Yoko Tawada has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 3.5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is The Emissary.
The Emissary
Summary
Yoko Tawada's new novel is a breathtakingly light-hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her "brilliant, shimmering, magnificent strangeness" Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient - frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy who offers "the beauty of the time that is yet to come." A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko Tawada, deftly turning inside-out "the curse", defies gravity and creates a playful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a legerdemain uniquely her own.
©2018 Yoko Tawada; translation Margaret Mitsutani (P)2018 Random House Audio
Memoirs of a Polar Bear
Summary
Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as "Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness". Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany. They are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a best-selling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had emigrated) moves to the DDR and takes a job in the circus. Her son - the last of their line - is Knut, born in chapter three in a Leipzig zoo, but raised by a human keeper in relatively happy circumstances in the Berlin zoo, until his keeper, Matthias, is taken away. Happy or sad, each bear writes a story, enjoying both celebrity and "the intimacy of being alone with my pen."
©2014 Yoko Tawada; translation copyright 2016 by Susan Bernofsky (P)2017 Tantor