Hiruko and Knut set off together to look for other survivors from Hiruko’s vanished homeland who might speak the same mother tongue. The first place they visit is an “Umami Festival” being held in the German city of Trier. Slated to speak at the festival is Nanook, a Japanese chef conducting research on umami flavors. Tawada, who lives in Berlin and writes in Japanese and German, has a tendency to borrow fantastical premises from folk tales that dip into mind-bending hypotheticals: What if a woman married a dog? What if it’s the children who grow ill, and the elders who thrive? What if an anthropomorphic polar bear in East Germany becomes a bestselling memoirist? Jacob later says more about the Jews in 2 Nephi 10:7–9: “But behold, thus saith the Lord God: When the day cometh that they shall believe in me, that I am Christ, then have I covenanted with their fathers that they shall be restored in the flesh, upon the earth, unto the lands of thei 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.”

Throughout Scattered, different characters provide separate reasons for why the concept of a native language or a mother tongue is “rather childish.” When Hiruko realizes that the person she thought was Japanese actually was something else, she surprises herself with her own reaction: “When I found out we didn’t share a mother tongue, I wasn’t disappointed in the least. In fact, the whole idea of a mother tongue no longer seemed to matter; this meeting between two unique speaking beings was far more important.” The novel, a finalist for a 2022 US National Book Award in the category of translated literature, is the first installment of a trilogy. The sequel, Hoshi ni honomekasarete (Written in the Stars), was published in 2020, and the concluding volume Taiyō shotō (Islands of the Sun) came out in October 2022.

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. Thus, the gathering of Israel in the last days will be recognized as a greater miracle than when the Lord earlier delivered Israel out of Egypt. Before…I wrote in German or in Japanese. Separate books. But I had the feeling the force of one language must come near the other…. I wrote five sentences in German and translated them into Japanese, and then continued the text in Japanese, five sentences, and then translated those into German, and so on. The novel begins from the perspective of Knut, a quirky Danish linguistics student. By chance, he watches a televised panel between people from extinct countries such as East Germany, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. He then sees a young woman whose face resembles an “anime character.” To adapt to his postapocalyptic reality and to care properly for Mumei, Yoshiro has had to transform himself, but he is in control of his remaking, painful though it is. If his old self isn’t suited to his new reality, he muses,

A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference and what it means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist. As I spend more time in Nashville, I’m also meeting Americans who are passionate about Japan in a way that surpasses my own knowledge of the country and its customs. There’s a woman who leads forest bathing tours inspired by the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku; a ramen chef whose passion originated from once hosting a Japanese exchange student; and a half-Japanese mom who can hear the subtle difference when her baby babbles with her English-speaking grandparents and her Japanese-speaking ones. In Chapter 1, a Danish linguistics student named Knut sees a woman on a television show who claims to be from a country that no longer exists. Her name is Hiruko and she speaks a homemade language she created drawing from different languages in the Scandinavian countries where she has been living. Knut is fascinated by Hiruko's story and calls the television station to ask if he can meet her. Hiruko agrees to meet Knut and the two go out to dinner together. She tells him that she is trying to find another person from her home country. She has heard of one person living in the German city of Trier. Knut agrees to travel there with her.

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Scattered All Over the Earth is a deceptively easy read. On a sentence level, one thought follows another in an apparently naive way, with words occasionally marching into little pools of non sequitur (“But actually I have great respect for coyotes. This is because I am wrapped in layers of cloth like a mummy”) or blank-sounding profundity (“languages can make people happy, and show them what’s beyond death”). The novel’s lightness tells us something about the human ability to assimilate (to disaster or to a new country or language) and move on, while its vacancies alert us to the cognitive dissonance of assimilation and to the more dangerous prospect of collective self-delusion. The curious forgetfulness of Tawada’s characters—their flitting from thought to thought and place to place—is all too familiar. A second great world religion, that of Islam, arose among the Arab descendants of Abraham in the seventh century and has become the second largest world religion, with 1.2 billion followers, or 19.7 percent of the world’s population. The contributions of Islam in the areas of science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, architecture, and technology have been considerable. Islam has served as the moral and ethical basis of many nations, and its leavening influence has been felt in several empires, including those of the Turks, Persians, and Mughals. 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. As a young woman, Tawada took the same six-thousand-mile railway trip, on a visit to Germany in 1979; she left Japan permanently three years later. “When I was a child, I thought all people in the world spoke only Japanese,” she has said. But a larger world of letters revealed itself through her father, who owned a bookshop in Tokyo and imported titles from abroad. Tawada studied Russian literature at Waseda University and yearned to pursue further study in the Soviet Union—an impossibility, as it turned out, because of the Cold War. Instead, Tawada went to Hamburg, where she initially took a job at one of the companies that supplied her father’s bookshop. At Hamburg University, she fell under the influence of writers like Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin, and especially Paul Celan, a German-speaking Jew from Romania, whose poetry became a model for her anti-nationalist vision of language and translation. 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.