Scattered All Over the Earth

256 pages

English language

Published March 6, 2022

ISBN:: 978-0-8112-2928-9

(1 review)

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.

2 editions

Christof reviewed Scattered All Over the Earth by Yōko 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.