Three Streets

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 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 work of this magisterial writer.

Review

About the Author

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Kleist, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes as well as the Goethe Medal. In 2018 her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.

Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada (sharing her National Book Award) and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).