Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada. 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. 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. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand’. Tawada is dual-lingual novelist, alternating between Japanese and German, which she learned when she moved to Hamburg in the 1980s. Both Tawada and Au use place as a way to write about identity over timeabout the selves that inhabit the here and now, and the past selves, overlaid onto the landscape like variegated watermarks. Kundera, who wrote in Czech and then French, Ms. no time to learn three different languages. Scattered All Over the Earth is set in a future where Japan no longer exists. 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. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as ‘the land of sushi’.
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