Begins. The narrator starts writing her travelling journals even before the trip begins, in order to know what to say next. The narration here seems fractured, constructed by bits and pieces that hold it together lightly, moving forth and back all the time, mixing myth with reality. During the long journey we come to learn a few things about the Sleeping Land (Siberia), its people and their traditions.
We come to the end with A Guest, which tells the story of a woman that visits the doctor because of a severe pain in the air, only to find out that she’s pregnant. As if that’s not enough she then goes on to buy a book, which turns out to be tapes. In these tapes someone is reading the book so that’s not too bad after all. Or is it? As it seems it actually is, since sooner than later the sound of that voice will start driving her crazy. She’ll hear it all the time, whether she plays the tapes or not, day and night. Left with no other option and in her struggle to survive she’s trying to do the only thing she can do; abolish the alphabet. In this story every boundary seems to be coming tumbling down and one can no longer tell what is real and what is not.
Where Europe Begins is one of the best short-story collections I’ve read lately and Yoko Tawada is in her own special way a superb storyteller. Highly recommended.
February 24, 2020
You may not guess it when reading the description of Where Europe Begins by Yoko Tawada, but this is largely a collection of surreal horror stories, with only a couple exceptions. Furthermore, the horror stories that make up the bulk of the work can be remarkably disturbing.
Similar to The Blind Owl by by Sadegh Hedayat, the best descriptor of the horror stories in Where Europe Begins that I can come up with is “nightmare-like.” Events don’t progress as they should, nor does the narrator react in a normal way, and impossible, hallucinatory things abound. Not that Tawada’s horror stories are all the same type of nightmare, however. The opening novella The Bath is heavy on body horror, with the narrator’s flesh transforming and her losing pieces of herself, while the closing novella A Guest is more psychological horror, as the narrator unwittingly becomes a sin-eater for other people’s psychological disorders.
There are a couple of stories in Where Europe Begins that are not horror stories, the most noteworthy of them being the story that gives the collection its name. Even the non-horror works are surreal, though to different ends: The story Where Europe Begins uses its surreal tone to emphasize how the rest of the text plays with “real” versus invented narrative.
Whether it’s a work of horror or not, Yoko Tawada frequently imbues the stories’ narrators with her own history of being both Japanese and German (and, therefore, distinct from either). In The Bath the narrator is a German-Japanese translator, in A Guest the narrator writes columns about the difference between German and Japanese culture, and some of the other stories deal with feeling foreign or out of place in that specific way as well. The surreal atmosphere of the stories feels linked to this status of being trapped in some nebulous in-between. That’s not a particularly interesting take, I know, but I think it’s a take that Tawada intended, or else I can’t see the reason for the repetition.
Other elements repeat in these works as well, such as kokeshi dolls, marking Tawada as one of those authors (like Borges before her) that often revisit the same set of symbols in her works. I think that Where Europe Begins is the right size collection for her works, as a longer selection would likely have suffered from diminishing returns as the surreal tones and other elements repeated.
These stories were not what I expected, but, as a fan of surreal horror stories, I was pleasantly surprised, and even the non-horror pieces were interesting. I’m in the strange position, though, of feeling as if this single collection could be enough of a sample of Yoko Tawada’s work for me. I will still likely check out her well-regarded sci-fi novella The Emissary just because it sounds so different, but I think that I’ve read enough of her short stories. 3.5/5, which I’m rounding down to 3, though I was right on the edge of rounding up.
Similar to The Blind Owl by by Sadegh Hedayat, the best descriptor of the horror stories in Where Europe Begins that I can come up with is “nightmare-like.” Events don’t progress as they should, nor does the narrator react in a normal way, and impossible, hallucinatory things abound. Not that Tawada’s horror stories are all the same type of nightmare, however. The opening novella The Bath is heavy on body horror, with the narrator’s flesh transforming and her losing pieces of herself, while the closing novella A Guest is more psychological horror, as the narrator unwittingly becomes a sin-eater for other people’s psychological disorders.
There are a couple of stories in Where Europe Begins that are not horror stories, the most noteworthy of them being the story that gives the collection its name. Even the non-horror works are surreal, though to different ends: The story Where Europe Begins uses its surreal tone to emphasize how the rest of the text plays with “real” versus invented narrative.
Whether it’s a work of horror or not, Yoko Tawada frequently imbues the stories’ narrators with her own history of being both Japanese and German (and, therefore, distinct from either). In The Bath the narrator is a German-Japanese translator, in A Guest the narrator writes columns about the difference between German and Japanese culture, and some of the other stories deal with feeling foreign or out of place in that specific way as well. The surreal atmosphere of the stories feels linked to this status of being trapped in some nebulous in-between. That’s not a particularly interesting take, I know, but I think it’s a take that Tawada intended, or else I can’t see the reason for the repetition.
Other elements repeat in these works as well, such as kokeshi dolls, marking Tawada as one of those authors (like Borges before her) that often revisit the same set of symbols in her works. I think that Where Europe Begins is the right size collection for her works, as a longer selection would likely have suffered from diminishing returns as the surreal tones and other elements repeated.
These stories were not what I expected, but, as a fan of surreal horror stories, I was pleasantly surprised, and even the non-horror pieces were interesting. I’m in the strange position, though, of feeling as if this single collection could be enough of a sample of Yoko Tawada’s work for me. I will still likely check out her well-regarded sci-fi novella The Emissary just because it sounds so different, but I think that I’ve read enough of her short stories. 3.5/5, which I’m rounding down to 3, though I was right on the edge of rounding up.
July 3, 2013
I want to give this book a 3.5, because though "I Really Liked" the writer's skill with language, I found the tales difficult and at times redundant. This is another book that I think I would appreciate much more after discussing it with other readers. Having said that, there are quite a few moments in the book that are 5-star beautiful, amazing lines, like these:
“Even a right moon can be wrong
at the wrong moment.” (Tawada, 61)
“When talking to a large company over dinner, one is not so much looking for things to say as walking along a narrow road trying not to touch things one shouldn’t and somehow making one’s way forward.” (Tawada, 79)
“Maybe if one simply gathers up one’s courage to fly, one doesn’t fall.” (Tawada, 84)
“The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.” (Tawada 108)
“I keep hearing a woman’s voice, too, one that tells me all the times I keep doing something wrong. But I know perfectly well whose voice it is.” (Tawada, 179)
“How strange! In order to read, I have to look at the text. But to avoid stumbling, I have to pretend the letters don’t exist. This is the secret of the alphabet: the letters aren’t there any longer, and at the same time they haven’t yet vanished.” (Tawada 118)
You can read someone else's review if you want a summary.
“Even a right moon can be wrong
at the wrong moment.” (Tawada, 61)
“When talking to a large company over dinner, one is not so much looking for things to say as walking along a narrow road trying not to touch things one shouldn’t and somehow making one’s way forward.” (Tawada, 79)
“Maybe if one simply gathers up one’s courage to fly, one doesn’t fall.” (Tawada, 84)
“The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.” (Tawada 108)
“I keep hearing a woman’s voice, too, one that tells me all the times I keep doing something wrong. But I know perfectly well whose voice it is.” (Tawada, 179)
“How strange! In order to read, I have to look at the text. But to avoid stumbling, I have to pretend the letters don’t exist. This is the secret of the alphabet: the letters aren’t there any longer, and at the same time they haven’t yet vanished.” (Tawada 118)
You can read someone else's review if you want a summary.
April 12, 2025
Anything by Yoko Tawada was my book club selection for this month. I read the first couple of stories of this book, and "The Bridegroom Was A Dog". Her writing is amazing and very different. The stories aren't written in the usual beginning-middle-end with developmental arcs that most writing has. They're more like adult (in the sense of mature!) fairy stories, or snapshots. Language and culture are important, I think she's commenting on the way our culture and upbringing shape us, and the limitations of language - but not in a 1984 controlling sense, more the invisible prison sense - or is that the same thing?! The stories are very evocative, but it's beyond me to analyse them. While I'm impressed by her writing, I think this is enough for me. Perhaps I'm just too straitlaced.
March 1, 2023
"I looked inside the temple and saw a single monk praying. From his body came several voices. After he had taken a breath, he once more spread out a deep voice like a carpet on which several other voices could then appear. He produced these voices from within his body, offering a sounding board to storytellers who themselves had none."
Tawada destroys borders in this text. She deconstructs the border between Europe and Asia, but also Life/Death, Child/Adult, and Self/Other. She takes on the subjectivity of the European, the Other, an Object, and many other positions. This is a travel tale for the globalized world, for the infosphere, and I'm here for it.
Tawada destroys borders in this text. She deconstructs the border between Europe and Asia, but also Life/Death, Child/Adult, and Self/Other. She takes on the subjectivity of the European, the Other, an Object, and many other positions. This is a travel tale for the globalized world, for the infosphere, and I'm here for it.
September 6, 2022
Easily the weirdest books I’ve ever read—loved it. Tawada’s unapologetic associations break free even the stiffest parts of the imagination, but “The Bath” is the star of the show among all the stories: a truly unique and mind-boggling read. I fell for some of the shorter stories as well, especially “Canned Foreigner” and “Soulless Storytellers”—Tawada’s rendering of living in another language is relatable, tender. That she moved to Germany in her twenties and learned the language so well she eventually authored books in German is wild.
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