The three stories collected in Facing the Bridge by Yoko Tawada took me by surprise: they were completely different from anything I’ve read before and much of what Tawada does — shifting narrative views, careening back and forth across centuries of time, allowing her character’s thoughts to switch on and off and from topic to topic, emotion to emotion (much as real thoughts do) — worked to create a really interesting atmospheric mix of hyper-reality and utter fantasy.  At times the stories felt grindingly real in the frustrations, fears, and even boredom facing the characters, and at other times the whole concept of reality just took off, leaving behind startled but game characters, ready to take on the new order and run.

But in the end, the devices that Tawada uses, while jarring and interesting, fail in what I think is the ultimate goal of story-telling, which is to engage and connect the reader to the writers’ characters and story.  The strangeness of Tawada’s writing distanced me from the content of her writing: I did not care about the characters or their struggles. I was a spectator to a show involving innovative writing, and never a participant in the story itself, never part of the process of struggle, change, and recognition that underlies a good story.

Distancing, disengagement, and removal are all themes of Tawada’s so perhaps she purposefully negates any connection of affection or understanding between her readers and her characters.  All the characters are travelers to somewhere else, either by choice (disengagement) or by compulsion (removal), and each one has trouble grounding themselves and feeling at home, in their new space, new country, new town. Maybe Tawada wanted to make me the unwelcoming native misunderstanding her characters, the new folks in town, as the natives in the stories do.  But the characters themselves are unwelcoming to me; for all the freedom Tawada gives them in their thoughts, she allows them very little emotional connection to anyone else in the stories, and even less so to the reader.  They are cold, self-centered, unaware.  When they do reach out for another human, it is always a misunderstanding or mistake (or self-serving) and never a satisfying, equal meeting of friends or lovers.

Tawada makes some startling and genuine observations in her stories and it is for those sparks of ingenuity that I enjoyed reading the collection, especially the first story, “The Shadow Man”.  The Shadow Man takes a true story, the  story of Amo of Ghana who was taken by Dutch slave traders from Africa in the early eighteenth century and brought to Amsterdam where he became a prodigy and a spectacle of learning, a scholar and then professor of philosophy, and mixes in characters who, like Amo, are visitors in a strange country.  When the fates of all the characters in the story collide, the result is not a United Nations of understanding but instead a maelstrom of cultures and expectations, and the various participants are flung apart, back to their respective places in the world.

In Tawada’s world, connections are temporary, and they are collisions, even cataclysms, never bringing anyone together, instead rending them further apart.  And as much as her characters collide with each other, her writing collides with the reader, leaving the reader alone and disengaged.  Tawada seems to be arguing that every single being is an island, no matter how many journeys are undertaken. Herstories are interesting but not convincing. I have never believed in the island theory of humanity, and I still don’t. I think we have survived because we thrive on connections made with each other, even over cultural and political and social divides, and the more journeys we take, whether actual or through reading books, the better.