scattered all over the earth by yoko tawada

Tawada’s characters are similarly impressionistic: mobile, protean and evanescent, whirled together in a manner that can seem insubstantial but combines to form a vision of beauty and calm. “Monet’s colors change with each brushstroke, yet his landscapes appear as a whole,” Knut reflects, and Ms. Her most frequent translator, Mitsutani, brilliantly ciphers Tawada’s magnificently inventive wordplay. Tawada slyly interrogates shifting (disappearing) borders and populations, native (invented) identities, assumptions, and adaptations. Tawada expands upon the themes of language, immigration, globalization, and authenticity which underpin this slyly humorous first installment of a planned trilogy. Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth is a cheerful dystopian novel that celebrates inventiveness, possibilities, and human connections. Threats abound-a changing climate, terrorism, and hostile political structures create danger and uncertainty-but these characters carry within themselves the seeds of a possible new world. Wonderful-what is truly affecting is Tawada’s language, which jumps off the page and practically sings.

What is true of Hiruko, Tawada suggests, is true of everyone from the harmless Nanook to an ultranationalist called Breivik: Our national identities are at bottom simulacra, copies of originals that no longer exist, if they ever did. Rivka Galchen - New York Times Magazine Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman. With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork. 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.”Īs she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends.

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. A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the 2022 National Book Award

Scattered all over the earth by yoko tawada