... mordantly funny ... More than simply international, her writing is translingual; she leaves the borders between languages open and allows them to cross-pollinate. To translate her into English is to excavate linguistic strata: Panska reads like a Japonic parody of Nordic syntax translated into a West Germanic language ... Each character in Tawada’s 'band of zigzag travelers' is given chapters to narrate in the first person. These limited perspectives give rise to a comedy of intercultural misunderstandings that both move the plot forward and provide targets for Tawada’s sharp satire ... Judging by the recent migrant crises that informed Tawada’s novel, it is a long-overdue lesson. By the time we are reading the trilogy’s final volume, the climate-fiction scenario Tawada drapes in the trappings of picaresque comedy will no longer seem speculative.
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 ... Scattered All Over the Earth [is] Tawada’s playful and deeply inventive new novel ... Tawada applies the same fairy-tale conventions—mistaken identity, unexpected metamorphosis—to the dilemmas of finding linguistic shelter in a world of rising seas and ceaseless migration ... The characters all take turns as narrator, contributing their own incongruous understanding; Tawada elevates the comedy of mistranslation to a principle of narrative ... The linguistic love triangles culminate in a somewhat chaotic dénouement, filled with comedy and coincidence ... As metafiction, it succeeds brilliantly, sketching a grim global dilemma with the sort of wit and humanism that Italo Calvino, in a discussion of lightness in literature, described as 'weightless gravity' ... But the novel occasionally falters in its efforts to imbue the characters with psychological depth; splitting the difference between a high-concept fairy tale and a realist novel is a hard trick to pull off. Family traumas and romantic dramas can feel like laborious pretexts to illuminate some aspect of language as lived experience.
... possesses both the looseness and wistfulness of extreme displacement ... Ms. Tawada’s characters are similarly impressionistic: mobile, protean and evanescent, whirled together in a manner that can seem insubstantial but combines to form a vision of beauty and calm.
Tawada inhabits many tongues with ease and playfulness, although not without anxiety. Her work often shows concerns about the state of the Japanese language in a world where everything seems to be rapidly shifting toward English ... Tawada’s satirical tone and flirtation with sci-fi are intensely original, but these questions of assimilation vis-à-vis tradition are not completely out of line with current conversations in Japanese literature ... 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.
Ultimately, the beauty of Tawada’s work is that she treats the uncertain footing of the second language learner—and of the native speaker looking back on their first language with new eyes—not as a source of anxiety, but as a source of boundless creative potential ... Tawada is immune to the seduction of ideal worlds. Even when speculative, her fiction still manages to operate in the world that we actually inhabit: one characterized by slippages, ambiguity, and a history of territorial entanglements that began long before twentieth-century globalism—entanglements that, in fact, go back so far that they might be one of the few things coterminous with being human ... Regardless of their somewhat awkward prose, or any possible critiques that might be made of their content or structure, Scattered All Over the Earth and Three Streets are exceedingly original works by an artist who never ceases to challenge her readers to see the world differently. When taken as inroads into Tawada’s singular mind and larger conceptual project, both books must be not only understood as literature, but literature of an inimitable sort. We can only hope for more.
Sometimes the novel can seem cartoonishly topical, skewering everything from air travel to computer games to global supply chains to the US ... But like Panska itself, the state of the world is veiled in strangeness ... The novel questions its own ease of consumption and by implication our complacent passage through the world.
As if pulling the world’s fibres apart and reconstructing them anew, Tawada’s Earth is recognisably our own and notably out of shape ... unfolds over 10 elegantly written chapters, narrated by a cast of dispersed — but strangely interlinked — characters ... Comical linguistic glitches sparkle throughout the novel ... Reading Tawada you feel her subtle authorial presence, simultaneously guiding the reader ashore and casting us out to sea; paradoxically, both lead to a single destination. Where do we — along with Hiruko, Knut, Akash, Tenzo, Nora and Susanoo — end up? It can only be described as somewhere soft and strange and new.
... brilliant ... Tawada renders with beautiful immediacy the selfless and heartwarming effort of someone learning an entirely new language, just to talk to you. She also shows us the difference between intelligence and fluency–we see many examples of rich narration followed by broken attempts at speech, as well as the opposite ... This is a rare book where the translation not only conveys the narrative, but constructs a metanarrative as well. Mitsutani’s sparkling prose adds a new and different focus to the book’s multilingualism. The translation invites its new English-speaking audience to consider both the global community forged by the English language, and the violence by which it propagated ... Tawada’s sensitivities to the loss of language–and her knack for its transmutation–may be rooted in personal experience. She has been a Japanese expat in Germany for forty years, and has won numerous awards for her writing in both languages. At the center of her work are words, worlds, and the borders they straddle–in her writing we see the closeness of hearts, and the fallibility of the barriers between them.
... a broad, kooky, character-driven dystopia ... The book is not a love story between Knut and Hiruko (the two become close friends), but an elegy to the power of language and its ability to evolve along with the changing world. Though the tale is not life-affirming, it is language-affirming ... driven by quantity—many characters are squished into the pages, and broad historical and cultural reflections never leave enough room for any one story to be fleshed out. The effect is a novel that feels, well, a bit scattered.
Tawada’s dystopia is a quiet one ... Even the word 'Japan' is absent from the novel. For the reader, Hiruko’s nationality is obvious, but Tawada never refers to Hiruko or her first language as 'Japanese.' Instead, the novel is a running commentary on the ubiquity of “Cool Japan’s” soft power, even divorced from Japan itself ... The real heart of Tawada’s novel, though, is the 'eroticism' of language—a love of language so all-encompassing it takes on a devotional fervor ... Tawada approaches language with wry humor ... It is also worth noting how alluringly Margaret Mitsutani translates this homage to language ... Scattered All Over the Earth doesn’t come to a neat conclusion ... Even as a stand-alone novel, as both a story and a work of translation, it is a remarkable tribute to language.
... this is no jeremiad or lament for a long-lost land. For one thing, the nostalgia Hiruko feels is centred on language itself, not any time, place or former identity ... This could almost be satirical, but scarcely in this novel’s carefully woven fabric is a detail provided without its serving to reinforce the same, all too predictable, set of ideological assumptions. Sympathetic characters are introduced explicitly by their leftist political credentials; figures of authority and law enforcement (always men) are to be feared; and the blame for environmental catastrophe is laid squarely and with a troubling sense of absolution on the political class. Even language does not escape this treatment: Hiruko’s briefly charming Panska is revealed to be born of a fear that speaking English will lead to her being sent to America, where the broken healthcare system will, she is certain, fail her ... Tawada has certainly achieved the goal of highlighting the arbitrariness or even meaninglessness of borders, nations and fixed identities, and of holding up the inequalities of western immigration policies to scrutiny. The craftmanship of Scattered All Over the Earth is impeccable and the language, so skilfully translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is every bit as inventive as fans of Yoko Tawada’s work have come to expect. Still, the lethal charm and cute politics of this fantasy belie thornier, harsher realities that would surely have been better served by a more dialectic response.
The time period and geopolitical structures of Tawada’s science fiction world remain vague, which places greater emphasis on the book’s ideas about friendship, borders, and language ... The novel celebrates crosslinguistic communication as generative, fostering imagination and friendship and offering hope in a chaotic world ... The novel’s form underscores this hopefulness: it moves through a series of narrators so that each character has a chance to speak ... Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth is a cheerful dystopian novel that celebrates inventiveness, possibilities, and human connections.
Tawada puts a rather buoyant spin in her focus on one refugee's hopeful quest to find a compatriot with whom she can once more converse in Japanese, a language that has become critically endangered ... The novel contemplates beautifully the nuances of the Japanese language without veering into didactic territory ... 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 ... Readers who crave explosive drama will probably not enjoy the quiet narrative, which is heavily centred on conversations and the power of listening ... But the novel - the first in a planned trilogy - is an exquisite folkloric read of the power of language in shaping identity and what it means to lose a sense of self.
When I heard about Scattered All Over the Earth, I worried I’d need a PHD in linguistics to appreciate Yoko Tawada’s exploration of language and identity in a quasi-dystopian landscape. Luckily, this is one of those rare novels that challenges the intellect while creating engaging characters to whom almost any reader can relate ... unlike anything I’ve read before ... Likewise, its tone, described as “cheerfully dystopian” by its publishers, was new to me. Despite a backdrop of global disasters and personal tragedies, many of the characters are relentlessly upbeat. Although this attitude doesn’t always befit their circumstances, it is oddly charming, which is a testament to both the book’s writer and its translator Margaret Mitsutani ... first and foremost a love letter to language in all its forms ... Fascinating as these themes are, Tawada’s most impressive achievement is the creation of emotionally credible characters who are more than simply tools to further her thematic preoccupations ... for all its lyricism, the novel firmly grounds its dystopian themes in many of the most troubling issues facing readers in 2022 ... When I started reading, portions of dialogue did feel stilted. It wasn’t until I read on, that I realised this effect is a deliberate attempt to highlight the strangeness of verbal communication. No matter how much the characters love language, it can be an imperfect tool to communicate across cultures. My biggest frustration, however, was probably with the character of Hiruko who, for me, is the least relatable in the book, with her reliance on Panska occasionally grating.
It could be the end of the world as we know it, but Tawada’s vision of the future is intriguing ... Tawada expands upon the themes of language, immigration, globalization, and authenticity which underpin this slyly humorous first installment of a planned trilogy ... Who decides what’s authentic? Tawada will tell you that’s in flux and always has been.
Vernacular noir, etymological postapocalypse, a romance in syntax—it’s hard to nail down which genre National Book Award winner Tawada’s brilliant and beguiling latest belongs to, except to say it’s deeply rooted in the power of language ... At every turn, at least two narratives coexist: the central story line and another hidden just under the surface, emerging through inflections of speech and the vagaries of translation, making the text as thrillingly complex as its characters. This pulls readers deep into the author’s polyphonic convergence of cultures. Once again, Tawada doesn’t cease to amaze.
