Yōko Tawada

Some passages from Where Europe Begins:

If they didn’t manage the operation properly and cut off some necessary part of her, she would not be completely back. If it came to that, I could donate a body part of my own. I could give at least one. Many of the body’s organs come in twos. I have two ears. Two lungs. I think there might even be two of the uterus, but I don’t remember now.

*

When talking to a large company over dinner, one is not so much looking for things to say as walking along a narrow road trying not to touch things one shouldn’t and somehow making one’s way forward.

*

To some extent, one has to forgive them on account of their youth, but I can’t forgive people who use their youth as an excuse to oppress others.

*

Most of the words that came out of my mouth had nothing to do with how I felt. But at the same time I realized that my native tongue didn’t have words for how I felt either. It’s just that this never occurred to me until I’d begun to live in a foreign language.

Often it sickened me to hear people speak their native tongues fluently. It was as if they were unable to think and feel anything but what their language so readily served up to them.

*

But can one understand the language of cells at all? The question brings to mind the image of yet another cell: the booth for simultaneous interpreters. At international congresses you often see these beautiful transparent booths in which people stand telling stories: they translate, so actually they are retelling tales that already exist. The lip movements and gestures of each interpreter and the way each of them glances about as she speaks are so various it’s difficult to believe they are all translating a single, shared text. And perhaps, it isn’t really a single shared text after all, perhaps the translators, by translating, demonstrate that this text is really many texts at once. The human body, too, contains many booths in which translations are made. I suspect that these are all translations for which no original exists. There are people, though, who assume that everyone is given an original text at birth. They call the place in which these texts are stored a soul.

*

A theatre, for example, is often a place where the dead can speak. A simple example is found in Hamlet: the dead father comes on stage and tells how he was killed by his brother. That is the decisive moment in this play, without which neither Hamlet nor the audience would have access to the past. They would have to go on believing the story of the murderer, who claimed Hamlet’s father had been bitten by a poisonous snake. Through the dead man’s story we learn a bit of the past that otherwise would have remained obscure. The theatre is the place where knowledge not accessible to us becomes audible. In other places, we almost always hear only the tales of the living. They force their stories on us to justify themselves, and so that they will be able to go on living, like Hamlet’s uncle. The tales told by the dead are fundamentally different, because their stories are not told to conceal their wounds.

.… (more)

I won this as a prize for the winter readathon at my library, and it does look interesting enough to read, so ok.

Read at the most superficial level, the blurb reminds me of the picturebook stories about Larry, Irving, and Muktuk by [a:Daniel Pinkwater|20575|Daniel Pinkwater|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1218645652p2/20575.jpg]. The cover reminds me very superficially of The Night Circus. But of course I'll try to read it for its own merits, whenever I get around to it.
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Ok done.
Ambitious... almost succeeds.
Seems original, no doubt, to some readers, but I was reminded of [b:I Am a Cat|62772|I Am a Cat|Sōseki Natsume|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1364139690i/62772._SY75_.jpg|60969], [b:The Bear Went Over the Mountain|225691|The Bear Went Over the Mountain|William Kotzwinkle|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388378538i/225691._SY75_.jpg|1555086], and even [b:Life of Pi|4214|Life of Pi|Yann Martel|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1320562005i/4214._SY75_.jpg|1392700]. And of course there's obviously a lot of 'write what you know' going on, given the author's background.

Lots of cleverness. Some beautiful poetic stylings in the beginning that some readers might roll their eyes at, but that I missed when the prose become more, erm, prosaic. Lots of metaphorical themes & commentaries, what with allusions to climate change, East & West Berlin, racism, art, celebrities (took me a minute, but I did finally realize that Michael was pop star Michael Jackson.), etc. A *L*iterary scholar would have fun dissecting it.

But I think there's a larger message, something to unite the three stories, the generations, and I could not find it. It's definitely not a genre saga, nor is it really about polar bears (though I did learn a lot about them from a scientific pov). What it is, I just couldn't figure out. And it just plain ends, no resolution, no looking towards the future.

I can guess that it might be a sort of 'magical realism' - which I don't normally read and so am not qualified to say anything about - since the group Play Book Tag is doing m.r. this month I will report it there, maybe somebody will have a clue.

From the enchanting beginning:
"The willow trees, elegant, cunning, and overcome with ennui, kept poking their thin fingers into the water, perhaps hoping it would play with them. Pale green shoots punctuated their branches."

(Which reminds me, kudos to the translator, and kudos to the publisher for giving her more credit than is usually given.)

Later, random bits of philosophy and politics show up. A minor character spouts:
"I find it lamentable that we have to keep eating all the time so as not to just die on the spot. I detest 'gourmets.' The act as if food were an ornament that increases the aesthetic value of their lives. Which only works if they suppress all thought of how miserable it is that they have to eat at all."… (more)

Compared with her previous translated novel [b:The Last Children of Tokyo|37800111|The Last Children of Tokyo|Yōko Tawada|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1543850172l/37800111._SY75_.jpg|56779160], I found Yōko Tawada's [b:Scattered All Over the Earth|58470813|Scattered All Over the Earth|Yōko Tawada|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1628279933l/58470813._SY75_.jpg|76590310] more elusive in plot terms yet more explicit in its themes. Both novels are atmospheric and ambiguous above all, in part because they are concerned with forgetting, disappearance, and decline. [b:Scattered All Over the Earth|58470813|Scattered All Over the Earth|Yōko Tawada|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1628279933l/58470813._SY75_.jpg|76590310] considers what might remain of a culture once its original home vanishes: the language, food, and a few refugees. However the rest of the world tends to assimilate such remnants, so their origin is soon forgotten. I appreciated the examination of this process via multiple perspectives. The shifting points of view deepened the introspection of the narrative, while ensuring the plot was slow and sprawling to the point of non-existence. Characters travelled about a bit and had conversations, but the book is much more concerned with their cultural backgrounds and how these influence their relationships.

My favourite aspect of the novel was the exploration of language and how it mediates experience. One character moves to Europe and is constantly assumed to be of Japanese background, when actually he came from Greenland. He reflects that learning a new language is like gaining 'an extra identity', which he considers fun and exciting. Another character experiences more of a loss from moving to Europe from Japan and no longer having anyone to speak Japanese with. She invents a 'homemade' language called Panska, which can be understood by anyone who speaks a Scandinavian language, and takes a job essentially translating mythology across cultures. The playful use of fusion food as a cultural signifier is interesting too, such as 'meditation pizza'.

As with [b:The Last Children of Tokyo|37800111|The Last Children of Tokyo|Yōko Tawada|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1543850172l/37800111._SY75_.jpg|56779160], I found [b:Scattered All Over the Earth|58470813|Scattered All Over the Earth|Yōko Tawada|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1628279933l/58470813._SY75_.jpg|76590310] thought-provoking but would struggle to articulate what it added up to. It seems to be introducing characters and themes to set up events that never happen, then ends entirely arbitrarily. Indeed, I think it feels incomplete. I could have sworn I read somewhere that there will be a sequel, so perhaps this is intentional. The blurb describes it as 'a synaesthetic love song to language and liminality', which gives a fair indication of what to expect.… (more)