Scattered All Over the Earth

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In Chapter 8, Susanoo is living in Arles, working at a sushi restaurant. He recalls his childhood, during which his mother left him and his father built robots, one of which was used in the Homeland PR Center to tout the benefits of nuclear power before the reopening of a nuclear power plant. Susanoo left Japan to attend university in Kiel. He then followed a woman to Arles who turned out to be otherwise attached to another man. He has lived in Arles ever since and has lost the ability to speak. Jacob, Nephi’s brother, records his vision of the Jews in 2 Nephi 6:11: “Wherefore, after they are driven to and fro, for thus saith the angel, many shall be afflicted in the flesh, and shall not be suffered to perish, because of the prayers of the faithful; they shall be scattered, and smitten, and hated; nevertheless, the Lord will be merciful unto them, that when they shall come to the knowledge of their Redeemer, they shall be gathered together again to the lands of their inheritance” (emphasis added). In this second condition and promise, a change of knowledge also leads to a gathering phase for Israel. Tawada unveils another undeniable truth: woven into languages are the threads of loss and pain sewn by its speakers. As more and more languages become globalized, the very nature of speech will become stained with the experiences and cultures of people across the world – weakening the very idea of a “native tongue.” Like Mr. Kundera, who wrote in Czech and then French, Ms. Tawada is dual-lingual novelist, alternating between Japanese and German, which she learned when she moved to Hamburg in the 1980s. “Scattered All Over the Earth”—written in Japanese and translated by Margaret Mitsutani—possesses both the looseness and wistfulness of extreme displacement. In its speculative setting, some unspecified disaster has caused Japan to disappear under the sea. Hiruko is one of countless refugees who have come to Europe—in her case, to Denmark, where she is hired to teach immigrant children about European culture. But rather than pine for her lost homeland or fully assimilate, Hiruko has followed an individual path of self-creation, synthesizing aspects of her different cultures into a unique whole, exemplified by a “homemade language” she has invented called Panska. Comedy is everywhere, in each one of us,” wrote Milan Kundera, “it goes with us like our shadow, it is even in our misfortune, lying in wait for us like a precipice.” For Mr. Kundera, Stalinism was the tragedy that had to be met with frivolity. For novelists today, misfortune is often imminent rather than actual, taking the form of looming environmental and technological apocalypses. The rising ocean of dystopian fiction tends to be bleak and cautionary, but a few books have approached catastrophe through the universal language of humor: Joy Williams’s “Harrow,” for instance, and now, less caustically, Yoko Tawada’s ”Scattered All Over the Earth.”

Scattered All Over the Earth (2022) has no polished, clean-cut ending. It is the first installment of a planned-out trilogy that aims to answer some of Tawada’s philosophical and existential questions. Even without sequels to carry its weight, Tawada’s latest release is both a brilliant homage to language and a thoroughly entertaining fiction novel to let yourself get lost within. However, such a journey would not be possible without the sophisticated linguistic Sherpa, Margaret Mitsutani, who guides it all into language you can easily follow. 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. Tawada has always had a talent for ventriloquizing eccentrics, following singular minds through fugue and limbo. “Scattered All Over the Earth” departs from this model by introducing a team of such characters—a shift from exploring the inner worlds of linguistic displacement toward Babel-like allegory. As metafiction, it succeeds brilliantly, sketching a grim global dilemma with the sort of wit and humanism that Italo Calvino, in a discussion of lightness in literature, described as “weightless gravity.”

Tawada’s Latest Global Splash

Perhaps, we are not as different as we have been led to believe. The concept of a “global culture” and the impending doom set on humanity by ecological disasters puts a kind of melancholic tint on “Panska,” as it was born out of necessity and devastation rather than pure linguistic innovation. Knut, a man with the privilege of still having a home country, describes Hiruko’s “homemade language” as being like “Monet’s water lilies. The colors, shattered into pieces, were beautiful but painful.” In Chapter 4, a German woman named Nora hangs signs announcing the cancellation of the dashi presentation because Tenzo, the man who was to do the presentation and also Nora's lover, had suddenly gone to Oslo and had not returned. Nora met Tenzo at the Roman bath ruins a month earlier. He had sprained his ankle and she helped him to her apartment. She noticed he was ethnically ambiguous and felt embarrassed for noticing. Tenzo told Nora he had been working at a sushi restaurant in northern Germany and she assumed he was Japanese, which Tenzo confirmed. In the ensuing weeks, Tenzo stayed with Nora and the two became lovers. He had trouble finding work, so Nora organized the dashi presentation for him, but he left Trier five days before it was to be held, claiming he was going to Oslo to take part in a cooking competition. He has not returned, so she is canceling the presentation. After hanging the signs, Nora walks into the Roman baths, feeling despondent about Tenzo, and comes upon Knut, Hiruko, and Akash. They tell her they are planning to attend the dashi presentation and she tells them it has been canceled. Everyone except Akash, who cannot afford to come along, decides to travel to Oslo to look for Tenzo.

Scattered All Over the Earth is a deceptively easy read. On a sentence level, one thought follows another in an apparently naive way, with words occasionally marching into little pools of non sequitur (“But actually I have great respect for coyotes. This is because I am wrapped in layers of cloth like a mummy”) or blank-sounding profundity (“languages can make people happy, and show them what’s beyond death”). The novel’s lightness tells us something about the human ability to assimilate (to disaster or to a new country or language) and move on, while its vacancies alert us to the cognitive dissonance of assimilation and to the more dangerous prospect of collective self-delusion. The curious forgetfulness of Tawada’s characters—their flitting from thought to thought and place to place—is all too familiar.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. The Jewish contribution, in addition to the spiritual and religious realm, has been remarkable in many areas, including discoveries in natural and social sciences, medicine, and philosophy. Although Jews make up fewer than one out of every five hundred people on the earth, individuals of Jewish descent typically receive one of every every five Nobel Prizes. These descendants of Abraham have also made important contributions in their professions as merchants, businessmen, and bankers; in accountability; and in the improved lifestyle and the moral-ethical values of our society. 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. The following chart summarizes how Abraham’s family has contributed to the different important areas of our lives: