![]() ![]() The young specter uses antiquated words and seems unfamiliar with post–World War II products. In “Kollwitz Strasse,” our narrator is in an expensive grocery store filled with affluent young families when a “ghost-child” materializes and drags her to the candy aisle. ![]() ![]() Each takes its title from a street named for a dead artist. Each of the book’s three stories is set in Berlin, where the author, who was born in Tokyo, now lives. Her characters face predicaments and puzzles that present the reader with interesting new ways to think about language, inspiration, history, and chance. ![]() In Three Streets, women, men, and human-adjacent beings land in slow-simmering metaphysical adventures. Tawada, whose novel The Emissary won the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature, writes a singular, uncanny brand of fiction. “A moment ago, he’d been talking about lost love and pineapples,” the narrator notes, “and now he was going on about ‘terrible times’ and politics.” This might seem like a bizarre cameo appearance, but within the context of this slender, captivating book, it’s perfectly reasonable. Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, but in contemporary Berlin, on a street that bears his name, the Russian poet-or perhaps his ghost-is having his say on matters great and small. IN “MAJAKOWSKIRING,” the second story in Yoko Tawada’s Three Streets, an unnamed narrator encounters an undead writer. ![]()
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