Published: 10/10/2024
ISBN: 9781803510996
Granta Books
240 pages

Suggested in the Stars

Yoko Tawada

Hiruko, from the now vanished archipelago ‘somewhere between China and Polynesia’, and her companions have searched in vain for someone who speaks her native language. They finally track down a sushi chef from the same nation, but he has apparently lost the power of speech. If Hiruko is ever to hear her mother tongue again, a sceptical aphasia specialist is her last hope.

The novel is inventive at sentence level, absurd at plot level, yet strangely penetrating at psychological level... Margaret Mitsutani does an expert job... chaos and cleverness combine so well to bewitch the reader

Ronan Hession, Irish Times

A new kind of novel... (Margaret Mitsutani's translation, incorporating so many different languages, rhyme schemes and linguistic misunderstandings, is also a serious accomplishment.) Suggested in the Stars teases a decisive and exciting finale to come, a further journey for this wild group of fit-together misfits. But for now, this second installment is a weird and wonderful adventure on its own

New York Times

'Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives new senses in return'

Madeleine Thien

The Author

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books-stories, novels, poems, plays, essays-in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Kleist-Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, and her novel of Catherine Deneuve obsession, The Naked Eye.

More about the author →