"In Tawada’s dreamlike travelogue 'Where Europe Begins'... a young Japanese woman travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway tries to identify where, exactly, one continent shades into another..."

"... but none of the passengers can agree. Gradually, she descends into a trance brought on by reading Tungus and Samoyed fairy tales, which cut across the journey like a polar wind. The woman learns from an atlas that Japan is, tectonically, a 'child of Siberia that had turned on its mother and was now swimming alone in the Pacific . . . a seahorse, which in Japanese is called Tatsu-no-otoshigo—the lost child of the dragon.' She begins to dread the finality of arrival."

From "The Novelist Yoko Tawada Conjures a World Between Languages/Writing in Japanese and German, Tawada explores borderlands in which people and words have lost their moorings" (The New Yorker).