Scattered All Over the Earth

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Readers who crave explosive drama will probably not enjoy the quiet narrative, which is heavily centred on conversations and the power of listening.

The characters’ connection to their origins has a nightmarish quality. They are like manifestations of the biblical myth that gives the novel its title (in which God, angry at the makers of the Tower of Babel, confuses man’s single language and “scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city”). Astray and atomized, wandering the Earth like postmodern sleepwalkers, they are both fixated on their identity and lost in it. These nomads find little to no pleasure in grappling with the differences within communities, tacitly defining themselves purely as trans, Marxist, Danish, or Japanese. Akash, Nanook, Nora, and Hiruko are thrown into a dystopian world that progressively erases their notions of belonging. In the face of catastrophe, they try to reinforce these scattered notions, with varying degrees of success. 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.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. The displacement is yet more surreal in “Memoirs of a Polar Bear,” a saga published in 2011 about three generations of ursine acrobats in Berlin. It is, as improbable as it sounds, a historical novel: Tawada fictionalizes the lives of Tosca, the Canadian-born star of the East German state circus, and her son, Knut, whom she rejected at birth, and whose miraculous survival at the Berlin Zoo sparked a worldwide craze in the early two-thousands. Tawada augments the family with an imperious matriarch from Moscow, who defects to West Germany and writes a best-selling memoir entitled “Thunderous Applause for My Tears.” In Tawada’s dreamlike travelogue “Where Europe Begins,” an early short story, a young Japanese woman travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway tries to identify where, exactly, one continent shades into another, but none of the passengers can agree. Gradually, she descends into a trance brought on by reading Tungus and Samoyed fairy tales, which cut across the journey like a polar wind. The woman learns from an atlas that Japan is, tectonically, a “child of Siberia that had turned on its mother and was now swimming alone in the Pacific . . . a seahorse, which in Japanese is called Tatsu-no-otoshigo—the lost child of the dragon.” She begins to dread the finality of arrival. In Chapter 2, Hiruko is working in Odense at a school where she teaches European languages and culture to immigrant children. She takes part in the television program and then meets Knut for dinner and discusses her plans to travel to Trier. Knut tells her about his mother, who has an unnatural fixation on Eskimo people.

The prophet Zenos talks about the Jews in 1 Nephi 19:15–16: “Nevertheless, when that day cometh, saith the prophet, that they no more turn aside their hearts against the Holy One of Israel, then will he remember the covenants which he made to their fathers. . . . And all the people who are of the house of Israel, will I gather in, saith the Lord” (emphasis added). The first condition and promise identified is a change of attitude that leads to a gathering phase for the house of Israel to the lands of their inheritance. Pattern of scattering and gathering. Of particular interest is the notable pattern of the scattering, which began in the eighth century BC, and the gathering of the house of Israel, which began with the Restoration and has not yet been completed. The pattern is found often in the scriptures: the first shall be last and the last shall be first (see Matthew 19:30; D&C 29:30). This pattern was also prophesied concerning the scattering and gathering of Israel (see Jacob 5:63). The novel begins from the perspective of Knut, a quirky Danish linguistics student. By chance, he watches a televised panel between people from extinct countries such as East Germany, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. He then sees a young woman whose face resembles an “anime character.”Knut is a graduate student of linguistics at a university in Copenhagen. One day he comes across a television panel featuring people who grew up in countries that no longer exist. He becomes fascinated by a young Japanese woman called Hiruko, who appears on the program speaking an unfamiliar language that turns out to be a homemade form of “Pan-Scandinavian.” The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Tawada, Yoko. Scattered All Over the Earth. New York: New Directions, 2022. God instructed Adam and Eve, and they in turn taught their posterity concerning Christ’s atoning sacrifice and relevant gospel principles and practices (see Moses 5:5–12, 13–15, 58–59; 6:1). The ancient patriarch-prophets taught the gospel to succeeding generations throughout the ages (see Moses 6:22–23, 27–30; 8:13, 16, 19–24). Eventually, Abraham sought for the blessings, truths, and priesthood that his ancestors had received from God (see Abraham 1:2–4). He was told by the Lord that he would be taken with God’s blessings and power to another land (see Abraham 1:16, 18–19). The Lord later told Abraham that he would become a great nation with numberless posterity that would be a blessing unto all nations (see Abraham 2:9–10; 3:14).

As seen from the chart above, the later Arab tribes included descendants of both Abraham (primarily through Ishmael’s lineage) and Lot. Note how the ancestors of the Arabs multiplied into more nations and greater numbers far more rapidly and extensively than the Israelites, who were descendants of Jacob, just one of the twenty-one known grandsons of Abraham (see 1 Chronicles 1:29–34). [1] It’s possible to interpret the novel as a cozy, upbeat response to global crisis. The young characters celebrate their differences while at the same time eliminating all barriers to communication, setting off on adventures together that are designed to heal in some small way the wounds of planetary dysfunction. Tawada suggests as much herself: “In this novel, I wanted to focus on a small group of people making their way through that world, to write about the bond of friendship that holds them together.” Still, it’s hard not to prefer Yoshiro’s deep-rooted, loving steadfastness in The Emissary to the rather machinelike chumminess of Hiruko and her friends. We first glimpse Hiruko, the protagonist of Yoko Tawada’s novel Scattered All Over the Earth, on a Danish television program about people whose countries no longer exist. She came to Denmark as a student, intending to stay for a year, but shortly before she was meant to go home her country—an unnamed archipelago located vaguely between China and Polynesia—disappeared. She speaks about this clearly and eloquently. Everyone understands what she says. But the language she’s speaking has never been heard before. “Tell me,” the host asks, “what is this language you’re speaking so fluently?”

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Scattered All Over the Earth,” Tawada’s playful and deeply inventive new novel, isn’t quite a sequel to “The Emissary,” but it shares the conceit of a Japan amputated from the world. The first installment of a trilogy, it begins in Copenhagen, where a graduate student in linguistics named Knut is watching a televised panel on vanished countries. Among the speakers is Hiruko, a young woman originally from “an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia.” During her years of seeking asylum, she has invented a language called Panska, which is intelligible throughout Scandinavia. Knut is transfixed: “The smooth surface of my native language broke apart, and I saw fragments of it glittering on her tongue.” He finds Hiruko and joins her search for another surviving native speaker of Japanese. First published in Japanese in 2018, Scattered All Over The Earth reads like the Berlin-based Tawada's homage to her native country - she was born in Tokyo in 1960, but relocated to Germany when she was 22 and now writes in Japanese and German. In Yoko Tawada’s latest release of dystopian fiction, Scattered All Over the Earth (2022), “the land of sushi” (presumably Japan) disappears due to global warming and rising sea levels. As a result, the country lingers on only in its kitschy and most digestible form. While no one remembers the actual name of the disappeared land, people do reminisce on anime, miso soup, and cosplay. (Author Yoko Tawada) 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.

Israel’s punishments follow the classic pattern of the law of justice: our actions or reactions to the laws of God and the universe lead to certain consequences, which will result in experiences and feelings, which bring either happiness or sorrow into our lives. The law of justice relates to the other divine laws and provides the means by which people receive their just reward. In essence, the law of justice might be ­summarized as follows: 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 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. Before…I wrote in German or in Japanese. Separate books. But I had the feeling the force of one language must come near the other…. I wrote five sentences in German and translated them into Japanese, and then continued the text in Japanese, five sentences, and then translated those into German, and so on. From the twentieth-century dystopia that was the Soviet Empire, Tawada has moved on to dystopias of our own times. The Emissary, inaugural winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2018 and to my mind her best novel—luminous and humane while as bracingly weird as ever—is a kind of shadow companion to Scattered All Over the Earth (itself billed as the first book in a trilogy). In The Emissary, Japan has become cut off from the world for reasons that aren’t entirely clear but seem to be a combination of nuclear disaster, climate change, and an earthquake. In its isolation, it outlaws the use of foreign words; the knowledge of other countries fades. Yoshiro, once a novelist, is now more than one hundred years old, but in the toxic new climate of Japan, the elderly live on and on, tending to the nation’s frail and failing children. Yoshiro’s great-grandson Mumei is tottering and birdlike, with wispy hair and wobbly teeth. Yet he is marvelously cheerful: his generation is “equipped with natural defenses against despair.”

Tawada doesn’t dwell on the ineffability of a language that has never been heard before. Hiruko’s Panska is rendered forthrightly, in lower case, with some dropped pronouns and shuffled syntax. (It appears only in direct dialogue: her narrative voice is a non-Panska standard first person.) The effect is at once childlike and gnomic, persuasive in Margaret Mitsutani’s crisp, consistent translation from the Japanese. And yet the paradox of Panska’s existence floats around it like an aura. It is mysterious and ordinary, miraculous and practical. As Hiruko puts it, “it’s a language that just sort of came into being as I said things that people somehow understood.” My mother was the farthest thing from a “tiger mom,” never forcing me to go to Japanese school on Saturdays like other Japanese families, encouraging me to go forward with my studies in English even if it meant our conversations would continue to sound confusing to outsiders. Over the years, my mother, too, began to learn English as a hobby, taking the TOEIC English proficiency test for fun. She prided herself on being able to watch episodes of Sex and the City without using Japanese subtitles. Hiruko, in this sense, is in a deeply touching trip—dispensed of any material sense of a past, the Japanese language is the last and most emotionally charged axis in her sense of rootedness. For Tawada, language carries a specific form of memory and sense of belonging, which, in the face of atomization, becomes fraught and melancholic all at once. As the world becomes more interconnected and exophony becomes an excruciatingly contemporary condition, Tawada’s sci-fi becomes a recognizable parable for writers in exile or living abroad. Scattered All Over the Earth relies on the affect and importance of a mother tongue and, in the same movement, suggests that this is also form of fiction. It is then turned into an invention, a translation of something else, hovering between the purity of the kotodama and the sinfulness of the multilingual. The truly productive space, where Tawada displays all the force of her potential as a novelist, lies in the uncomfortable in-between.