Three Streets

Yoko Tawada—winner of the National Book Award—presents three terrific new ghost stories, each named after a street in Berlin

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 Berlin's new bourgeois health food stores, so popular with wealthy young people, a ghost boy begs her to buy him the old-fashioned sweets he craves. She worries that sugar's still sugar—but why lecture him, since he's a...