A01=Yoko Tawada
Author_Yoko Tawada
before the coffee
best translated fiction
breasts and eggs
Category=FBA
Category=FMM
Category=FQ
convenience store woman
eq_bestseller
eq_fantasy
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
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hiromi kawakami
japanese bestsellers
memory police
mieko kawakami
murakami
sayaka murata
strange weather in Tokyo
travelling cat
Product details
- ISBN 9781803511726
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 12 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Granta Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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A young Vietnamese woman is invited to travel from Ho Chi Minh City to speak at an International Youth Conference in East Berlin. On her arrival, as she is preparing to present her paper in Russian on 'Vietnam as a Victim of American Imperialism', she is abruptly kidnapped and taken to a small town on the western side of the Berlin Wall. There she falls under a strange spell of domestic and sexual boredom with her abductor, until one night she manages to escape on a train to Moscow... but mistakenly arrives in Paris. Alone, penniless, and in a completely foreign land, Anh (her false name) wanders the fringes of society, meeting a sex worker, another Vietnamese immigrant, a theatre troupe and other shadowy characters. But at the centre of her new life is Catherine Deneuve, the iconic film star whose films she loses herself in and who becomes the object of her obsessions.
Crossing borders of language, nation, ethnicity, sexuality and art, The Naked Eye is a cinematic, incandescent novel that anticipates and embodies our twenty-first century nightmares and dreams.
YOKO TAWADA writes in both Japanese and German. She has received the Akutagawa Prize among other awards, and is the author of Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Scattered All Other the Earth and The Last Children of Tokyo, which won the National Book Award under the title The Emissary.
SUSAN BERNOFSKY is the prizewinning translator of works by Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, Franz Kafka and Hermann Hesse. She is the author, most recently, of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser.
