Scattered All Over the Earth
‘Are you sure? I always thought it was Finnish,’ says Knut, one of the narrators of Yoko Tawada’s sweet and lopsided novel, Scattered All Over the Earth. Hiruko, the novel’s central character, has obviously heard this before. ‘sushi not finnish,’ she replies without missing a beat.
Newly translated into English, Scattered
All Over the Earth is the first instalment in an expected trilogy (the first two books have already been published in Japanese) in which the nation once known as Japan has apparently ceased to exist. Tawada’s characters, guided by memory and hearsay, can only speculate about the realities suggested by its lingering, ghostly culture. In their world, China has stopped exporting, and English-speaking immigrants to Europe fear deportation to the US, which is now in need of a larger workforce. The novel’s alternating narrators come from Denmark, Germany, Greenland, India and that unnamable ‘land of sushi’.
Hiruko left home to study abroad in Sweden, but a few months before she was meant to return, ‘her country disappeared’. Her memory of her culture and language fading, she speaks in her own made-up, pan-scandinavian language. Hiruko finds a willing ally in Knut, a fellow logophile, who volunteers to help her find other Japanese speakers. They are joined, now and again, by the other characters (Akash, Tenzo/
Nanook, Nora, Susanoo), as they follow one another across Northern Europe in search of truth, romance and umami.
The universe Tawada has created feels incongruous: it’s at once borderless and carefree, and at the same time feels heavily regulated and policed. The characters turn up in Oslo and the South of France at the drop of a hat, fuelled by a carefree Euro-trip vibe: a crush is reason enough to join strangers on a transcontinental quest, and the world seems to run on a logic of serendipity. Yet the world outside Europe is impossibly far away and walled off, and the lack of access to information about Japan suggests some larger plot to erase it from global memory.
It’s odd, for example, that despite the existence of the internet and smartphones, Hiruko doesn’t use them to contact other people stranded outside Japan. But one line provides a hint: one of the narrators works in a sushi restaurant, and though he isn’t Japanese, his customers pepper him with questions about the religion and other ‘realities’ of Japan they’ve constructed out of guesswork; researching Buddhism online, he finds that the web pages disappear not long after he checks them. The lore surrounding Japan is at times mundane: ‘I had heard something once about people sleeping standing up in crowded trains – wasn’t that in the land of sushi?’ Or more oblique: ‘I once heard about a garden somewhere on the other side of the globe where flowing water is expressed entirely in stone without a drop of moisture’. Hiruko recalls that in her culture ‘sexual hormones had died out’. The line comes as part of some amusing commentary on Hiruko’s hypercharged encounters with European men, but considering Japan’s very real declining-population crisis, it’s also an unsettling clue.
Tawada has lived in Germany, away from her birth country, for nearly 40 years, and writes both in Japanese and German. Here she paints a moving depiction of an immigrant’s anxiety and the fear of permanent displacement. If the plot is driven by a central mystery – what exactly happened to Japan? – the novel’s central question is: what happens to a language and its speakers without a home?
In Copenhagen a sushi restaurant is run by a guy from China trained in Paris, who employs someone from Vietnam and a nonspecific Asian American. ‘When the original no longer exists,’ says the chef, ‘there’s nothing you can do except look for the best copy.’ It’s a hopeful idea – that the legacy of a culture could be carried on without its direct descendants. But ultimately the novel seems to disagree: without the original, what’s left is only a patchwork of simulacra, stereotype and conjecture. Thu-huong Ha