Three Streets

"Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half-remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within." -- The New York Times "Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman." -- Rivka Galchen - The New York Times Magazine "Tawadas strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity, and what it means to own someone elses story or ones own." -- The New Yorker "These stories reinvent familiar landmarks and artworks, giving readers an imaginative and hopeful way to grapple with the history thats written into the urban landscape." -- Publishers Weekly "Three Streets is one of the most explicitly dialectical works in Tawadas oeuvre. It pursues a left project not only in form but also in contentan engagement with the plight of the poor, the disenfranchised, the forgottenand leaves her readers no doubt that, at the end of the day, her project has political stakes." -- Reed McConnell - The Baffler "The mystery of what it means to be humanthis phrase, which pops up early in Kollwitz Strasse, is an apt description of what Tawada aims to explore in these stories. From one moment to the next, her narratives can be mystifying. In time, though, they cohere into engrossing meditations on historical memory and the oft-baffling nature of life in this century. " -- Kevin Canfield - World Literature Today "In her latest work of fiction Three Streets, Tawada brings her remarkable intelligence and linguistic playfulness to bear on the cityscape of Berlin itself or, more specifically, its former East. On Kollwitzstrae, Majakowskiring and Puschkinallee, Tawada conjures a series of ghostly encounters with the past, present and supernatural possibilities of our history-heavy city. This klein aber fein addition to Tawadas oeuvre, translated elegantly by Margaret Mitsutani, compresses plenty of its authors trademark offbeat brilliance into a pleasingly short format." -- Alexander Wells - Exberliner "Each street in the volume, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is both charming and unnerving...This may well be Tawadas finest work, partly because of how moving it is when someone capable of so much wit knows when to be reverent. A perfect story." -- J.W. McCormack - The New Left Review

Born in Tokyo in 1960, Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German: she has received the Akutagawa, Kleist, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Tanizaki prizes, as well as the Goethe Medal. Her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. Rivka Galchen in the New York Times Magazine hailed her work as magnificently strange. Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada (sharing her National Book Award) and Kenzaburo Oe (Japans 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).