Yoko Tawada

Tawada's strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity and what it means to own someone else's story or one's own The New Yorker on Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear. Are you formed by your mother tongue? How might the world unfold if you stepped outside of its rhythms? In this playful and daring interrogation of language, the...

Yoshiro celebrated his hundredth birthday many years ago, but every morning before work he still goes running in the park with his rent-a-dog. He is one of the many aged-elderly in Japan, and he might, he thinks, live forever. Life for Yoshiro isn't as simple as it used to be. Pollution and natural disasters have scarred the face of the...

A young Vietnamese woman is invited to travel from Ho Chi Minh City to speak at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. On her arrival, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on 'Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism', she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town on the western side of the...

Hiruko, from the now vanished archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia, and her band of friends have searched in vain for someone who speaks her native language. They finally track down Susanoo, a sushi chef from the same nation, but there's a problem — he has lost the power of speech. As the companions set out to help Susanoo regain...

The always astonishing Yoko Tawada here takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street. In Kollwitzstrasse, as the narrator muses on former East Berlin's new bourgeois health food stores, so popular with the wealthy young people, a ghost boy begs her to buy him the old-fashioned sweets he craves. She worries that sugar's still sugar—but why lecture him,...

In this concluding volume, intrepid Hiruko and her band of friends embark on a sea voyage in search of Hiruko's lost island homeland — the Land of Sushi. The boat carrying the companions strikes east from Copenhagen across the Baltic Sea, but as it docks in coastal ports along the route, an array of mysterious characters boards the vessel. Deeply...

Amo, an African kidnapped to Europe as a boy, and Tamao, a Japanese exchange student in Germany, live in different countries but are being followed by the same shadow; Kazuko, a young professional tourist, is lured to Vietnam by a mysterious postcard; on the Canary Islands, a nameless translator battles a banana grove and a series of Saint Georges... These...

From the author of The Last Children of Tokyo A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference, and what it means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist. Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job...

The highly anticipated new novel from award-winning, critically acclaimed novelist Yoko Tawada. Patrik is a literary researcher living in Berlin, a city just coming back to life after lockdown. Though his beloved opera houses are open again, Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. He is supposed to give a paper at a conference...

A tale of passion and romance between a Japanese schoolteacher and a doglike man, from the prize-winning author of The Last Children of Tokyo. Mitsuko, a schoolteacher at the Kitamura school, inspires both rumour and curiosity in the parents of her students because of her unconventional manner—not least when she tells the children the fable of a princess whose hand...