Where Europe Begins presents a collection of startling, innovative stories by Yoko Tawada. In these ten tales - two originally written in Japanese, eight in German - the reader moves through landscapes of fairy tales, family history, childhood memories, strange words and letters, dreams, and everyday reality.

In these stories' disparate settings - Japan, Siberia, Russia, and Germany - boundaries blur and shift between the physical and metaphysical, creating a fragmented world where a city or even the human body can become a sort of text. Suddenly, the reader becomes as much a foreigner as the author, or the figures that fill this book: the ghost of a burned woman, a traveler on the Trans-Siberian railroad, a mechanical doll, a tongue, a monk who leaps into his own reflection.

Contents:

• The Bath
• The Reflection
• Spores
• Canned Foreign
• The Talisman
• Raisin Eyes
• Storytellers without Souls
• Tongue Dance
• Where Europe Begins
• A Guest