Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani (Translator)

Overview

A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the 2018 National Book Award

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language.”

As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.

With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229289
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/01/2022
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the National Book Award. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Emissary, Scattered All over the Earth, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, Suggested in the Stars, and forthcoming in autumn 2025 is Archipelago of the Sun, the final novel in her Scattered trilogy.

 

Margaret Mitsutani has lived in Japan since the mid-1970s and was a finalist for the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth and winner of the National Book Award for her translation of Tawada’s The Emissary. She also translates Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe.

Editorial Reviews

"This dystopian novel is riveting, bizarre as can be, and like nothing else I've ever read. I'm terrified not enough people will read it. "

NPR - Kamil Ahsan

"Reading Tawada you feel her subtle authorial presence, simultaneously guiding the reader ashore and casting us out to sea; paradoxically, both lead to a single destination. Where do we—along with Hiruko, Knut, Akash, Tenzo, Nora and Susanoo—end up? It can only be described as somewhere soft and strange and new."

Financial Times - Matthew Janney

"Magnificently strange. Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman."

New York Times Magazine - Rivka Galchen

"Reading Yoko Tawada is a marvel…Scattered All Over the Earth is a reflection on language, migration and identity that manages to be entirely unpredictable."

ABC (Australia) - Declan Fry

"Tawada slyly interrogates shifting (disappearing) borders and populations, native (invented) identities, assumptions, and adaptations. Her most frequent translator, Mitsutani, brilliantly ciphers Tawada’s magnificently inventive wordplay."

Booklist

"Tawada builds from many points of view and moves fluidly between characters who express themselves in Danish, English, German, and Japanese, for a resulting work that must have been a puzzle to translate. Indeed, the resulting insights on language and cultural meaning leave me with the pleasant feeling that new neurons are connecting in my brain. She leaves some major ambiguities for her readers, but I feel content closing the book to ponder them."

The International Examiner - Emma Brown

"Playful and deeply inventive."

The New Yorker - Julian Lucas

"Wonderful—what is truly affecting is Tawada’s language, which jumps off the page and practically sings."

NPR - Juan Vidal

"Like Panska itself, the state of the world is veiled in strangeness. Tawada’s words are easy to understand—in this novel more than ever—and her dystopia is Day-Glo bright. "

The New York Review of Books - Natasha Wimmer

"What is true of Hiruko, Tawada suggests, is true of everyone from the harmless Nanook to an ultranationalist called Breivik: Our national identities are at bottom simulacra, copies of originals that no longer exist, if they ever did."

The New York Times - Ryan Ruby

"For a book about the end of the world as we know it, Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth is awfully cheery… [I]t’s possible to not understand someone even when you speak the same language, and to use different words but still recognize each other well."

Wired - Eve Sneider

"As she encounters people from all over the globe, Tawada’s carefully built story probes the concept of homeland and the meaning of language."

Time Magazine - Mahita Gajanan

"Threats abound—a changing climate, terrorism, and hostile political structures create danger and uncertainty—but these characters carry within themselves the seeds of a possible new world. Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth is a cheerful dystopian novel that celebrates inventiveness, possibilities, and human connections."

Foreword Reviews

"Tawada’s satirical tone and flirtation with sci-fi are intensely original."

Bookforum - Julia Kornberg

"Tawada is immune to the seduction of ideal worlds. Even when speculative, her fiction still manages to operate in the world that we actually inhabit: one characterized by slippages, ambiguity, and a history of territorial entanglements that began long before twentieth-century globalism—entanglements that, in fact, go back so far that they might be one of the few things coterminous with being human."

The Baffler - Reed McConnell

"The world is close to our own, suggesting that soon our boundaries will radically change. Tawada reminds us that we, too, might become refugees from lands that no longer exist—obliterated by nuclear mishaps, rising water levels, or arbitrary lines drawn in history textbooks."

Cleveland Review - Emma Heath

"“Monet’s colors change with each brushstroke, yet his landscapes appear as a whole,” Knut reflects, and Ms. Tawada’s characters are similarly impressionistic: mobile, protean and evanescent, whirled together in a manner that can seem insubstantial but combines to form a vision of beauty and calm."

The Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

"Tawada’s strange, exquisite book toys with ideas of language, identity, and what it means to own someone else’s story or one’s own."

The New Yorker

"Tawada's stories agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure boxes whose keys are locked within."

The New York Times

★ 2021-12-24
It could be the end of the world as we know it, but Tawada’s vision of the future is intriguing.

Hiruko, a refugee from a Japan that no longer exists—Tawada hints at sinister environmental reasons—spends her days in Denmark teaching young immigrant children to speak Panska (from Pan-Scandinavian), a seemingly simplistic language she's invented. When she appears on television, Hiruko draws the attention of linguist Knut, and the two embark on an increasingly madcap quest through northern Europe in search of another speaker of Hiruko’s native language. A varied cast of characters—each in search of something—joins the quest along the way, and, as the band of seekers grows, Tawada expands upon the themes of language, immigration, globalization, and authenticity which underpin this slyly humorous first installment of a planned trilogy. As the pilgrims travel around in the shadows of the Roman Empire and its legacy of domination and assimilation, questions of contemporary mutations of culture arise: If pizza is served at an Indian restaurant in Germany, is it Indian food? Similar observations about the effects of global warming on Greenland—where the fish have disappeared but vegetables can now be grown—highlight the evolution of culture and existence. As dire as the quasi-dystopian future could be, with reminders of menacing climate change and Japan’s nuclear history, Tawada’s intrepid travelers seek community and consensus, and, when confronted with the loss of something “original,” they seek out the best copy. Tawada, who won the National Book Award for Translated Literature for The Emissary (2018), also translated by Mitsutani, lives in Berlin and writes in both German and Japanese.

Who decides what’s authentic? Tawada will tell you that’s in flux and always has been.

Kirkus Reviews