INVISIBLE SENSORS
Three Streets by Yoko Tawada; translated by Margaret Mitsutani
New DirectionsAugust 2022Selected by Barbara Epler
Curated by the writer and translator Gini Alhadeff, Storybook ND is a new series of slim hardcover books that look to recreate that childhood pleasure of reading a book from start to finish in a single afternoon. As Alhadeff says, “There's nothing sweeter than to fall, for a few hours, between the covers of a perfect book.” The series, designed by Peter Mendelsund and with covers by renowned contemporary artists, consists of original works of fiction from six international authors. These books, with their riotous individual energies, take the reader from Buenos Aires to Berlin via a mysterious magician, a cyborg child and Hebridean tweed, each telling a story that’s entirely their own.
In three ghost stories, the always-astonishing Yoko Tawada takes a walk on the wild side of the street. In “Kollwitzstrasse”, a ghost boy begs our narrator to buy him the old-fashioned sweets he craves. Pure white kittens and a great Russian poet haunt “Majakowskiring”: she’s delighted to meet his ghost and the little cats. And then, in “Pushkin Allee,” a huge Soviet-era memorial of soldiers comes to life – and, “for a scene of carnage, everything was awfully well-ordered”. – Barbara Epler
A child, still too little for school, is walking in a strange way. As if it’s making its way across the surface of the moon. That soft down jacket full of feathers is a space suit; in place of a helmet, a white knitted cap is pulled all the way down over its ears. One foot goes up and the whole body seems about to slide off diagonally into the air. But when the heel hits the ground, the child’s whole weight comes down with a thud, threatening to throw it off balance. It stumbles, grabs the hem of its mother’s coat, and gawks around, wide eyed. The mother looks calmly down on her child. I stop to watch them, pretending to look for something in my pocket.
Invisible sensors extend from the child’s forehead. The sensors move constantly, darting this way and that, trying to absorb all the stimuli from the outside world. Like those bicycles parked
by the side of the road. They’re an important source of information. Some have handlebars shaped like sheep horns, others like a bull horns. Wondering if bicycles have zodiac signs, I look
again and see one that resembles a goat, another a lion, and still another, a scorpion.
The tiny lights on the child’s shoes start to blink. This is not a human child, but a robot. The moment this thought occurred to me I took a leap into the future. I’d just read a dystopian novel in which children were no longer being born and the human race was heading for extinction. People were starting to demand child robots. Although software enabling robots to converse with human beings had been perfected long ago, the development of “my-child-robots” able to use outside data organically, mixing it with their programs to form their own personalities, was stuck at a rudimentary level without much hope for improvement. Company A’s robot, for instance, was very popular at first because it responded so sweetly to whatever its parents said, but in time the adults got sick of all that sweetness and stopped talking to it, leaving the child robot to gather dust in its own room, where it eventually stopped moving. Company B, on the other hand, came up with an intellectually curious type that peppered its parents with questions, storing up more and more knowledge. It was programmed with just the right amount of cheekiness and persistence, too. Unfortunately, it only asked things like, “How many people live in this city?” and “What year was the French Revolution?” so the parents soon got bored and turned the switch off in irritation. There was something fascinating about the stuff real children had asked about long ago. Yet Company B failed to discover the source of questions like “Where is my dead uncle living now?” or “Why doesn’t our dog talk?” ◉