Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yōko Tawada

When you think about it, since we’re all earthlings, no one can be an illegal resident of earth. So why are there more and more illegal aliens every year? If things keep on this way, someday the whole human race will be illegal.

I remember learning about people of this type in a class on historical geography; how long ago, when our country India was called South Asia, they lived in a place that was also called Asia, but specifically Far East Asia. These Far Eastern people apparently shared a number of bizarre characteristics. One was an inability to distinguish between the virtual and real world: stories were told of people who, when severely beaten by an internet gang, would die of their wounds, and of youngsters in love with online stars diving into their computer screens, never to be seen again. There were even tales of laborers who worked eighty-hour shifts without sleeping, which would astound even our most ascetic yogis.

“When experts decide whether what people speak is independent language or just dialect there’s almost always a political agenda behind it — you see that, don’t you?”

but staring at the stone walls I sometimes think I hear splashing from the distant past, which for some reason sounds like japon, japon.

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.

There must be something wrong with me, asking for a name to learn about the past, when it should be the beginning of a new friendship, heading into the future.

Someone had eaten breakfast there that morning before leaving the apartment. Though it was undoubtedly me, it now seemed like some stranger from the distant past.

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?

“When the original no longer exists,” he said, “there’s nothing you can do except look for the best copy,” which sounded to me like some sort of riddle — such a scary one that I couldn’t bring myself to ask him what it meant.

Those mountain peaks soaring straight up to the sky seemed to be mocking human standards of beauty. Homo sapiens, they roared, in your frailty you find beauty only in gentle slopes and green fields, in a mild climate, in calm seas and inlets where you can catch fish, in places where even weaklings like you can survive, in scenery with no value except as your home. You’re so pleased with yourselves, singing the praises of what you call natural beauty. When in reality, nature takes no notice of your existence.

Of course that’s a myth you can’t even dress up in the invisibility cloak of science anymore. There are people who think everything native speakers say must be grammatically correct, when all they’re doing is faithfully copying the way most of the people around them talk, which isn’t necessarily correct usage. Still others say a native has a better vocabulary. But most native speakers are too busy to think much about language, and tend to use the same words and phrases all the time, whereas non-natives, who move back and forth between two languages, are always looking for new words and expressions — so who’s more likely to have a bigger vocabulary?