Scattered All Over the Earth

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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. While this might sound like a horrific situation to some, I’ve found that being as strange as a talking polar bear comes with its benefits. In Tokyo, my outward appearance blended in with most people around me, but inside I was a foreigner yearning to get out. In New York, where most people around me also came from other countries, no one bothered to ask me about Japan because they thought it was impolite, or worse, they thought they already knew everything they needed to know. 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. Since the English translation of this novel came out in early March, critics have praised it as “mordantly funny,” or “deeply inventive,” and categorized it as “science fiction,” a “dystopia,” and even contrary to that, “the first great utopian novel of the 21st century.”Tenzo, originally a Greenlander, is described as an “Eskimo” throughout the story, despite that term having racist and offensive implications. He explains that “people who consider the word ‘Eskimo’ racist think it’s enough to just replace it with ‘Inuit’, even though strictly speaking not all Eskimos are Inuit.” Through Tenzo’s perspective, Tawada casts an uncomfortable spotlight on the perhaps simulated discomfort that many non-natives exhibit over the treatment of indigenous people. Tenzo is not the only character “driven into an ethnic corner.” Everyone in Tawada’s novel experiences what it’s like to be exoticized. Foreignness is all just a matter of perspective. 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. According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. But their creator—a novelist, a poet, and a playwright—has chosen her estrangement. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even natural, about the way we use words. “Even one’s mother tongue,” she maintains, “is a translation.”

In the spiritual and religious realm, Christianity, which had its roots in earlier Judaic practice, has become the religion of 1.9 billion people, or 31.1 percent of the population of the world. The Judeo-Christian tradition, which derives from the spiritual labor of Abraham’s descendants, is a foundation of Western civilization, providing social and political values and the moral and ethical basis of the legal systems. That same tradition has made an emotional and psychological contribution in defining the value and purpose of life, the goodness of God, His love for all, and the Golden Rule as a guide for human conduct. In the social and cultural realm, the themes of the Bible have provided inspiration for great works of architecture, music, art, literature, and entertainment. In some ways, Scattered All Over the Earth builds on the themes of this earlier work. Both novels share certain elements: a land rendered uninhabitable by pollution in one case, a lost homeland in the other. In Scattered, a Japanese man called Susanoo has stopped aging. Hiruko and her companions eventually manage to find him and meet him, but he doesn’t say a word. What is the reason for this strange silence?As can be seen by the earlier historical review and the basic outlines shown above, important elements of the gathering of the house of Israel have occurred in the past few centuries, especially since the Church was established in 1830. Significant historical events in Church history, Jewish history, and Nephite/ Lamanite history demonstrate that God has certainly not forgotten Jacob’s family. These modern events are in partial fulfillment of key ancient prophecies and promises of God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as found in the scriptures. [4] I am half-Japanese, half-Zainichi Korean, and have lived in the US for more than half my life. I have a green card instead of American citizenship, so it’s awkward for me to identify as an Asian-American. In an attempt to figure out where I fit in, I’ve been reading many books by and about Japanese, Japanese-American, half-Japanese, Zainichi Korean, and Asian-Americans—but it wasn’t until I discovered Yoko Tawada that I, an uncategorizable international person finally felt seen in a literary work. 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. 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.