Yoko Tawada is a compelling, prolific, and award-winning writer working in Japanese, German, and English. Three Streets is her most recent collection published in English, here not so much short stories as they are strolls through three streets in Berlin. Throughout her works, her narrators are often strangers in a strange land, living in between moments in history, cultures, and languages. Alternative worlds emerge from answers to any number of “what ifs”. The woman who narrates the first story in this collection, “Kollwitzstrasse”, sets the tone when she describes the child that accompanies her as she walks. Who the child is or where she came from is unknown.
Invisible sensors extend from the child’s forehead. The sensors move constantly, darting this way and that, trying to absorb all the stimuli from the outside world.
Key to that outside world and to the beauty of Tawada’s writing is how one not only absorbs but interprets such stimuli and how quickly those interpretations veer from the ordinary. The narrator moves from the handlebars on a stand of bicycles to how they resemble the horns of animals. From animals, she moves to the zodiac. In three sentences her sense of the world has changed. As with young children, her attention span is short. The narrator is captured by the child’s sneakers beginning to flash. She quickly reassesses her companion and decides it is a robot from a dystopian future. When she later realizes the child is neither child nor robot, but instead a ghost, her encounters with the world are realigned with both the Berlin of a hundred years earlier and her companion’s lack of corporeality. The ghost wants candy. The narrator unthinkingly responds that too much sugar can make one sick. She catches herself with a fundamental question: can the dead get sick? These hesitations, uncertainties, and surrealities are celebrated:
Only children know about these adventures into the unknown, right in the middle of everyday life.
Not only children however. The narrator and much of Tadawa’s writing have such adventures.
One problem for understanding everyday life is how one situates oneself in time. The past is ever present in “Kollwitzstrasse”, in Berlin, and beyond. The past? “Which past?” asks Tawada. “Which moment in which past?” Potential interpretations explode.
In “Majakowskiring”, a street renamed by the Soviets in 1950 for the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the uncertainties also play with the instability of time. The street is a ring road that, suggests the narrator, once upon a time surrounded a medieval castle where its wall once was. Tawada considers the possibility of alternate presents or futures in encounters or friendships one might have or might still have depending upon how and when they travel back in time. Much of this is a problem with language and how words resist attaching themselves securely to the world. Their ambitions are broader:
The city is just like the inside of my brain: the words on shop signs create endless waves of associations—the chattering of passersby grows into an opera, travelers scatter foreign words on museum floors … and in coffee shops the people at the next table are always putting on a play with an indecipherable plot, as teas and cakes with tea-and-cake-like names go into mouths and down gullets to be digested by stomachs. …
At times, those associations are dark. The occasion for “Puschkinalle” is a narrator’s visit to Treptower Park. She encounters a monument to a Russian soldier memorializing the 80,000 soldiers killed in Berlin during WWII. Tawada extends the story through the stones in the park, which function much as pages in a book written to recognize the sacrifices of soldiers and those at home as they surrendered their identities to support the Soviet Union. It culminates with the child who is held by the thirty-foot bronze Liberator Soldier leaping to the ground and running off, aging seventy years as she goes. Here there are breakdowns of all sense in the atrocities of war midst Tawada’s play along the way.
Given the presence of Russia in the two of the streets encountered here, it is tempting to invoke Victor Shklovsky’s “estrangement” as one aesthetic informing much of Tawada’s work. But Tawada does so much more in Three Streets as she underscores the provisional nature of cultural ideologies encoded in all narratives by writing these Berlin walks in Japanese rather than in German. She plays a series of alternatingly delightful and tragic games with her narrators as they fumble for understanding. The goal is not a “story” or a worldview that is coherent, nor is it in presenting a dystopia as she has in works like her recent novel, Scattered All Over the Earth. In these three stories drawn from her 2017 collection Hyakunen-no-sanpo (“A Century of Walks”), Tawada is an artist who is on the playground, making up games as she goes along.