This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani.
I’ve been struggling to read lately. The world has just been too distracting, too upsetting. It’s been difficult to find a story that holds my focus long enough for me to really sink into it, and as much as I believe in allowing yourself an escape, now doesn’t really feel like the right time to go full escapist mode.
Which is all to say: thank god for
Scattered All Over the Earth, the new book from National Book Award-winner Yoko Tawada, deftly translated by Margaret Mitsuni. This is a book that doesn’t look away from our increasingly fractured lives, but faces that reality with an empathetic, expansive eye. In the world of this novel, language, borders, and identity are slippery, fungible creatures.
Set in a dystopic near future, the story centers on Hiruko, a climate refugee living in Denmark after her homeland (Japan, referred to in the book as “the land of sushi”) vanished into the ocean. As a refugee, she’s been forced to hop between Scandinavian countries; rather than learn three different languages, she’s devised a homemade language, Panska. When she speaks, it’s like she’s “breathing in several grammars, melding them together inside her body, then exhaling them as sweet breath.” For Hiruko, language is more about interpretation than precision.
But this hasn’t prevented her from yearning to feel connected to her homeland. As she searches for someone else from “the land of sushi,” she pulls others into her orbit — an amateur linguist, a lovestruck museum curator, a sushi chef adept at lying. Together, they travel from Germany to Norway to the south of France, hoping to find others who might speak Hiruko’s “mother tongue.”
Throughout, Tawada writes about language gleefully, lovingly. She compares language to pesky, flitting mosquitoes; weeds that grow tall and thick and humid; binding threads and tethers and cords; an ocean’s choppy waves; Monet’s water lilies; a frog jumping between ponds; sweet chocolate; mathematical formulas; obscuring mist; a game of catch. This is a book all about tongues: the words that they form and the tastes that they savor.
The book is billed as dystopic, which it is — Japan has disappeared into the ocean, waters are rising, global warming is a very present threat — but the tone is wry and curious and fun, more interested in opening doors and finding connections than shutting others off, which feels a lot less dystopic than the world we’re living in today. Somehow, the book manages to be as funny, charming, and sweet as the characters that populate its pages.
The first in a planned trilogy,
Scattered All Over the Earth is a wonderful read that’s perfect for anyone who has questions about borders, the language we use, and how we can redefine what it means to belong somewhere or to someone.
Check out the rest of our Picks of the Month.