Scattered All Over the Earth

Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani, Margaret Mitsutani

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English

Granta
02 August 2022

Fiction & Literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Science fiction; Fiction in translation

Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. 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. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'.

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. 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.

Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada.

By: Yoko Tawada
Translated by: Margaret Mitsutani, Margaret Mitsutani
Imprint: Granta
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 135mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 236g
ISBN: 9781783789030
ISBN 10: 1783789034
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 02 August 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

YOKO TAWADA was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Kleist, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes as well as the Goethe Medal. In 2018 her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. MARGARET MITSUTANI is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan's 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).

Reviews for Scattered All Over the Earth

Tawada writes beautifully about unbearable things -- Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither Magnificently strange -- RIVKA GALCHEN * NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE * Every Yoko Tawada novel pulls the ground out from under us, but gives us new senses in return. Scattered All Over the Earth, a novel of created, found, remembered and possible languages - of what lies at the very heart of listening - is that rare work of art: something entirely new in the world -- Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing