|
Showing 1 - 16 of
16 matches in All Departments
*From the author of The Last Children of Tokyo* A mind-expanding,
cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference and what it
means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist. Welcome
to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea,
is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a 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. no time to learn three different
languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new
language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'.
Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels searching
for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue: Knut, a graduate
student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an
Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an
Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the
land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier.
All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature
an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist
named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull
fight. Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All
Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada.
Yoshiro celebrated his hundredth birthday many years ago, but every
morning before work he still goes running in the park with his
rent-a-dog. He is one of the many aged-elderly in Japan and he
might, he thinks, live forever. Life for Yoshiro isn't as simple as
it used to be. Pollution and natural disasters have scarred the
face of the Earth, and even common foods are hard to come by.
Still, Yoshiro's only real worry is the future of his
great-grandson Mumei, who, like other children of his generation,
was born frail and grey-haired, old before he was ever young. As
daily life in Tokyo grows harder, a secretive organisation embarks
on an audacious plan to find a cure for the children of Japan -
might Yoshiro's great-grandson, Mumei, be the key? A dreamlike
story of filial love and glimmering hope, The Last Children of
Tokyo is a delicate glimpse of our future from one of Japan's most
celebrated writers.
|
The Emissary (Paperback)
Yoko Tawada; Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
|
R391
R312
Discovery Miles 3 120
Save R79 (20%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
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 turning inside-out "the curse," defies gravity and
creates a playful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a
legerdemain uniquely her own.
A bear, born and raised in captivity, is devastated by the loss of
his keeper; another finds herself performing in the circus; a third
sits down one day and pens a memoir which becomes an international
sensation, and causes her to flee her home. Through the stories of
these three bears, Tawada reflects on our own humanity, the ways in
which we belong to one another and the ways in which we are formed.
Delicate and surreal, Memoirs of a Polar Bear takes the reader into
foreign bodies and foreign climes, and immerses us in what the New
Yorker has called 'Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness'.
|
Time Differences (Pamphlet)
Yoko Tawada; Translated by Jeffrey Angles
|
R212
R172
Discovery Miles 1 720
Save R40 (19%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the 2022 National Book Award.
Welcome 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 intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.
|
Three Streets (Hardcover)
Yoko Tawada; Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
|
R390
Discovery Miles 3 900
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
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.
*From the author of The Last Children of Tokyo* A mind-expanding,
cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference and what it
means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist. Welcome
to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea,
is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a 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. no time to learn three different
languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new
language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'.
Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels searching
for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue: Knut, a graduate
student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an
Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an
Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the
land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier.
All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature
an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist
named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull
fight. Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All
Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada.
The 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 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."
|
All the Lonely People (Paperback)
Heike Catherina Mertens; Text written by Nana Bahlmann, Ann Cotten, Felicitas Hoppe, Monika Rinck, …
|
R713
Discovery Miles 7 130
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
A gorgeous collection of fantastic and dreamlike tales by one of
the world's most innovative contemporary writers.
"Where Europe Begins" presents a collection of startling new
stories by Japanese writer Yoko Tawada. Moving through landscapes
of fairy tales, family history, strange words and letters, dreams,
and every-day reality, Tawada's work blurs divisions between fact
and fiction, prose and poetry. Often set in physical spaces as
disparate as Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany, these tales
describe a fragmented world where even a city or the human body can
become a sort of text. Suddenly, the reader becomes as much a
foreigner as the author and the figures that fill this book: the
ghost of a burned woman, a woman traveling on the Trans-Siberian
railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his
own reflection. Tawada playfully makes the experience of
estrangement--of a being in-between--both sensual and bewildering,
and as a result practically invents a new way of seeing things
while telling a fine story.
|
El Emisario
Yoko Tawada
|
R581
Discovery Miles 5 810
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
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' ['Portrat 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 reader to
move seamlessly between the two parts. Chantal Wright's technique
models what happens when translators read and responds to calls
within Translation Studies for translators to claim visibility, to
practice "thick translation", and to develop their own creative
voices. This experimental translation addresses a readership within
the academic disciplines of Translation Studies, Germanic Studies,
and related fields.
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 imagination.
"When he watched Michael Jackson's videos, every cell in Tamao's
body started to seethe: he even felt his appearance begin to
change. His friends all said plastic surgery was in bad taste. But
didn't everyone harbor a secret desire for a new face? His own was
as plain as a burlap sack, so he put it out of his mind and studied
hard to compensate for how dull he looked. He told himself that
fretting over one's appearance was a job for women. But deep down,
doesn't every man who lacks confidence in his looks yearn for that
moment when the Beast turns into a handsome young man?"--from
"Facing the Bridge"
Reading Yoko Tawada becomes an obsession, like watching the films
of Catherine Deneuve. In "Facing the Bridge," Tawada's second story
collection with New Directions, obsession becomes delight as the
reader is absorbed into three tales where identities flicker and
shift within borders as wide as the mind.
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."
|
|