Scattered All Over the Earth

by Yōko Tawada

“everything from yesterday disappears, then yesterday into long ago transforms.”

Breathing in several grammars, she was melding them together inside her body, and then exhaling them as sweet breath.

You, on the other hand, are still young and full of life even though your country no longer exists.”

“When the safety net covers everybody, no one has economic reasons to lie any longer, so people stop lying.”

Europeans must think of handwriting and drawing as two completely separate things. If not, why are they so ashamed of a lousy picture when their terrible handwriting doesn’t bother them at all?

Immigrants don’t have enough time to learn lots of words that can only be used in one situation each. It’s better for them to learn how to use basic but many-faceted words from the time they’re children.

Only one problem: would a dog’s cousin be fooled by marzipan chocolate?

A long time ago, most immigrants headed for one specific country and stayed there until they died, so they only had to learn the language spoken there. Now, when people are always on the move, our language becomes a mixture of

all the scenes we’ve passed through on the way.

There are also languages called “pidgin,” but as they’re always connected to business, they don’t really apply to me. I have nothing to sell...

The trouble with me is that the only thing I’m really good at is coming up with suggestions. “Why don’t we try this?” I’ll

say, giving shape to things that don’t yet exist, and then coloring them in, convincing people that my idea is the future they’ve been waiting for.

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.

She was standing perfectly still, looking as if someone had cast a spell on her just as she was about to strike a match, freezing her in place. Every time I saw her I was afraid she might start moving one day, and I would turn to stone.

Some woman said we didn’t need language anymore now that we have emoji, which seemed to me to be missing the point. If her son broke her favorite vase what would she do — draw an angry-face emoji for him?

The strangest thing was that I could almost see pictographs in her eyes, blinking on and off.

Among the Europeans, whose clothing grows dark and drab as summer ends, we looked dangerously gorgeous.

“So dashi is the total sound coming from an orchestra, while umami is the music.”

Hiruko has the sweetness of apple blossoms, but none of the deep eroticism of marigolds.

“Are you returning to your home country, then?” “What is it that you call ‘home country’?”

“Are we back to the days when just saying the name Marx was enough to make you seem like a suspicious character?”

“You can’t express deliciousness using the first person singular with a transitive verb,” he said, sounding perfectly serious. “That’s always bothered me.”

and their voices echo off the stone in a blur of sound.

There was a library here in the great bath, and a room where you could hear lectures as if you were at the university.”

had the power to expand my shrunken imagination, small enough to fit into a coffee cup, and pull my miserable everyday life back up into the great, blue sky.

the power to expand my shrunken imagination, small enough to fit into a coffee cup, and pull my miserable everyday life back up into the great, blue sky.

Nevertheless, to any employee, work is to some degree a place where strangers pull at you from right, left, above and below, pinching, rubbing, and generally making a mess of you from morning to night.

Melancholy vowels dyed the air blue.

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.

It seems to me that people who have to know where everyone is from have no confidence in themselves.

It’s a bad habit of mine to start writing in my head the biography of someone I’ve just met.

When I unlocked the door, my keys rattling like a talisman, I saw the table at the back wall where it always was. There was a cup stained with lipstick and a plate with breadcrumbs on it. 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.

Having a certain “profession” is an illusion, I thought, because in reality, people are defined by the “place” where they end up. There are various kinds of places: some that smell, others that are peaceful, still others where one suffers constant verbal abuse, places that are freezing cold, and places that offer protection. If

Having turned the ample inheritance they had received from their parents into flour, they spent their days baking an ideal they called bread. Both had PhDs in philosophy.

is because I am wrapped in layers of cloth like a mummy, and if you unwind that cloth, you’d find nothing inside but a shriveled corpse.

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?

German sentences were like trains sliding smoothly down the tracks of the grammar already embedded in my mind.

The fuku of Fukui means glück (happiness), a word found in lots of other place names, too, all of which were originally blessed with the riches of nature.

Weren’t the adults just using a robot, a machine with no sense of right or wrong, having it lie for them so they wouldn’t have to take any responsibility?

Each veranda had a little table where people could sit quietly sipping tea, pretending not to hear the cars below, but in this city, full of logical angles and lines that suppressed all signs of violent emotion while

at the same time deftly avoiding ugliness, I didn’t know anyone well enough to sit on a veranda with them.

An octagonal building with glass walls was perched on top of it like a young girl with her skirt spread out around her.

I stepped into the gallery in my mind and examined each of the paintings hanging there. When the sky is a vivid blue, green gleams all the more brightly. These two colors should blend nicely since they’re next to each other, yet there’s a

hidden friction between them, so they almost seem to be fighting. Though the sky reflected in the pond and the water lilies floating on it look as if they’re touching on the canvas, in reality they never do. There’s something mysterious about the way all this can be expressed in a painting that only exists on a thin canvas surface.

There must be languages with no punctuation for a full stop. Like a journey that never ends. Or a sentence that doesn’t have a subject.

I wanted to go to a place where adjectives have a past tense, and prepositions come at the end of the phrase.

So her profession was using words to manipulate people.

“Well, in semidarkness you’re connected to the people around you in a vague sort of way. You share things, like being poor, and tired from working hard all day. But in very bright light each person is alone — I am me and you are you. And when they look in the mirror, they have to ask themselves, ‘Who am I?’ That may be all right for people who can lose themselves in the light, but I keep getting darker, year by year.”