scattered all over the earth by yoko tawada

Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they're all next off to Stockholm.

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. homemade language.' As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Loss - of a culture, a loved one or a cherished place - permeates this haunting collection of 10 stories about memory and grief.Summary: '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. ‘The Last Children of Tokyo’ is taken from her new novel with the same title, forthcoming from Portobello Books in the UK. If you like this, read: Things Remembered And Things Forgotten by Kyoko Nakajima, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and Ian MacDonald (Sort of Books, 2021, $19.80, buy here). Yoko Tawada She writes in Japanese and German and has won the 1993 Akutagawa Prize, the 2016 Kleist Prize and the 2017 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.

Readers who crave explosive drama will probably not enjoy the quiet narrative, which is heavily centred on conversations and the power of listening.īut the novel - the first in a planned trilogy - is an exquisite folkloric read of the power of language in shaping identity and what it means to lose a sense of self. The novel contemplates beautifully the nuances of the Japanese language without veering into didactic territory - the use of the formal, distant anata vis-a-vis the casual kimi, both of which mean 'you', or how the word natsukashii (nostalgic) 'seemed to be made of mist, a mist I was wandering? through with unsteady steps'.įirst published in Japanese in 2018, Scattered All Over The Earth reads like the Berlin-based Tawada's homage to her native country - she was born in Tokyo in 1960, but relocated to Germany when she was 22 and now writes in Japanese and German. While she leaves Denmark with Knut, a Danish linguistics student who converses with her in Panska, she comes to meet Tenzo, also known as Nanook, a native of Greenland who tries to pass off as Japanese, and his girlfriend Nora.Ĭompleting the quintet is Akash, an Indian transgender woman who tags along after taking a fancy to Knut.

She gets tip-offs after appearing on a variety programme about lost languages, leading to a multi-city quest across Europe with an expanding ragtag entourage of characters. 'If I just have someone to talk to, that will be enough,' says Hiruko, craving the familiarity of the Japanese vocabulary and the soft caress of the language's intonation.

Scattered all over the earth by yoko tawada