Author(s): Yoko Tawada

General Fiction

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

Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a 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. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'.

Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels searching for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue: Knut, a graduate student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier. All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull fight.

Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada.

MATILDA BOOKSHOP REVIEW

In this delicate work of speculative fiction, Japan has fallen into the sea. Everyone appears to have collective amnesia about this event, keeping in their minds only a vague picture of a "land of sushi". Japanese woman Hiruko is left adrift, traversing Scandinavia using her homemade language "Panska" to communicate and inadvertently collecting other lost souls on her travels.

Through conversations between the earnest but often obtuse characters, Tawada explores such esoteric subjects as linguistics and national identity in an almost poetic way. Though the writing has a dreamlike, soft quality to it, there is also a lot of wry humour, stemming from misunderstandings and non sequiturs due to miscommunication. Charmingly eccentric! Emilie