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 2022 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
Sales rank:	38,144
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 dozens of books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in each language. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, and the Goethe Medal. New Directions publishes eight of her books, including The Emissary, which won the inaugural National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2018.

Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada (sharing her National Book Award) and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/10/2022

Vernacular noir, etymological postapocalypse, a romance in syntax—it’s hard to nail down which genre National Book Award winner Tawada’s brilliant and beguiling latest belongs to, except to say it’s deeply rooted in the power of language. At the center is Huriko, a refugee from a Japan that has vanished both from maps and cultural memory, who works as a children’s illustrator in Denmark, where she befriends the diffident Knut, a computer game programmer with a connoisseur’s interest in language and who is fascinated by Huriko’s homegrown dialect, which she calls “Panska.” Soon a group of amateur linguists forms, including Akash, a trans Indian woman, and Nanook, a Greenland Inuit sushi chef masquerading as an authority on Asian cooking. After they visit an umami festival in Trier, they continue to a culinary competition in Oslo, only to be derailed by a racist terror attack and an investigation into the killing of whales for their meat. Eventually, Huriko considers leaving the group for Arles, to meet the precocious son of a robot programmer in love with language and ships of all sizes, who may hold the secrets to Huriko’s past and country of origin. At every turn, at least two narratives coexist: the central story line and another hidden just under the surface, emerging through inflections of speech and the vagaries of translation, making the text as thrillingly complex as its characters. This pulls readers deep into the author’s polyphonic convergence of cultures. Once again, Tawada doesn’t cease to amaze. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

Bookforum - Julia Kornberg

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"“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 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

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

NPR - Juan Vidal

"Playful and deeply inventive."

The New Yorker - Julian Lucas

"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

12/09/2022

In this acute meditation on language and culture from the National Book Award—winning Tawada (The Emissary), Japan vanishes beneath climate-changed waves, trapping Japanese national Hiruko in Denmark. There, she teaches immigrant children through picture dramas while purveying a delightfully grammar-fractured language she's invented called Panska (pan-Scandinavian). Amateur linguist Knut reaches out after hearing her on a TV show, and they travel Europe together in search of speakers of her native language. Their first stop is Trier, Germany, for a Umami festival at the Karl Marx House; there, they meet the gender-nonconforming Akash from India, who escorts Asians throughout the continent. The lecture they had planned to attend by famed chef Tenzo is cancelled owing to political unrest in Norway, where he is trapped—as Huriko points out, Japanese people are now without a country and hence a passport, making travel difficult—and so they head off to Oslo and eventually meet up with a Greenland Inuit sushi chef. From an argument over whether pizza can be considered Indian to Hiruko's fear of being sent to the United States, which needs English-speaking immigrants, the narrative is a study of culture as constantly shape-shifting. VERDICT As the smart, ever-inventive Tawada reveals, borders and languages may change, but the need to connect endures.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal

★ 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

The first installment in a trilogy, this audiobook is about language first and foremost. It begins with the story of Hiruko—a climate refugee from the “land of sushi.” Japan no longer exists, but Hiruko is searching for someone who can speak her language. Along her journey, she collects new friends and fellow travelers. Cindy Kay narrates the backstories of Hiruko’s six new friends, each in the first person. None has a distinctive accent as each speaks, or is studying, at least two or more languages. Kay varies the inflections slightly and uses subtle differences in pace, but the narrative is a little hard to follow at times. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile

The first installment in a trilogy, this audiobook is about language first and foremost. It begins with the story of Hiruko—a climate refugee from the “land of sushi.” Japan no longer exists, but Hiruko is searching for someone who can speak her language. Along her journey, she collects new friends and fellow travelers. Cindy Kay narrates the backstories of Hiruko’s six new friends, each in the first person. None has a distinctive accent as each speaks, or is studying, at least two or more languages. Kay varies the inflections slightly and uses subtle differences in pace, but the narrative is a little hard to follow at times. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

OCTOBER 2022 - AudioFile