Scattered All Over the Earth

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BOOK REVIEW EDITOR ELLA KELLEHER WRITES – What would happen if your country sank into the ocean? Would you still have a claim to your “homeland”? What about the language you speak? Could it still be considered your “native language”?

A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference and what it means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist.

Finalist, National Book Awards 2022 for Translated Literature

In Chapter 3, an Indian person named Akash who is transitioning from male to female observes Knut and Hiruko at the Luxembourg Airport. Striking up a conversation, he learns they are going to Trier. Knowing the city well (and feeling a romantic attraction toward Knut), Akash offers to show them around. Knut and Hiruko are looking for a man named Tenzo, who will be putting on a presentation about dashi, an ingredient in Japanese food, at the Karl Marx House Museum. Hiruko believes that Tenzo is from her home country. The group has lunch together and then walks through the ruins of a Roman bathhouse, where they come upon a blonde woman. 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. Completing the quintet is Akash, an Indian transgender woman who tags along after taking a fancy to Knut. Assuredly, days are coming—declares the Lord—when it will no more be said, As the Lord lives who brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt, but rather, As the Lord lives who brought the Israelites out of the northland, and out of all the lands to which he had banished them. . . . Lo, I am sending for many fishermen—declares the Lord—. . . . And after that I will send for many hunters. . . . For My eyes are on all their ways, they are not hidden from My presence, their iniquity is not concealed from my sight. . . . Assuredly, I will teach them, once and for all I will teach them My power and My might. And they shall learn that My name is Lord [Jehovah or Yahweh] (Jeremiah 16:14–21). [6] Like avatars for their countries of origin or those dolls in native costume that travelers used to collect, the characters each represent a national type. The novel is narrated from their alternating perspectives, and each person is constantly remarking on the defining characteristics of the others. Hiruko (in Akash’s view) is like “an anime character, cute yet slightly creepy” (she also reminds Knut of a young Björk); Knut is a handsome blond northerner with impressive cheekbones; Akash wears only red saris; Nora is tall and commanding. Tenzo’s role in the story is based on mistaken conclusions drawn by the other characters about his origins, which he initially does nothing to clear up (“So that’s where he was from—the land of sushi”). Tawada’s gleeful use of stereotype seems at once designed to send it up (sometimes looks are deceiving) and to redeem it (isn’t stereotype just a kind of shorthand, like language itself?).

Tawada, who lives in Berlin and writes in Japanese and German, has a tendency to borrow fantastical premises from folk tales that dip into mind-bending hypotheticals: What if a woman married a dog? What if it’s the children who grow ill, and the elders who thrive? What if an anthropomorphic polar bear in East Germany becomes a bestselling memoirist? In Chapter 6, Hiruko arrives in Oslo, where she meets Nora and Akash, who was sent by Knut in his place, supposedly because Knut's mother is ill. Hiruko meets Tenzo/Nanook at the restaurant where the cooking competition is being held, and immediately knows he is not Japanese. Tenzo/Nanook admits the ruse, and Hiruko convinces him to tell Nora the truth. The cooking competition is called off because a dead whale washes up on the beach and both Tenzo/Nanook and the restaurateur who was holding the competition are suspected of harming it, but they are ultimately cleared of these charges. My mother kept writing to her pen pal almost all the way up to her death. English became harder for her to write towards the end, her brain filling up with even more tumors. It became harder for me, too, to understand her poetic intentions. But the fact is, she kept trying. Hiruko is originally from Niigata but her homeland has disappeared while she has been studying abroad. Since then, she has moved from place to place as a migrant across Scandinavia. Over the course of her travels she has cobbled together her own hybrid language. It is not the national language of any single country, but can be understood by all Scandinavians. An Odyssey in Search of Compatriots By the time of Abraham’s entrance into Canaan, it appears that some faithful communities of children of God were scattered throughout the world. The Jaredites, a Semitic people of Book of Mormon fame, had left Babylonia much earlier and were already well established in the Americas (see Ether 1–2, 6). And as Abraham left Ur and traveled southwestwards towards the western regions of the Fertile Crescent, Melchizedek, the righteous high priest, reigned over Salem in Canaan (see Genesis 14:17–20). Also around this time, Job was a just and faithful patriarch in Uz, a land eastward of Canaan (see Job 1:1–5). Abraham was selected to receive special covenant promises that would carry through to the end of this earth’s history and into eternity.Hiruko, in this sense, is in a deeply touching trip—dispensed of any material sense of a past, the Japanese language is the last and most emotionally charged axis in her sense of rootedness. For Tawada, language carries a specific form of memory and sense of belonging, which, in the face of atomization, becomes fraught and melancholic all at once. As the world becomes more interconnected and exophony becomes an excruciatingly contemporary condition, Tawada’s sci-fi becomes a recognizable parable for writers in exile or living abroad. Scattered All Over the Earth relies on the affect and importance of a mother tongue and, in the same movement, suggests that this is also form of fiction. It is then turned into an invention, a translation of something else, hovering between the purity of the kotodama and the sinfulness of the multilingual. The truly productive space, where Tawada displays all the force of her potential as a novelist, lies in the uncomfortable in-between.