Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko Tawada

Instead, she has concocted her own “homemade language”, which she has named “Panska” from “pan-” for “all” and “-ska” for “Skandinavia.” Panska allows her to communicate with people from all over Northern Europe, where many of the languages are more-or-less mutually comprehensible. Sushi is one of the novel’s most important motifs. Hiruko looks like she’s from an anime, and other characters discuss cosplay. Instead, the novel is a running commentary on the ubiquity of “Cool Japan’s” soft power, even divorced from Japan itself. For the reader, Hiruko’s nationality is obvious, but Tawada never refers to Hiruko or her first language as “Japanese”.

Hiruko is from “an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia”-a country that has now disappeared.Įven the word “Japan” is absent from the novel.

Then the show turns to a young woman whose face looks like a character from an anime. One afternoon, he watches a televised panel discussion between people whose countries no longer exist: East Germans, Yugoslavs, and Soviets. The novel opens with Knut, a disillusioned Danish linguistics student. Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani (trans) (New Directions, March 2020 Granta, June 2022) The apocalypse looms even in Europe, where environmental poisons stimulate salmon the size of whales leaping out of the water. But there is no easy explanation for Japan’s disappearance. Rumors hold that the Japanese could not “distinguish between the virtual and real worlds” and “laborers who worked eighty-hour shifts without sleeping”. Sexual hormones had become “practically extinct”. Urban sprawl led to the leveling of Japan’s mountains. Like her 2014 novella, The Last Children of Tokyo (published in the US as The Emissary) or Yoko Ogawa’s 1994 The Memory Police, the cause of disaster here is ambiguous or even irrelevant. In Yoko Tawada’s novel, Scattered All Over the Earth, the rest of Japan has disappeared as well. Like many of Japan’s rural villages and even smaller cities, Nagoro has all but disappeared. More than 300 doll likenesses stand-in for the people who have died or moved away from Nagoro. On the southwestern Japanese island of Shikoku, there is a village populated almost entirely by dolls.

Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko Tawada