Scattered All Over the Earth

Product Information

Tawada wrings a lot of punning mileage from the concept of a “mother tongue.” Her male characters are all in flight from women. Tenzo is fleeing not just Nora but also a Danish benefactor, who gave him a scholarship out of maternal affection for the “Eskimos.” Knut is avoiding his real mother, mostly because of her instinctive grasp of the way he uses language to evade responsibility. His repulsion leads him toward Hiruko, whose Panska sounds freeingly strange—but she, of course, is in the grip of an ambivalent longing for her native speech. The linguistic love triangles culminate in a somewhat chaotic dénouement, filled with comedy and coincidence. Hiruko does eventually find another native speaker, but the encounter comes with a twist that undermines the whole search.

Hanging over the search for a native speaker is all the ethnocentric baggage that the concept implies. When Hiruko and the others reach Oslo, they find that they have arrived in the wake of Anders Behring Breivik’s devastating 2011 mass shooting, a grisly protest against immigration. The atrocity functions as a strange footnote to their adventure: Tenzo is meant to compete in a dashi competition at an Oslo sushi restaurant owned by an ultranationalist who also happens to be named Breivik—and who soon falls under suspicion of killing a whale. The turn of events skewers Japanese and Norwegian nationalism (both countries attempt to justify whaling through appeals to culinary tradition) by undercutting each society’s imagined uniqueness. Recipes, whales, and words all get around; even in a culture’s most chauvinistic totems, Tawada seems to say, there are traces of the foreign.Hiruko is from “an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia” that has completely vanished. The actual name of Hiruko’s country is obviously Japan. However, Tawada makes a point to never explicitly name the country of Hiruko’s birth. Rather, the readers begin to understand the soft power of Japan, as its pop culture and uniqueness are almost an entirely separate entity divorced from its country of origin. The Meiji period in Japan was the main stage for the country’s overall modernization. Starting in 1868, with the crowning of fourteen-year-old Emperor Meiji, the island started to reshape itself from being an isolated, feudal society under Chinese influence and entered an increasingly interconnected, Westernized world. Nineteenth-century Japan, Mizumura explains, wanted to move away from the Sinosphere toward creating international networks, particularly with the American and British Empires. During this period, linguistic debates ensued as to how to create a new version of Japanese—one statesman, Mori Arinori, going so far as to claim that Japan should “yield to the domination of the English tongue.” Other members of the intelligentsia wanted to replace Japanese characters with Romanized ones, making it a horizontal language, read from left to right. And although these proposals were never executed, the Meiji Restoration decided to cut a considerable number of Chinese characters and incorporate, instead, more vernacular syllabary ideograms. Nowadays, the Japanese language looks like a combination of easy-to-memorize syllabaries ( katakana for foreign loan words and hiragana for Japanese words) and harder-to-memorize kanjis (simplified versions of the Chinese ideogram system). Modern Japanese, Mizumura explains, was a modern invention, a fiction that accompanied the assimilation of Japan into the early stages of Western forms of capitalism. 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. While I might be losing my ability to speak fluent Japanese the way I used to, I’m finding deeper connections with these Nashvillians than if I were to simply walk into a room filled with people who speak Japanese. A language, after all, is not just about the spoken and written word. It’s also about sharing food, music, plants, and art. It wasn’t until I came to a place where Japan was so distant from me that I realized I’d rather be half-fluent in a language but make one lasting friendship, than become fluent in multiple languages and have no one to talk to and become vulnerable with.

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.” This was an effort not to be repeated (“I never did it before and I will never do it again!”), a personal edge case for Tawada in language experimentation. Knut and Hiruko’s travels feature companions who also become narrators, creating a kaleidoscopic array of languages and personas: there is Akash, an Indian trans woman who studies the dynamics of sex and gender; Nora, a precocious, bourgeois German fashioning herself after the teachings of Karl Marx; Nanook, an Indigenous Greenlander who discovers his life in Denmark is easier if he pretends to be from Japan; and Susanoo, the other Japanese migrant in the country, who grew up in a fishing town that was scattered by the development of a nuclear planation and, later, the unnamed catastrophe. They are all displaced in their own way, and each is dusted with the ashes of the Soviet Union, the United States, and, in Trier’s Porta Nigra, the Roman Empire. If I just have someone to talk to, that will be enough," says Hiruko, craving the familiarity of the Japanese vocabulary and the soft caress of the language's intonation. While she leaves Denmark with Knut, a Danish linguistics student who converses with her in Panska, she comes to meet Tenzo, also known as Nanook, a native of Greenland who tries to pass off as Japanese, and his girlfriend Nora.Hiruko’s native language has long been lost, her island devoured by water. She was a refugee in Norway and Denmark, where she finally settled and developed the language she calls Panska, which draws on the resemblances between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Panska, or Pan-Scandinavian, helps her move between countries and communicate with other immigrants. Tenzo, as it happens, isn’t Japanese at all. He’s an Indigenous Greenlander originally named Nanook, who stumbled into a Japanese identity while living in Denmark and Germany; because of his work and his anime-inspired hair style, everyone, including Nora, has assumed that he’s from the “land of sushi.” The character is an elaborate joke at the expense of ethnolinguistic authenticity: he has, ironically, assumed a Japanese identity to escape the assumptions around being an “Eskimo” in Denmark. Yet Tenzo’s escape from one authenticity trap only leads him to another, when he’s forced to leave for Oslo to keep Nora from learning that he isn’t Japanese.