Scattered All Over the Earth

by

256 pages

English language

Published March 6, 2022

ISBN:
9780811229289

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4 stars (2 reviews)

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.

1 edition

reviewed Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada

The Land of Sushi

4 stars

Scattered All Over The Earth is set in a future where Japan (the land of sushi) has given way to the ocean and its rising tides. It manages to be both a story of climate refugees raising questions of national identity, as well as a poetic homage to languages. She has lived in Germany for decades and even writes in both Japanese and German, and I can’t help but imagine how her experience of coming to Germany in the 1980s has influenced this book.

reviewed Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada

Lovely - weird but maybe not in the right way?

4 stars

I enjoyed this but also... I struggled with the racist/transphobic/fatphobic character descriptions. The story is set decades in the future with some intriguingly huge global landmarks and norms shifted. And Tawada writes each character sympathetically, even lovingly, but I struggled with some of her descriptive choices. Those felt like deliberate provocation on the author's part.

So I'm left unsure. I did put another book of hers (The Emissary) on hold at the library, because I really enjoyed the writing (except for these glaring issues.) I'm curious whether its an authorial problem, or whether these were choices unique to this story.