Facing the Bridge

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the National Book Award. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Emissary, Scattered All over the Earth, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, Suggested in the Stars, and forthcoming in autumn 2025 is Archipelago of the Sun, the final novel in her Scattered trilogy. Margaret Mitsutani has lived in Japan since the mid-1970s and was a finalist for the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth and winner of the National Book Award for her translation of Tawada’s The Emissary. She also translates Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe.

"...in the title of this volume [Tawada] chooses to face the bridge, to stare it down, perhaps, refusing to cross. Through her writing she seeks to create a new kind of bridge—not as a structure built of stone or concrete, but as a physical process, a continuing dance."