Three streets, hardcover/yoko tawada

The always astonishing Yoko Tawada here takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street.

In Kollwitzstrasse, as the narrator muses on former East Berlins new bourgeois health food stores, so popular with the wealthy young people, a ghost boy begs her to buy him the old-fashioned sweets he craves.

She worries that sugars still sugar--but why lecture him, since hes already dead? Then white feathers fall from her head and she seems to be turning into a crane .

Pure white kittens and a great Russian poet haunt Majakowskiring the narrator who reveres Mayakovskys work is delighted to meet his ghost.

And finally, in Pushkin Allee, a huge Soviet-era memorial of soldiers comes to life--and, for a scene of carnage everything was awfully well-ordered.

Each of these stories glows, and opens up into new dimensions the work of this magisterial writer.