Scattered All Over the Earth

The first in a projected trilogy, <i>Scattered All Over the Earth</i> builds on themes that will be familiar to regular readers of Yōko Tawada’s fiction. Tawada’s famous for working in both Japanese and German, Germany having been her home for many years, but has settled on Japanese for this latest translated work. It’s short but dense and richly inventive with an unusual folkloric aspect: sometimes a little perplexing but always engrossing and thought-provoking. The novel unfolds from a variety of viewpoints but at its centre’s Hiruko who, like her namesake, is adrift in the world, ending up working as a storyteller in a Danish community centre. Hers is a world that’s both instantly recognisable, a 2011 in which Anders Breivik’s infamous terrorist attacks are just about to take place, but also strangely disorientating. In this version of reality, Hiruko’s homeland Japan no longer exists, even its name has vanished from memory, it’s now known only as the land of sushi. <br /><br />Hiruko’s story revolves around her quest for someone who shares her mother tongue. As her search takes her across Northern Europe, she quickly accumulates an unlikely entourage: Danish Knut who’s a linguistics scholar of sorts; Nora a curator from Trier’s Marx Museum and her erstwhile lover Nanook who hails from Greenland but has reinvented himself as “Japanese” Tenzo; and Akash an Indian, trans woman who joins them on their travels. Chapters move between their voices - the emphasis on voices is deliberate and significant, Tawada privileges the oral with its immediacy and flexibility over the limits and constraints of the written word. <br /><br />The characters’ narratives intertwine, intersecting with Knut’s mother whose existence’s structured around her need to rescue and sponsor young people from Denmark’s former colonies. Through this disparate group, Tawada teases out a multiplicity of interconnected themes, often returning to her long-standing preoccupations with environmentalism and the damaging implications of nationalistic policies; alongside her fascination with communication, language and identity, and the possibilities for new forms of selfhood opened up by nomadic individuals. All of which echo aspects of her earlier work especially <i>Memoirs of a Polar Bear</i> and <i>Where Europe Begins. </i><br /><br />Tawada’s characters’ experiences highlight the transformational potential of transnational identities, forming a strong plea for casting off the constrictions of nationalist longings. Hiruko’s created her own language Panska incorporating words and phrases from numerous Scandinavian countries, giving her an enviable freedom both in her encounters and her ability to represent the world around her. Her polyglot style allows her to move beyond the limits of her cultural underpinnings. Instead, she’s able to mix and match aspects of her past and present, using folklore and fairy tales from her childhood that she reinvents for new audiences of migrant children. <br /><br />The nature of Tawada’s interests may make this sound potentially dry and overly academic, and there are moments when that seems likely but the book’s rescued by her creative approach and vivid style; while her prose’s laden with memorable phrases and evocative descriptions, bringing in musings on a wonderfully-eccentric range of topics from the Moomins, to lost civilisations to Ovid’s <i>Metamorphosis.</i> Tawada uses Hiruko’s group to explore and question established or conventional notions of race or gender binaries that often go hand in hand with a stifling fixation on national origins and a stubborn refusal to let go of divisive myths of linguistic and cultural purity. It’s a timely, fertile story and I’m looking forward to finding out where future instalments will take me. Translated here by Margaret Mitsutani. <br /><br />Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Granta Publications for an ARC.

I like the author, Yoko Tawada's writing style and the way she presented the story in this book.<br /><br />Each chapter has a different person telling their story from their point of view and all the stories are finally related together.<br /><br />There are few people characters and languages and even different races including nationalities. Learn some new cultures and places.<br /><br />A group of people met up coincidently and each one has different motives.<br /><br />The more you read the more you like to discover. I think this book is underrated.

This book grapples with interesting ideas in, to me, a not particularly interesting way.<br /><br />I was intrigued by the general idea, a future world in which Japan has disappeared and a Japanese woman is looking for a compatriot to speak her own language to. I’ve said before that recently I’ve read a number of “gentle dystopias” that haven’t exactly set my heart on fire, but what I liked here was that it wasn’t really a dystopia at all (unless, I suppose, you are Japanese), merely an intriguingly mundane future world. <br /><br />And I felt the pursuit of a fellow native speaker had promise. I’ve lived abroad for years, and there have been times when all my English speaking friends seem to have moved away and yes, it erodes identity in a curious way, even as speaking another language adds something to who you are, it takes something away.<br /><br />Unfortunately, I wasn’t charmed by Hiruko’s conclusions when she finally catches up with another Japanese man (and earlier, one who isn’t). <input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="06036445-3f66-4df9-b21e-868a89d6a6f2" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="06036445-3f66-4df9-b21e-868a89d6a6f2"> An extremely pat comment about how speaking your own language isn’t nearly so important as communicating with the soul of another individual, and look, I’m married to someone who isn’t a native speaker of my language, so, duh, but in that case why don’t we all just speak English (or whatever), kill all the smaller languages, erase cultural specificity and … what a boring world. Unless there was a deeper irony that went over my head </label><br /><br />I also found the novel frustrating on many other levels. It is narrated in turns by a group of largely-European young people. Never have I met a more tedious crowd. From Knut, a linguist, whose claim to fame seems to be that he smokes weed, to Akash, a transgender Indian with no personality whatsoever apart from having the hots for Knut, to Nora, a German woman with no personality whatever on any issue.<br /><br />I think a lot of the problem is less the book than me, which is why I’m giving three stars. Tawada has a light, quirky, eccentric kind of style that I’ve discovered before doesn’t work for me. My husband described her previous book as “silly,” so perhaps it’s just us. <br /><br />I can see how for somebody else this could be invigorating both in concept and execution but for me it fell flat.<br />Thank you to Netgalley and Granta (whose books I generally love) for an ARC.

One of the most fascinating premises I have encountered in years is tragically wasted on a chaotic mess of a book. I stuck it out through the end, but aside from a few clever musings about language, identify and the travesty of “fusion” cuisine, there’s not a lot to love here. I was also deeply put off by the treatment of the novel’s one trans character. The novel makes a point of describing Akash as transitioning but declining to have surgery - then proceeds to describe her as a “man in woman’s clothes” for the duration of the book. The author even goes so far as to note that Akash appears unbothered by deeply transphobic comments such as “what are you?” There is no thoughtful critique or plot-based reason for this callous and offensive treatment of Akash’a character, and I implore the author to return to the drawing board and educate herself if this is indeed going to be a trilogy.

I have found a new favorite author in Yoko Tawada. I absolutely loved all aspects of my reading experience of Scattered All Over the Earth. It is a brilliant exploration of language, communication, and connectedness. <br /><br />The author does not explicitly state, but hints at Japan having disappeared (by political and/or climate changes). This leads to exploring the impact of its disappearance on languages and immigrants learning new languages. I found this to be fascinating and intriguing. <br /><br />A great quote that captures this is. “A long time ago, most immigrants headed for one specific country and stayed there until they died, so they only had to learn the language spoken there. Now, when people are always on the move, our language becomes a mixture of all the scenes we’ve passed through on the way.”<br /><br />What a diverse and interesting ensemble of characters. Each chapter is told through a different character’s perspective. The characters met unexpectedly and join together to go on a quest to find a “native speaker” of Japanese. I learned a lot and laughed out loud. Each character is flawed, yet so very likable. The meddling mother was too much!<br /><br />There is so much to this story! Love, coming of age, identity, the lingering effects of colonization, adapting, redefining, leaving home, work/finding work, what is home, generational differences and expectations, misconceptions, misunderstandings, and above all, communication. The choice of which language a character spoke was purposely, knowing the choice or the language’s origin has implications to meaning and interpretation. <br /><br />Scattered All Over the Earth is an ode to spoken language and communication. It is beautifully written, the use of language is exquisite, descriptive, playful, and multilayered. If you love to travel by book or are a lover of language, I highly recommend this book.

Albeit a few clever observations of language and identity, there was neither a definite theme nor a striking plotline in <i>Scattered All Over the Earth</i>. Yoko Tawada’s narrative spreads and builds around the idea of a world in which Japan no longer exists because of the rising sea levels, with only a few survivors scattered all over the earth. And only the remaining few remember their native language, be it fragmental or fluent. From the incipient, Tawada expects us to believe the absurd - The language of a highly culturally influential nation is, unfathomably, rendered near extinct. In a global and multicultural society, where the exchange of languages and cultures is prominent, when people are excavating and deciphering arcane scripts, do polyglots and capable linguists no longer exist? While the writing alludes that no outsiders retain memory of the language, there is no believable backstory or coherent world-building proving the same. Also, if a language is erased from collective memory, it raises the questions of who, how, and why? <br /><br />While Tawada inserts interesting dialogue on language and linguistics, the off-kilter jumps from one character to another, and the injection of surface-level commentary on environmentalism, nationalism, immigration, attitudes to refugees, and exoticism of foreigners turned the narrative pedantic and hoary. <br /><br />Adding to the above, Yoko Tawada continuously mis-genders a trans woman (who identifies as female and did not opt surgical procedures) throughout the narrative and we see other characters address Akash as <b> ‘he/him’ or ‘a man dressed in woman’s clothes.’ </b> Also, she depicts the only transgender character as a jealous and borderline-obsessive lover. And in no instance, we get to see the author addressing the above issues, or include discussions on gender and challenge the negative stereotypes attached to the transgender community. <br /><br />While this is the first in the trilogy, and despite the hovering thought of what-if-it-gets-better, I doubt I’ll pick up any of the future installments.

Be ready because this is going to be a long one:<br /><br />Yes the book is pretty, yes the writing is moving at times, yes it’s exploration of language is unique, and yes the premise is interesting, but the overwhelming <b> transphobia </b> in this book completely ruins it for me.<br /><br />The purpose of the story is to explore how individuals build their own identities and they present themselves to the world. Society will try to define you but you have the power to shape your own reality.<br /><br />One of the characters that <i> I guess </i> is meant to represent these themes is a transgender woman named Akash. In her pov chapter she explains how she presents herself as a woman, lives as a woman, and wants the world to see her as a woman. <br /><br />And YET the book INSISTS on misgendering her on EVERY SINGLE OCCASION. The MAIN CHARACTERS, her FRIENDS!!! Think of her as a “man in women’s clothes”. There is a moment in the book in which someone says to her “what are you?” And all Akash does is shrug, with no one really pushing against it. <br /><br />The author may be trying to make a point about the importance of an individuals sense of identity, but she <i> completely </i> fails with Akash. It does not matter that Akash is a woman and presents herself as such, the world around her does not recognize it.<br /><br />To make matters worse, there are ZERO moments where the supposed friends are confronted about their misgendering of Akash, nor is there any indication that the act of misgendering is inherently wrong. Akash literally has no moment of agency through which she can present herself. (I also do not love that she is made to be desperately in love and chasing after a man who doesn’t even see her as a woman)<br /><br />Beyond Akash, the book at time loses its sense of purpose, the racial dynamics are strange, and there is an undercurrent of misogyny that I did not love.<br /><br />Yeah, great premise, too bad it was transphobic AF.<br /><br />TW: transphobia, misgendering, racism, slurs.

• SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTH by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani, 2019/2022 @ndpublishing<br /><br />Tawada's tale is a near future speculative; Japan is underwater due to climate change. Remaining inhabitants are "scattered all over the earth". This background is set for a smaller story of people living and communicating in a future Europe - specifically Denmark and Germany. <br />One of the only remaining Japanese people seeks other refugees to speak to in her native language, while simultaneously creating a collective European language she calls panska. <br /><br />A strange story that includes a lot of linguistic speculation and an eclectic cast characters: an Inuit sushi chef, a Danish linguist, a trans Marathi-speaking tour guide, many others... <br /><br />There wasn't a lot of direction or plot here, but the perspective shifts and speculation on disappearing countries and people kept me reading. <br /><br />Probably a solid 3⭐ - maybe a little more since I'm still thinking about it a few days later.

<b>Finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature</b><br /><br /><i>When the original no longer exists, there’s nothing you can do except look for the best copy</i><br /><br />Yōko Tawada is a fascinating writer. Born in Japan but resident for many years in Germany, she writes her novels in either German or Japanese, switching between languages for different books, particularly if she feels she is getting too comfortable writing in one. As she explained in <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/25659630" rel="nofollow noopener">2008 interview</a>, this loss of familiarity is key for her:<br /><br /><blockquote>It is useful, I believe, to fundamentally lose one sense of direction at least once. To break with the familiarity and routine of the culture and the institution of the society in which you grew up. Thus one is at least partially reborn somewhere else and this gives you a double advantage: you can observe the patterns of new institutions in a foreign world with the critical consciousness of an adult and selectively appropriate them like an actor does.</blockquote><br /><br />And Scattered All Over the Earth, in a 2022 translation from Margaret Mitsutani from the 2018 Japanese original, is focused on identity and language, and indeed the loss of a native language.<br /><br />The novel opens with a young Danish linguist (although a rather half-hearted one and more of a pothead), Knut, watching TV when he stumbles across a program about people from countries that have disappeared - the GDR, USSR, Yugoslavia. He finds his attention caught by one panelist, a young woman, who reminds him of an anime heroine. Called Hiruko, she is from <i>an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia</i> (which the reader soon realises is Japan, although Knut seems unaware of the country, and it is never named). As he listen he realises that while he understands her she isn't actually speaking Danish, nor Swedish nor Norwegian, and she transpires to have invented her own language, Panska, a mishmash of the three languages, resulting from her time as a refugee flitting between each:<br /><br /><i>recent immigrants wander place to place. no country oblighed to let them in has. not clear if they can stay. only three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain, so made new language. homemade language most scandinavian people understand</i><br /><br />Hiruko also speaks English - although only quietly as she is convinced she will be sent to the US if anyone knows she speaks the language and fears that because of their terrible health system - as well as increasingly forgetting her own native tongue. <br /><br />The infatuated Knut describes her Panska, rather rhapsodically, as <i>breathing in several grammars, melding them together inside her body, then exhaling them as sweet breath</i>. <br /><br />For the translation this must have presented challenges, but also for the original author (and it would be fascinating to see the book, and hence Panska, translated into a Scandinavian language) and Mitsutani's rendition of Panska, which draws only on English vocabulary, can come across as a little Yodaese. <br /><br /><i>this bird legs does not have. artist did not draw. I, too, legs left out when crane I drew. colleague said, 'duck.' legs I added. 'crane,' colleague said. but making colleague see crane is not art.</i><br /><br />Mitsutani describes her approach in this interview from <a href="https://wordswithoutborders.org/read/article/2022-10/the-national-book-award-interviews-yoko-tawada-margaret-mitsutani/" rel="nofollow noopener">Words Without Borders</a>.<br /><br /><blockquote>It’s safe to assume that Hiruko’s native language is Japanese. I therefore tried to incorporate certain characteristics of the Japanese language, such as bringing the verb to the end of the sentence. One review said that, “Panska reads like a Japonic parody of Nordic syntax translated into a West Germanic language.” While I can’t exactly say that that was what I was aiming for, it seems like a good mixture. Also, Hiruko says that she doesn’t speak English very well, and I puzzled over how to show that. I didn’t want to have her speaking “broken English,” but in the end I decided to leave out an article here and there, especially when she’s excited. There’s no equivalent of the English article in Japanese, so that’s something Japanese speakers have trouble with.</blockquote><br /><br />Hiruko is on a quest to find native speakers of her language, which has all but been erased with her country, with her culture seemingly absorbed internationally (Knut is convinced Sushi is Finnish and very dubious of her claims that it is from Hiruko's native land). In the above-linked WWB article Yōko Tawada explained how this erasure of a language and separate cultural identity has echoes in Japan's own colonial history and their attempt to cultural assimilate the Korean people in 1910-1945.<br /><br />The time setting of the novel isn't so much the future as some sort of alternative reality. There is for example an odd incident when the characters visit Oslo, where there is unusually heightened security due to a terrorist incident which is clearly the 2011 attacks by Anders Breivik, but then the character called Breivik is someone else: also a Norwegian ultranationalist but expressing this not via terrorism but rather arranging a sushi competition using whale meat (that this makes sense in the context of the novel rather speaks to its at times forced quirkiness). <br /><br />And the cause of the deminse of Hiruko's land is never entirely clear, with various references to:<br /><br />- the country levelling the mountains, then sinking under the waves as the sea rise with climate change;<br />- overpopulation at one stage;<br />- followed by population decline due to lack of sex drive;<br />- people unable to distignuish between the real and virtual worlds'<br />- death through overwork;<br />- robots taking over from people;<br />- a factory explosion (possibly nuclear) rendering large parts of the country uninhabitable; and<br />- houses built of paper and wood which burned easily.<br /><br />The story itself turns into a Wizard of Oz style quest as Knut and Hiruko travel across Europe (from Copenhagen to Trier in Germany, to Oslo and then Arles in France) seeking Susanoo, reputed to be one of the few remaining speakers of her language, in the company of a group of fellow travellers each searching for something in terms of their identity:<br /><br />- Akash, from Pune, who is transitioning gender from male to female;<br />- Nora from Trier, who claims to have no interest in people's origins yet, immediately she meets someone, imagines origin stories for them;<br />- 'Tenzo', Nora's boyfriend, who tells her he is a sushi chef from Hiruko's country but is actually an Eskimo(*) from Greenland. That he learned his sushi skills from a chef from Fujian Province on China who himself learned them from a French chef in Paris is the context for the quote that opens my review;<br />- Knut's mother, convinced she is the surrogate mother of all Eskimos in Denmarl.<br /><br />(* I used the term advisedly as both Tenzo and Knut's mother each claim it is no more, perhaps less, offensive than Inuit - which seems a rather odd call by the author)<br /><br />The visits to both Arles and Trier are not coincidental to the novel's message since each contains remants of a former empire, the Roman.<br /><br />It makes for a fascinating if slightly exasperating read - and one that doesn't really reach any conclusions, since this transpires to be the first of a planned trilogy. <br /><br />3.5 stars - rounded down as an obvious test is whether I will snatch up the next part when it appears in translation, and I'm not sure I woud.

Set in a near future, climate change has caused several of our present-day countries to disappear. Protagonist Hiruko is a former resident of a country that no longer exists – it has been absorbed into the sea. As the story opens, she is living in Denmark. She is on a quest to find anyone who still knows her native tongue. During her search, she gradually assembles a small group of people who travel together. She meets a Danish linguistics student, a non-binary Indian immigrant, a German woman, and a sushi-chef from Greenland. Each has a special connection with linguistics. <br /><br />Hiruko has created her own language, called Panska, which enables her to communicate with northern Europeans. The characters form an interesting, quirky bunch. It is a book about language, communications, and linguistics. It explores the concepts of homelands and migrations, and how these may change in the future. Even though it is dystopian, it has a certain charm, portraying how people try to do the best they can in less-than-ideal circumstances. The ending is open and full of irony. I read the English translation by Margaret Mitsutani. I look forward to reading more of Tawada’s catalogue.<br />