Facing the Bridge, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani, includes three novellas: “The Shadow Man,” “In Front of Trang Tien Bridge” and “Saint George and the Translator.”

In “Shadow Man,” two stories set in two different historical times are told in parallel, but the shift from one to the other is done without transition, as if they were merely two version of the same (old and new) story. The first narration is about Amo, a character with a real historical existence. According to the translator, he was brought from Africa to Europe by Dutch slave traders in the early eighteenth century, raised and educated by a duke, and later enrolled at the University of Halle and the University of Witterburg. He taught philosophy both at Halle and Jena, but came increasingly under racist attacks and eventually returned to Africa where he died in grim circumstances. It is obvious that the author identifies with this black man, who feels so Other among the Europeans, or rather, who must have seemed so Other to them; a man in whom the belief in Bad Spirits coexists with ideas that are said to have influenced Lessing, the poet and philosopher of the German Enlightenment.

The second story is about the Japanese Tamao, a contemporary Japanese young man who studies in Germany. It is interesting that Tawada seems to identify less with Tamao—who is described with a certain degree of irony—than with Amo.

“In front of the Trang Tien Bridge” is another “travel narrative” whose protagonist is a woman of Japanese origin who is mistaken for a Vietnamese in Germany—one can guess Tawada’s irritation at this European perception of the “Asian,” in spite of the fact that the Japanese and the Vietnamese are physically so different. A tourist in contemporary Vietnam, the narrator meets a Japanese-speaking Caucasian man who appears to be American but identifies as a Japanese. Like most of Tawada’s characters, this woman too seems detached from what happens to her, though the reader can feel a certain malaise or bad conscience lurking not only at the back of her mind, but in the author’s too. A “rich” tourist in a poor country, Tawada tries to resist, through her character, the tourist sensibility and mode, which transform everything, included the pain of others, into a spectacle. And she doesn’t see herself either, as so many Westerners when going abroad, as having “an interesting experience” among the “natives,” which they can later brag about in their blogs.

“Saint George and the Translator” seems even more autobiographical than the other two novellas: the story of a translator who retreats to a cottage on the Canary Islands, but refuses to look at this “exotic” environment with the eyes of a dumbstruck tourist. The translator’s explicit refusal of “sightseeing,” her lucid coldness and her detached tone are doubled by the strangeness that envelops everything on the island. I realize that there is no word in our literary vocabulary for this kind of strangeness, and this makes me think that this may be one of the ways by which we can recognize a new, great artistic sensibility. We have words for certain kinds of strangeness—“surreal,” “kafkaesque” and, for the most erudite, “unheimlich”—but there is no word to characterize Tawada’s strangeness. The strangeness of the island is consubstantial with the oddity of the passages translated by the narrator, whose unclear subject, referring to sacrifices and murders, becomes less and less rational as we advance into the story, and whose words grow increasingly into a nonsensical list, but this nonsense too contributes to the economy of the story: “the organ ‘heart,’ no more, must not, beat, pump blood, pulsate, must not, the heart’s pain, all ceased […]” (158). It is Beckett’s voice that one can hear behind these lines. It may be that Tawada’s strangeness is the result of a synthesis of very diverse voices, from universal myths and fairy tales, to the Japanese Osamu Dazai to Kafka, to Beckett and many others.