Where Europe Begins: Stories
Translated by Susan Bernofsky
About
A collection of stories and essays that move between Japan, Russia, and the spaces in between — linguistic, geographic, and psychological. Tawada's characters cross borders the way other writers' characters cross streets, and each crossing changes them in ways they can't quite articulate. A woman on the Trans-Siberian Railway watches her language dissolve. A writer discovers that translation is a form of resurrection. Tawada writes from inside the experience of multilingualism — the vertigo, the comedy, the strange freedom of belonging to no single language. These stories are playful, philosophical, and built from the conviction that the spaces between cultures are the most interesting places to live. Stories about the place where Europe begins — which turns out to be wherever your mother tongue ends.
