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.

There are some works where I must be content with the single fish I have managed to catch. The flopping thing might not make much sense, or be very pretty, or in general be anything other than weird in a way I can't wrap my head around. I'd prefer being disturbed to this state of the uneasily vague, for disturbance implies something to disturb and eventually discover through the most sinister of echolocation. Instead, I have a fish, and as I have no interest in becoming fluent in both Japanese and German, the fish will suffice.

As in other museums as well, a power relationship is illustrated here: that which is represented is always something that has been destroyed.

The word not being said that I may have found out quicker had I read the original Japanese/German (each story is in one or the other but whether I want to discover which is in what has not been answered with the affirmative) is reality. Metonymy's a popular concept these days but it is not often that the entire mediating principle is sidestepped completely, leaving the interaction between letter of story of culture of world of living and the body a direct impact rather than a muffled rationality. You can't talk your way out of this one.

“How did you get such an Asian face?”
“What are you talking about, Mother? I am Asian.”
“That’s not what I meant. You’ve started to have one of those faces like Japanese people in American movies.”

Before I dropped a class due to the professor changing their grading principle every time we met, we were looking at ads, murals, public property pictures built upon principles of patriarchal dominance where the theme song of a woman not getting into the higher echelons of art unless naked and splayed in ink and oil has changed very little in the intervening centuries. We are walking portraits of what others have continually registered as carefully constructed otherwise; I don't know about your language, but I'm having enough trouble with picking apart my androcentric context with my androcentric English without even thinking about taking on another.

Apparently it was standard practice to retouch the photo of a suicide to make her look unattractive.

There's blood and sex and death and giant tongues and drowning monks and maybe lesbians? It's less of a sexual attraction and more the voice of the gods, or however we each individually process our integrated In the beginning was the Word.

The human body, too, contains many booths in which translation 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.

I could continue my thought and take this as a references to my indoctrinated Catholicism, or I could take a second to step outside the process. Both at the same time and then some, though. That's the translation.

Most readers don’t like to read short texts because they have so little time. They would rather go for a walk in a long novel and not have to change. The short texts would go for a walk inside their bodies, which they would find exhausting.

( )

Where Europe Begins, prefaced by the German film director Wim Wenders, has three parts: “The Bath,” translated from the Japanese by Yumi Selden, and “Where Europe Begins” and “The Guest,” translated from German by Susan Bernofsky.

“Where Europe Begins,” one of the eight stories from the section with the same title, is, like many of Tawada’s short stories, an unusual mixture of fairy-tale motifs and travel essay. Essay-like ruminations provoked by various landscapes and places are interspersed with folktales of various origins—Japanese, European, Samoyedic—often retold from a contemporary perspective, and with creation myths, of which we are never sure whether they are indeed culturally specific or they are in fact false creation myths—the author’s fictions. The effect of this mixture is a certain unsettling strangeness hard to define: on the one hand, the myth seeps into contemporary reality; on the other, reality itself is described in what appears to be an essay-like narrative, but even here the narrator’s voice, although an alter ego of the author, is fictional.

“Where Europe Begins,” written in the first person, with paragraphs titled “Diary excerpt” and “Excerpt from my first travel narrative,” seems a very convincing autobiographical “travel narrative” that tells the story of the narrator’s first encounter with Europe. As a child, the narrator wanted to go to Moscow, depicted as a magic city, the kind of city that exists only in a writer’s imagination, a paradise already lost before being found. Eventually, she does go to Moscow, but once she gets there, the story ends with the provocative and very ambiguous sentence (at least from the point of view of an European) “I realized I was standing in the middle of Europe” (146). In an interview, Tawada has mentioned that she wrote this story before she took the Trans-Siberian and went to Moscow; in other words, she invented the reality before actually living it.