In writing her memoirs, she finds plenty of opportunities to comment on human society. Although her fluent navigation of human society seems quite ordinary, the bear is quite aware of her difference from the humans around her. After years of work as a circus bear, she retires from the performance arts to a bureaucratic administrative position that allows her time to work on her autobiography. She communicates easily with the humans around her, using both speech and writing. The first protagonist is an unnamed female bear who lives in Cold War-era Soviet Russia. This casual folding of the fantastic into a world otherwise realistically depicted most closely aligns the novel stylistically with magical realism. Following her general approach, Tawada describes these differences without explaining them. Nevertheless, there are major differences in the roles individual bears occupy in the human society they find themselves imbricated within in each generation. In the fictional world of Memoirs of a Polar Bear, these traits are simply taken for granted. Tawada never fully explains the bears' anthropomorphism – for example, their ability to communicate with others (both humans and other animals) and to walk on their hind legs. Yoko Tawada’s novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016) follows three generations of polar bears, two of whom narrate their sections.
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