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 in marriage is promised to a dog she is intimate with. And when a young man with sharp canine teeth turns up at the schoolteacher's home and declares he's 'here to stay', the romantic - and sexual - relationship that develops intrigues the community, some of whom have suspicions about the man's identity and motives.Masterfully turning the rules of folklore and fable on their head, The Bridegroom Was a Dog is a disarming and unforgettable modern classic.

On the heels of Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada's new and irresistible Suggested in the Stars carries on her band of friends' astonishing and intrepid adventuresIt's hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than Scattered All Over the Earth—Yoko Tawada's rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change—but surprising her readers is what Tawada does best: its sequel, Suggested in the Stars, delivers exploits even more poignant and shambolic.As Hiruko—whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue—and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko—and amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature)—they...

A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book AwardWelcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language."As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they're all next off to Stockholm.With its...

Yoko Tawada—winner of the National Book Award—presents three terrific new ghost stories, each named after a street in BerlinThe 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 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, since he's already dead? Then white feathers fall from her head and she seems to be turning into a crane . . . Pure white kittens and a great Russian poet haunt "Majakowskiring": the narrator who reveres Mayakovsky's work is delighted to meet his ghost. And finally, in "Pushkin Allee," a huge Soviet-era memorial of soldiers comes to life—and, "for a scene of carnage everything was awfully well-ordered." Each of these stories opens up into new dimensions the...

Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language prose text by Yoko Tawada entitled 'Portrait of a Tongue' ['Porträt einer Zunge', 2002]. Yoko Tawada is a native speaker of Japanese who learned German as an adult.Portrait of a Tongue is a portrait of a German woman—referred to only as P—who has lived in the United States for many years and whose German has become inflected by English. The text is the first-person narrator's declaration of love for P and for her language, a 'thinking-out-loud' about language(s), and a self-reflexive commentary.Chantal Wright offers a critical response and a new approach to the translation process by interweaving Tawada's text and the translator's dialogue, creating a side-by-side reading experience that encourages the...

A moving story about friendship, illness, and the poetry of Paul Celan by the astonishing Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book AwardPatrik, who sometimes calls himself "the patient," is a literary researcher living in present-day Berlin. The city is just coming back to life after lockdown, and his beloved opera houses are open again, but Patrik cannot leave the house and hardly manages to get out of bed. When he shaves his head, his girlfriend scolds him, "What have you done to your head? I don't want to be with a prisoner from a concentration camp!" He is supposed to give a paper at a conference in Paris, on the poetry collection Threadsuns by Paul Celan, but he can't manage to get past the first question on the registration form: "What is your nationality?" Then at a café (or in the memory of being at a café?), he meets a mysterious stranger. The man's name is Leo-Eric Fu, and somehow he already knows Patrik...In the spirit of...

From Japan to Vietnam to Amsterdam to the Canary Islands, these three new tales by master storyteller Yoko Tawada float between cultures, identities, and the dreamwork of the imaginationAmo, 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 three new tales by master storyteller Yoko Tawada cross cultures and histories with a sensuous playfulness as sweet as a box of candied hearts—even Michael Jackson makes an appearance. In Facing the Bridge, Tawada's second collection of stories with New Directions, obsession becomes delight as the reader is whisked into a world where identities flicker and shift in a never-ending balance.

Yoko Tawada's new novel is a breathtakingly light-hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her "brilliant, shimmering, magnificent strangeness"Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient—frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy who offers "the beauty of the time that is yet to come."A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko Tawada, deftly...

Internationally acclaimed author Yoko Tawada's most famous — and bizarre — tale in a stand-alone, New Directions Pearl edition.The Bridegroom Was a Dog is perhaps the Japanese-German writer Yoko Tawada's most famous story. Its initial publication in 1998 garnered admiration from The New Yorker, who praised it as, "fast-moving, mysteriously compelling tale that has the dream quality of Kafka."The Bridegroom Was a Dog begins with a schoolteacher telling a fable to her students. In the fable, a princess promises her hand in marriage to a dog that has licked her bottom clean. The story takes an even stranger twist when that very dog appears to the schoolteacher in real life as a dog-like man. They develop a very sexual, romantic courtship with many allegorical overtones — much to the chagrin of her friends.

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers—who happen to be polar bearsThe Memoirs of a Polar Bear stars three generations of talented writers and performers—who happen to be polar bearsThe Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness"—Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son—the last of their line—is Knut, born in chapter three in a...