| daniela
hurezanu
Where Europe Begins
Yoko Tawada
Translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
and from the Japanese by Yumi Selden
New Directions, 2007
224 pp
Facing the Bridge
Yoko Tawada
Translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani
New Directions, 2007
186 pp
I discovered Yoko Tawada thanks to one of those serendipitous
encounters life occasionally offers us: at a conference on
languages and literature in Louisville, Kentucky. I actually
wanted to attend a different talk, but couldn’t find
the room, and I somehow found myself in one of the charming
houses bordering the campus, where various conference events
were being hosted. I opened a door and there was no going
back.
The room was packed. The speaker: a woman of Japanese appearance,
barely forty, flanked by two people who turned out to be her
translators, one from the Japanese, Yumi Selder, the other
from German, Susan Bernofsky. I thus found out that Yoko Tawada
left Japan when she was twenty-two and settled in Hamburg,
Germany. Today she is considered one of the major contemporary
writers in both Japanese and German.
I bought the book that was being promoted at the conference,
Where Europe Begins, prefaced by the German film
director Wim Wenders, and whose three parts, “The Bath,”
translated from the Japanese, “Where Europe Begins”
and “The Guest,” translated from German, make
for a rather eclectic combination.
“Where Europe Begins,” one of the eight stories
from the section with the same title, is, like many of Tawada’s
short stories, an unusual mixture of fairy-tale motifs and
travel essay. Essay-like ruminations provoked by various landscapes
and places are interspersed with folktales of various origins—Japanese,
European, Samoyedic—often retold from a contemporary
perspective, and with creation myths, of which we are never
sure whether they are indeed culturally specific or they are
in fact false creation myths—the author’s fictions.
The effect of this mixture is a certain unsettling strangeness
hard to define: on the one hand, the myth seeps into contemporary
reality; on the other, reality itself is described in what
appears to be an essay-like narrative, but even here the narrator’s
voice, although an alter ego of the author, is fictional.
“Where Europe Begins,” written in the first person,
with paragraphs titled “Diary excerpt” and “Excerpt
from my first travel narrative,” seems a very convincing
autobiographical “travel narrative” that tells
the story of the narrator’s first encounter with Europe.
As a child, the narrator wanted to go to Moscow, depicted
as a magic city, the kind of city that exists only in a writer’s
imagination, a paradise already lost before being found. Eventually,
she does go to Moscow, but once she gets there, the story
ends with the provocative and very ambiguous sentence (at
least from the point of view of an European) “I realized
I was standing in the middle of Europe” (146). In an
interview, Tawada has mentioned that she wrote this story
before she took the Trans-Siberian and went to Moscow; in
other words, she invented the reality before actually living
it.
As a matter of fact, travel is the subject of most of Tawada’s
stories. The protagonist is usually a single woman of indeterminate
age—anywhere between thirty-five and fifty—who
has a cold detachment from everything she sees and that surrounds
her. She seems to be drifting without really touching anything
or being emotionally touched. In this respect, Tawada’s
stories are reminiscent of the French nouveau roman (or nouveau
nouveau roman). Her characters seem incapable of belonging,
and the plot never “thickens” but always crumbles,
as if the authorial voice were reminding us that this is not
the real, but merely a story that could go in any direction
the author felt like taking it. Yet the mixture of mythical
elements makes Tawada a more interesting and captivating writer
than most French novelists of the last half-century. The narrator
may not have a soul—storytellers and travelers don’t
have souls, Tawada tells us—but she is able to filter
what was once the soul of the world she happens to travel
through. The world is a puzzle of mixed-up fragments that
travelers and writers look at as if they were in a museum.
(I will never forget my own experience as a tourist in Paris,
when, as I was absentmindedly admiring some duck mousse, foie
gras, olives, and other products in a little gourmet shop,
hearing the answer I had given the seller—“I am
only looking”— someone mumbled in Italian: “She
thinks she’s in a museum.”)
In Facing the Bridge, translated from the Japanese
by Margaret Mitsutani, some of the narrator-traveler’s
remarks make it clear that Tawada is not apolitical and that
her writing is not underlined by the nihilism one would suspect
behind such detachment. All three novellas included here,
“The Shadow Man,” “In Front of Trang Tien
Bridge” and “Saint George and the Translator,”
have, in one way or another, political implications.
In “Shadow Man,” two stories set in two different
historical times are told in parallel, but the shift from
one to the other is done without transition, as if they were
merely two version of the same (old and new) story. The first
narration is about Amo, a character with a real historical
existence. According to the translator, he was brought from
Africa to Europe by Dutch slave traders in the early eighteenth
century, raised and educated by a duke, and later enrolled
at the University of Halle and the University of Witterburg.
He taught philosophy both at Halle and Jena, but came increasingly
under racist attacks and eventually returned to Africa where
he died in grim circumstances. It is obvious that the author
identifies with this black man, who feels so Other among the
Europeans, or rather, who must have seemed so Other to them;
a man in whom the belief in Bad Spirits coexists with ideas
that are said to have influenced Lessing, the poet and philosopher
of the German Enlightenment.
The second story is about the Japanese Tamao, a contemporary
Japanese young man who studies in Germany. It is interesting
that Tawada seems to identify less with Tamao—who is
described with a certain degree of irony—than with Amo.
“In front of the Trang Tien Bridge” is another
“travel narrative” whose protagonist is a woman
of Japanese origin who is mistaken for a Vietnamese in Germany—one
can guess Tawada’s irritation at this European perception
of the “Asian,” in spite of the fact that the
Japanese and the Vietnamese are physically so different. A
tourist in contemporary Vietnam, the narrator meets a Japanese-speaking
Caucasian man who appears to be American but identifies as
a Japanese. Like most of Tawada’s characters, this woman
too seems detached from what happens to her, though the reader
can feel a certain malaise or bad conscience lurking not only
at the back of her mind, but in the author’s too. A
“rich” tourist in a poor country, Tawada tries
to resist, through her character, the tourist sensibility
and mode, which transform everything, included the pain of
others, into a spectacle. And she doesn’t see herself
either, as so many Westerners when going abroad, as having
“an interesting experience” among the “natives,”
which they can later brag about in their blogs.
“Saint George and the Translator” seems even more
autobiographical than the other two novellas: the story of
a translator who retreats to a cottage on the Canary Islands,
but refuses to look at this “exotic” environment
with the eyes of a dumbstruck tourist. The translator’s
explicit refusal of “sightseeing,” her lucid coldness
and her detached tone are doubled by the strangeness that
envelops everything on the island. I realize that there is
no word in our literary vocabulary for this kind of strangeness,
and this makes me think that this may be one of the ways by
which we can recognize a new, great artistic sensibility.
We have words for certain kinds of strangeness—“surreal,”
“kafkaesque” and, for the most erudite, “unheimlich”—but
there is no word to characterize Tawada’s strangeness.
The strangeness of the island is consubstantial with the oddity
of the passages translated by the narrator, whose unclear
subject, referring to sacrifices and murders, becomes less
and less rational as we advance into the story, and whose
words grow increasingly into a nonsensical list, but this
nonsense too contributes to the economy of the story: “the
organ ‘heart,’ no more, must not, beat, pump blood,
pulsate, must not, the heart’s pain, all ceased […]”
(158). It is Beckett’s voice that one can hear behind
these lines. It may be that Tawada’s strangeness is
the result of a synthesis of very diverse voices, from universal
myths and fairy tales, to the Japanese Osamu Dazai to Kafka,
to Beckett and many others.
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