WHERE EUROPE BEGINS by Yoko Tawada, translated by Susan Bernofsky and Yumi Selden, preface by Wim Wenders. New York: New Directions, 2007, 208 pp., $14.95 (paper)
For all his originality, Haruki Murakami, in his artful blends of fantasy and the mundane, reminds one of Paul Auster. The other Murakami, Ryu, succeeds in shocking, but he does so in a manner that screams Bret Easton Ellis. When reading Yoko Tawada, on the other hand, though the specter of Franz Kafka flutters, now and then, up from the pages, one is struck less by the resemblance of her fiction to that of other authors than by its utter originality.
Those of us illiterate in Japanese and German (she writes in both languages) have, since the publication in 1998 of her first English collection, "The Bridegroom was a Dog," had little chance to enjoy the unique pleasure her sporadically available work affords. The dry years, however, appear to be over. The ever-adventurous publisher New Directions, in "Facing the Bridge" and "Where Europe Begins," has brought us a healthy sampling of Tawada's work, a cornucopia that, as satisfying as it is, will leave us hungry for more.