- Published: 10/11/2016
- ISBN: 9781846276330
- Granta Books
- 256 pages
Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Yoko Tawada
Translated by Susan Bernofsky
Three bears.
The first, a diligent memoirist whose unlikely success forces her to flee Soviet Russia.
The second, her daughter, a skilled dancer in an East Berlin circus.
The third, Knut, a baby bear born and raised in Berlin Zoo at the beginning of the 21st century.
Here, then, is the enchanting story of three extraordinary bears, brought to life by one of Japan’s most inventive and dazzling novelists.
£12.99
In chronicling the lives of three generations of uniquely talented polar bears, the fantastically gifted Yoko Tawada has created an unforgettable meditation on celebrity, art, incarceration, and the nature of consciousness. Tawada is, far and away, one of my favourite writers, working today - thrilling, discomfiting, uncannily beautiful, like no one you have ever read before. Memoirs of a Polar Bear is Tawada at her best: humanity, as seen through the eyes of these bears, has never looks quite so stirringly strange.
Laura van den Berg, author, Find Me
Enchanting... an absorbing work from a fascinating mind
Kirkus
Disconcerting and exhilaratingly strange. With a deft wave of her literary wand, Tawada dissolves the frontier between humans and animals, disorientating us so that we can be more properly oriented towards ourselves
Charles Foster
From the Same Author
The Last Children of Tokyo
, translated by Margaret Mitsutani
Yoshiro thinks he might never die. A hundred years old and counting, he is one of Japan’s many ‘old-elderly’; men and women who remember a time before the air and the sea were poisoned, before terrible catastrophe promted Japan to shut itself off from the rest of the world. He may live for decades yet, but he knows his beloved great-grandson – born frail and prone to sickness – might not survive to adulthood. Day after day, it takes all of Yoshiro’s sagacity to keep Mumei alive.
As hopes for Japan’s youngest generation fade, a secretive organisation embarks on an audacious plan to find a cure – might Yoshiro’s great-grandson be the key to saving the last children of Tokyo?
£9.99
Yoko Tawada on Granta.com
Fiction
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Granta 142
The Last Children of Tokyo
Yoko Tawada
‘Encountering a real animal – not just its name – would have set Mumei’s heart on fire.’ Translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani.
