Morrison

Study Guide: Tawada Ykos Where Europe Begins (1991)

*To purchase Susan Bernofsky/Yumi Seldens translation of the story, click here.
*To view Tawada Ykos Official Homepage, click here.
Tawada Yko (1960): Tawada Yko majored in Russian at university, but during her
first job developed a passion for all things German and moved to Germany for
postgraduate study. She got her Masters at Hamburg University and her PhD at Zurich
before returning to Germany to write. Her first publication was a collection of poems. In
1991 her novella Kakato o nakushite (Missing Heels, tr. 1998) won the Gunzo Prize for
New Writers. The novella Inu mukoiri (The Bridegroom Was a Dog, tr. 1998) was
awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 1993, and Yogisha no yako ressha (Suspects on the
Night Train), a series of linked stories, received the Tanizaki Junichir Prize in 2003.
Tawada lives in Germany and writes in both Japanese and German. She describes her
approach in her essay Ekusofoni (Exophony), stressing that whats important is not each
individual language, but the space between them. I dont want to be an author who
writes either in language A or language B, she declares. I want to find that poetical
ravine that divides the two and tumble into it. In 1996 she won the Robert Bosch
Stiftung Chamisso Prize and in 2005 was awarded the Goethe Medal. In 2011 her
novel Yuki no renshusei (The Trainee of Snow) won the Noma Prize for Literature.
(Source: J-lit, Books from Japan)
Study Questions
1. Describe the narrative structure of the work. Summarize the five diary excerpts
(parts 3, 7, 8, 11, 15); the four first travel narratives (parts 5, 9, 12, 18); the two
something I told a woman three years after the journey sections (parts 6, 10); and the
excerpt of the letter to my parents (part 17). What effect is produced by constructing
the story as a patchwork of various types of narrative?
2. Describe the narrator. Where is she located (temporally and spatially)? What was she
1

Originally published in German (Wo Europa Anfngt) and Japanese (

) in 1991. English translation: Where Europe Begins. Susan
Bernofsky and Yumi Selden, with a preface by Wim WendersNew York : Published for
James Laughlin by New Directions Pub. 2002.

like before her trip to Moscow, during her trip, and after her trip? What is her
motivation for wanting to go to Moscow? How much of the experience on the boat/train
does she remember?
3. Tawada Ykos works are often described as writerly (see below definition). What
elements in this work are writerly? Explain.
4. Make a list of the salient images/symbols of this work (e.g. foreign water, water,
white serpent, Fire Bird, paper snake, white birch tree, omul, seahorse, knife, umbilical
cord, volcano, etc.). Describe these images/symbols and their significance.
5. Discuss the narrators parents/upbringing. What picture can we construct from the
fragments that are given?
6. Identify and summarize the various myths/legends that are referred to in the work.
Discuss their context/significance/function/relevance to the story.
7. Anton Chekhovs play Three Sisters (1901; transl. Elisaveta Fen) serves as a kind of
urtext to this story. Discuss the relation between these two texts.
8. What does the work tell us about the boundaries/divisions between nations,
continents, cultures, languages, etc.?
Related Literary Terms
*Readerly and Writerly Texts: Translated from Barthes
neologisms lisible and scriptible, the terms readerly and writerly text mark the
distinction between traditional literary works such as the classical novel, and those
twentieth century works, like the new novel, which violate the conventions of
realism and thus force the reader to produce a meaning or meanings which are
inevitably other than final or authorized. Barthes writes:
The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which
would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves
writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed,
intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus,

Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the
infinity of languages. (S/Z 5)
Readerly texts, by contrast, are anything but readerly; they are manifestations of The
Book. They do not locate the reader as a site of the production of meaning, but only as
the receiver of a fixed, pre-determined, reading. They are thus products rather than
productions and thus form the dominant mode of literature under capital.
Behind these distinctions lies Barthes own aesthetic and political projects, the
championing of those texts which he sees as usefully challengingoften through the
method of self-reflexivitytraditional literary conventions such as the omniscient
narrator. For Barthes, the readerly text, like the commodity, disguises its status as a
fiction, as a literary product, and presents itself as a transparent window onto reality.
The writerly text, however, self-consciously acknowledges its artifice by calling
attention to the various rhetorical techniques which produce the illusion of realism. In
accord with his proclamation of The Death of the Author. Barthes insists, the goal of
literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a
producer of the text (S/Z 4). (Source: Virginia.edu)