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Yōko Tawada

    March 23, 1960

    Yōko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German, with her works frequently exploring themes of identity, language, and cultural exchange. Her unique style, fluidly navigating between different languages and cultural contexts, investigates how our perception of the world is shaped by the way we communicate about it. Tawada brings a playful and often absurd perspective to everyday life, uncovering the hidden poetry within ordinary occurrences. Her writing compels readers to reconsider their own assumptions about reality and communication.

    Yōko Tawada
    Memoirs of a Polar Bear
    The Bridegroom Was a Dog
    The Last Children of Tokyo
    The naked eye
    Spontaneous Acts
    Suggested in the Stars
    • 2024
    • 2024

      The highly anticipated, exquisite new novel from the award-winning, critically acclaimed Yoko Tawada, following our protagonist Patrik as he attempts to find connection in a world that constantly overwhelms him.[Bokinfo].

      Spontaneous Acts
    • 2022

      A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference, and what it means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist.

      Scattered All Over the Earth
    • 2022

      Three Streets

      • 64 pages
      • 3 hours of reading
      3.2(282)Add rating

      Yoko Tawada-winner of the National Book Award-presents three terrific new ghost stories, each named after a street in Berlin

      Three Streets
    • 2018

      A dreamlike story of filial love and glimmering hope, set in a future where the old live almost-forever and children's lives are all too brief.

      The Last Children of Tokyo
    • 2017

      Mamoru wakes up at 9am in Berlin, eats breakfast, and then sets off to teach a Japanese language class, carrying a sashimi knife in his bag. At this moment in New York, Manfred lurches from a dream where a fisherman was about to gut him he wakes just in time to make his morning work-out. Meanwhile, Michael is preparing to go to the late-night gym in Tokyo, thinking of a man he met in Berlin only weeks before. Tawada s story follows the three men Mamoru, Manfred and Michael as they move through their lives on different sides of the globe. Though thousands of miles apart, odd moments of synchronicity form between these characters, the narrative shifting from one perspective to another as the three men's lives momentarily align and diverge. Here, modernity is rendered textual as Tawada explores the strange nature of human connection in a globalized, technologized world, and discovers what this means for contemporary storytelling.

      Time Differences
    • 2016

      Memoirs of a Polar Bear

      • 256 pages
      • 9 hours of reading
      3.4(2231)Add rating

      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 best-selling 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 Leipzig zoo, but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away.Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen."

      Memoirs of a Polar Bear
    • 2012

      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 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.

      The Bridegroom Was a Dog
    • 2009

      "Tawada's slender accounts of alienation achieve a remarkable potency."--Michael Porter, The New York Times

      The naked eye