Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yōko Tawada

Little by little I was starting to like Hiruko, which surprised me. “And are you a Buddhist?” I asked her. “No, I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a linguist.” “Is that a religion?” “Not really, but languages can make people happy, and show them what’s beyond death.”

“Maybe worrying too much about flavor stunts your growth.”

I don’t want to even think about a person’s country of origin if I can possibly avoid it. It seems to me that people who have to know where everyone is from have no confidence in themselves.

What if the things we saw on the computer screen were just what somebody had cooked up, and the outside world no longer existed? True, whatever we ordered came right on time. But what if there was only one huge factory somewhere across the sea where everything we ordered was manufactured, and the rest of the world had disappeared?