Yoko Tawada

*From the author of The Last Children of Tokyo* A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference and what it means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist. Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a 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. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'. Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels searching for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue: Knut, a graduate student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier. All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull fight. Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada.

Scattered All Over the Earth

Amanda

This story has a very unique cast of characters and premise. It reads almost as a series of short stories and characters studies that have been expertly woven together into an unusual story. I very much enjoyed it.

Scattered All Over The Earth tells the tale of a Japanese woman living in Europe after a natural disaster has completely destroyed the islands of Japan. The book is set in the not too distant future. Far enough out to be different, not so far as to be unrecognizable. The most unusual thing for me in reading this book, is that Japan has only been gone for a few years, but nobody remembers its name or even that it existed at all. Many Danish people believe that they invented sushi. There are no Japanese communities around Europe. There is apparently no Google Translate or Duolingo for the Japanese language anymore. We learn at one point that all of the Japanese culture and language websites have begun to disappear from the internet. The idea that a country could completely disappear and less than a decade later it would be totally forgotten is intriguing. It seems impossible, but I see how short our collective memories are over things that happened only a year or two ago, and suddenly it doesn't seem so far-fetched.

The story brings characters together from all over Europe. We learn that these seeming strangers sometimes have unseen connections to one another. The story toys with the ideas behind language and belonging. It's a unique and interesting story about people and language and communication. The ending to this particular story might seem strange or somehow unfinished, but to me it made perfect sense for the type of book that I was reading. Life experiences don't always have a grand conclusion. Sometimes if you're lucky, you make friends, and have an epiphany, and then go on with the rest of your life. I look forward to reading the other books in this series some day, but if the thought of a trilogy worries you, rest assured that this book stands comfortably on its own.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for providing this audio ARC.

Scattered All Over the Earth

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