Scattered all over the Earth by Yoko Tawada

We’re ending the year with Chapter 1 of Scattered All Over the Earth, a near-future dystopian novel by Yoko Tawada. The novel, which was translated from Japanese to English by Margaret Mitsutani, is the first installment of a trilogy on identity, language, and borders (it also touches on climate change and what we remember/forget about other cultures).

In this chapter, the narrator is watching TV when he hears a language he can’t quite pin. As a linguist, he’s intrigued and listens closely to the interview. The woman, whose name is Hiruko, is asked which language she’s speaking. She replies “homemade language.” After having to move throughout Scandinavia, she figured it was easier to make an amalgamated language, which could be understood by most familiar with Danish, Swedish, or Norwegian. She continues by saying her previous homes are gone, and that she hopes that Denmark will survive, too. The narrator–still watching the interview from home–is even more intrigued; he calls the station and makes plans to meet her. When he meets her, he is transfixed and invites her out to eat sushi, a food that in the narrator’s dystopian mind is Finnish, but that the woman tells him is certainly not Finnish.

This month, our meeting will be asynchronous, so we’re going to leave the discussion questions in the section labelled “practice” below. We’d love to hear what you think about the questions and the reading in the comments!