This encompasses the magic realism genre of the story – unfamiliarity that has been made familiar in some way. The polar bears in the story understand human language, but do not belong to the human world. Then again, it seems to be implied that the latter acts are imaginary ‘futures’ written the grandmother of the first act, leading to a paradoxical narrative which blurs the boundary between reality and fiction, the past and the present, just as the line between human and animal is blurred by Tawada. The final act is about the grandson, Knut, who struggles to find his place in the world. The following act follows the story of her daughter Tosca from the perspective of her human trainer and their quest towards their shared goals, although it seems that Tosca may actually be narrating the story of Barbara telling the story of Tosca. The opening act tells of the grandmother who after spending years performing in the circus, retires to an administrative position, where she tackles the bureaucracy of conferences and finally attempts to pursue her dream of writing an autobiography by recovering memories from her youth. Photo by Pixabay on Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada tells the story of three generations of anthropomorphic polar bears – this intergenerational element is an aspect common in Tawada’s work.
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