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Scattered All Over the Earth
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10/2024 Scattered All over the Earth, by Yōko Tawada
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I have my copy already.The bit about "her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian)" in the description makes me chuckle. Following on Max Weinreich's comment that "a language is a dialect with an army", John McWhorter commented that in a rational world all the Scandinavian 'languages' would be considered dialects of a single language if there were no international borders between them. I don't have an exact quote here because I listened to an audio book by McWhorter, but I'm sure he phrased this in a precise way that excluded Finnish (since as we all know, Finnish isn't related to anything).
Bill wrote: "I have my copy already.The bit about "her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian)" in the description makes me chuckle. Following on Max Weinreich's comment that "a language is a dialect with..."
I told my 13yo that line about dialects. It was useful to explain why I can muddle along in both Spanish and Italian versus why my spouse can speak intermediate "Chinese" (Mandarin) but no Cantonese.
Also, the entire novel makes me chuckle. This is the funniest Tawada novel I've read. Dark humor. But real humor.
There's something very Yoda-like about how she speaks. The translator here must have been very inventive, which makes me wonder how the original was worded, and if I would have a hard time understanding it.
No spoilers yet, since we're barely into the month.I'm halfway done and it feels like all we've gotten so far are the characters' backstories. It feels a bit off to me how they run into each other on the street and form lasting bonds to the point where they'll travel all over Europe together. Also, as someone who does quite a bit of play-by-post roleplaying, this exceeds the point where the GM would say "Too much backstory. Trim it by half and resubmit."
Hopefully we have the whole cast in place and the plot proceeds from here. If we just keep adding characters, I can understand people's negative reactions to it.
In the act where she first appears, the translator does a decent job with the trans character in the novel. Yes, one of the other characters misgenders her, which while objectionable is at least realistic. There are people who misgender others.But in the next act, the translator is continually misgendering the character! This can't be in the original. While there are words for 'he' and 'she' in Japanese, they are only used for emphasis, and wouldn't appear in the sentences translated here with 'he' and 'his'.
I am about 25% through Scattered. Considering our ongoing environmental disaster, and the book only touches it tangentially, this speculative fiction novel doesn’t seem very speculative. Maybe it will seem more like possible events influenced from the facts, by the time the third volume is published.
Bill wrote: "No spoilers yet, since we're barely into the month.I'm halfway done and it feels like all we've gotten so far are the characters' backstories. It feels a bit off to me how they run into each othe..."
Do people have negative reactions to it?
I read it less as character building and more as Tawada's opportunity to explore her pet themes? (We all know Tawada loves a good chance to explore her pet themes.) We get to see how each character engages with language, and Tawada is building a case that there's not really such a thing as a "home country" or a "native language". Because that's her big thing—the thread that winds through so many of her stories.
And, yeah, it's pretty obviously part one of a trilogy. I don't think you get to spend this long introducing characters or their ideas if you're writing a stand-alone—even if you're Yoko Tawada.
Bill wrote: "In the act where she first appears, the translator does a decent job with the trans character in the novel. Yes, one of the other characters misgenders her, which while objectionable is at least re..."I'll have to go back and look at that!
Jack wrote: "I am about 25% through Scattered. Considering our ongoing environmental disaster, and the book only touches it tangentially, this speculative fiction novel doesn’t seem very speculative. Maybe it w..."Yeah... good point. I mean, even five years ago, though, when the book was published in Japan, the climate crisis didn't look quite as bleak, did it? Or maybe my head was just more firmly rooted in the sand.
But I hear you. I got something like the same sense I got reading Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower—although more time elapsed between her writing it and my reading it. I kept thinking, "This is barely SF any more and about two years away from reality 😬."
In one sense, it depends on what one means by a trilogy ^_^Not that I'm trying to force the term into too small a box.
No J-Lit trilogy is coming to mind, so I'll mention the Sea of Fertility tetralogy. It's four books, each with their own characters, plot, and resolution together forming a greater whole. This to me is a trilogy as distinct from a long novel.
In the sense of, say, Lord of the Rings, though, a trilogy is one book split into three parts for publication. It's too big to read all at once. Or is it? Lord of the Rings is slightly shorter than War and Peace, which is often published in one volume. In one sense breaking it up lets you try out the first part of the novel to see if you want to pay for all of it. In another sense, you can feel cheated if you expect a resolution of the plot and don't get one. In another, you're expected to buy into something the author hasn't finished writing and may never finish. Yes, I buy books like this (mostly manga) and mostly after the series it finished; some series go on far too long for me to bother starting.
Due to the amount of time spent in Scattered on the backstories, it might have been better arranged like Canterbury Tales, to emphasize that each character gets a short story before the main plot begins. I don't think people will object if they know that's what they're getting. It worked for Dan Simmons in Hyperion.
Does anyone have a recommendation on their favorite Tawada book or what, of hers, to read next?I read and also listened to the audiobook version of the book. It continued to improve for me as I progressed and sometimes backtracked and read again. This is my first Tawada work so I don’t know if it is her writing style translated to English or the jumble of ideas on language, identity and place, that entranced me.
I currently have Facing the Bridge on my physical to-read shelf.
Bill wrote: "I currently have Facing the Bridge on my physical to-read shelf."I checked and I have access to that. Short story collection with 3 stories in it.
So if you are up for it, I can read it also starting about the 15th?
We can set up a thread in buddy reads or under the author profile.
r/Jack
Hi guys, it's my first time leaving a comment here :) I just finished the novel in Japanese, enjoyed it a lot.
I'm a fan of Tawada's essays on language, but this was my first full-length novel by her.
It feels like what i just went through was a huge dramatic opening act with a cliffhanger ending.
I'm very excited for the next part. Apparently, the trilogy was first published in serial form in a literary magazine, each part of the trilogy appeared 1.5-2 yrs apart. I would've gone insane waiting that long 😂
I wonder how this novel got translated into other languages! I'm specially curious about chapter 9.
Also, I'm aware that there is no German translation for this trilogy yet. I wonder if Tawada plans to write the German version by herself? She did that for Memoirs of a Polar Bear and The Naked Eye.
I'm currently listening to the book, I am at 44%. And I'm considering quitting.At the beginning, I really loved many elements about language, Panska for instance, and the connection between scifi and linguistics (which made me think of Babel, where both are closely intertwined as well). I also liked the use of Japanese folk tales.
And this great quotation:
“I’m a linguist.”
“Is that a religion?”
“Not really, but language can make people happy, and show them what’s beyond death.”
Oh, and it was fun finding the Moomins there (incidentally, I'm currently reading the Moomin series with another book blogger).
BUT starting around 40%, the book is starting getting boring, with what sounds artificial connection between people, useless background stories, and less elements on language itself.
I now discover it's a trilogy - which could explain then the reason for these background stories, but which also invites me to quit, as I don't see the book so brilliant that I would want to invest time into a trilogy.
I'm disappointed, as I usually enjoy Japanese literature, and I so love the theme of language.
Is it getting better again? I have three of her other novels on my TBR. Should I try them instead?
I also read two short stories by her (The Far Shore, and To Zagreb), which did not impress me that much.
One small point: earlier in the book, a character mentions metamorphosis and its Latin origin. That sounded so odd to me as coming from a linguist, as metamorphosis is so clearly of Greek origin.
Emma wrote: "I'm currently listening to the book, I am at 44%. And I'm considering quitting.At the beginning, I really loved many elements about language, Panska for instance, and the connection between scifi ..."
Emma, I thought it improved for me starting with chapter 4. Also, I switched back from the audiobook to the text about then. Even though it is a trilogy, I felt that the characters drew more intertangled as it progresses. This was my first Tawada book so I will read a few more to get a larger picture of the author. I posted an interview with Ms Tawada in her author profile in this forum. She speaks about “crossing borders” of barriers and language. She is speaking in German, Japanese and English. It is interesting and, I think, explains some of her recurring themes.
If you have time for one of your tbrs that you would like to read, I have time this month for one more Tawada book in addition to The Last Children of Tokyo (Reading now) and Facing the Bridge (reading with Bill next week). From your lit review site, I know you have a very busy reading schedule. (Jack follows and greatly enjoys Emma’s reviews.)
Emma wrote: "One small point: earlier in the book, a character mentions metamorphosis and its Latin origin. That sounded so odd to me as coming from a linguist, as metamorphosis is so clearly of Greek origin."They're probably thinking of The Metamophoses by Ovid, written in Latin.
Emma wrote: "I'm currently listening to the book, I am at 44%. And I'm considering quitting.At the beginning, I really loved many elements about language, Panska for instance, and the connection between scifi ..."
If you don't like this one then, imo, it's not worth continuing with the trilogy, the second is less concerned with world-building but quite muddled in terms of arguments/narrative structure.
Bill wrote: "Emma wrote: "One small point: earlier in the book, a character mentions metamorphosis and its Latin origin. That sounded so odd to me as coming from a linguist, as metamorphosis is so clearly of Gr..."Thanks, I thought she was referring to the noun in itself
Alwynne wrote: "Emma wrote: "I'm currently listening to the book, I am at 44%. And I'm considering quitting.At the beginning, I really loved many elements about language, Panska for instance, and the connection b..."
Ah, thanks, very helpful to know about book 2
Jack wrote: "Emma wrote: "I'm currently listening to the book, I am at 44%. And I'm considering quitting.At the beginning, I really loved many elements about language, Panska for instance, and the connection b..."
Thanks Jack. Alas, as you saw, no time to add to my October list
Jack wrote: "Does anyone have a recommendation on their favorite Tawada book or what, of hers, to read next?I read and also listened to the audiobook version of the book. It continued to improve for me as I p..."
She has more and less esoteric books. This is among the less esoteric books. Good follow-ups like it would be something like The Emissary, which I liked and did a podcast about.
Slightly odder would be Memoirs of a Polar Bear. Susan Bernofsky is the translator. Tawada wrote it in Japanese, translated it herself into German, and then took the unusual step of insisting the English translation come from her own translation into a "Western language".
This year's Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel (written in German, trans. Bernofsky) was pretty esoteric—especially if you're not a big Celan fan already. I think the translation here may make a big difference? The only folks I've spoken to much about it read it in the original German and came away with a different take than I did. (https://asianreviewofbooks.com/conten...)
Hope that helps? I've never read anything by Tawada I didn't like, although I've tended to prefer her less esoteric, SF-y work.
Jack wrote: "If you have time for one of your tbrs that you would like to read, I have time this month for one more Tawada book in addition to The Last Children of Tokyo (Reading now)."Just to make sure everyone knows, The Last Children of Tokyo is the UK+ title for The Emissary (North American title which is closer to the Japanese title). Same story. Same translator.
Tends to mix folks up.
So pleased to have you here, Emma! :-)Emma wrote: "I have three of her other novels on my TBR. Should I try them instead?"
This novel is very Tawada. The plots change from books to book, but these are absolutely the themes she hammers home in every book I've read by her. Seems like you're enjoying the themes? The Emissary is shorter and more self-contained. Since Scattered All Over the Earth is dragging, it might be a better fit?
Emma wrote: "And this great quotation:
“I’m a linguist.”
“Is that a religion?”
“Not really, but language can make people happy, and show them what’s beyond death.”"
This is also my absolute favorite quote in the entire book!
Hi, I finished the book a while ago and the day before yesterday I also finished to read the second volume. Without spoilers, for me it was a very good start that halfway through the first volume begann to go downhill and then dive into a gorge. I don't think I'll read the third unless they send me the ARC.
Unfortunately, the beautiful premises of the first book, which all had to do with language, then materialized into a nothing. Probably my disappointment is such that whatever followed in terms of plot and story even as far as the second volume is concerned, wouldn't have gone over well anyway.
So I take responsibility for that.
I see both books (I know nothing about the third) as a lost opportunity to speak how language shapes not only the culture but the brains and the behavior. I read a lot about this stuff because I am an Italian who have been living in Germany for the last 15 years, I have a bilingual son who doesn't have bilingual parents and I am a psychologist, that's why the topic is really one of my favorite. I do not consider myself a polyglott, because the only languages I use constantly are Italian, English and German. Spanish and French I mostly read but I don't use them so often and Portugiese I can only read. But I would like to know if there is anyone else in this group fascinated by this topic and if there is any other fiction book that you can recommend to me about it.
I know this author has written several books directly in German, so slowly I'll get them from the library, but it's not like I'm looking forward to it right now.
GONZA wrote: "I do not consider myself a polyglott, because the only languages I use constantly are Italian, English and German. Spanish and French I mostly read but I don't use them so often and Portugiese I can only read."This is so different from the American way of thinking about multilingualism... Alas.
I'm sorry you were disappointed. Tawada would definitely be my go-to on the topic of language.
Minae Mizumura takes a different approach—she's very concerned about the dominance of English. (She's an interesting case. Japanese by birth, spent her childhood and young adulthood in the US speaking English and writing an English-language graduate dissertation on a French author. So... at least trilingual. She returned to Japan to become a Japanese-language novelist, despite having never written so much as a journal in Japanese because it's what she'd always promised herself she'd do.) Try her An I-Novel, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter.
Her non-fiction work on the subject is The Fall of Language in the Age of English. Fascinating stuff, but, as someone with a master's in Medieval English, I can comfortably tell you that her understanding of the history of the English language is bollocks, and you should ignore it—she thinks the history of English language and literature is too much like French, which is, I guess, understandable given her academic background. Read the book for the rest of her thoughts, which are interesting and valuable.
Thanks a lot Alison, I will try Minae Mizumura.So I just read on my goodreads account that I read "The fall of language...." in 2016 so I will try the "I-Novel".
I am getting old and forgetful
GONZA wrote: "Thanks a lot Alison, I will try Minae Mizumura.So I just read on my goodreads account that I read "The fall of language...." in 2016 so I will try the "I-Novel".
I am getting old and forgetful"
As are many of us…
Thank you for your thoughtful reviews and comments. I am always interested in reading them.
r/Jack
I am reading Facing the Bridge with Bill as a buddy read and then finishing the month on Yamada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear ( available in Italian translation:Memorie di un'orsa polare) which, I think, was originally in German.I am hoping this will provide me a larger scope and feeling for Yamada’s works.
Alison wrote: "GONZA wrote: "Minae Mizumura takes a different approach"I don’t think we have ever had a group read of a Minae Mizumura work. Should we try that?
Happy to. I’m very interested in A True Novel. Not sure it’s still in print?
It is available in an ebook (kindle) format but a bit pricey.Might be avail in Libby via libraries...
Japan Foundation Library has it but it was checked out when I looked.
I have access to it if you want a buddy to read with.
"A remaking of Wuthering Heights in post-war Japan", it sounds fascinating.
I’ve got too much on my reading plate (?) to be signing up for buddy reads ATM, but I’d pick up a Mizumura if the group did. But thanks!
I was glad to read something by an author I wasn't familiar with and learn about her writing from this group.The book is devoid of human feelings to me. One of the main characters falls for a robot. Another jumps from job to job with no soul searching about what effect this has on his life. The characters travel between countries at the drop of a hat.
The reader soon finds out that this is a linguistics book, a discipline that the author identifies as having mathematical constraints. What I thought might be an imaginative trip into the future instead becomes like a frantic quest for what I don't know.
There are many words and phrases that are near and dear to
the Japanese heart, but these get stale quickly. I am reminded of someone's comment on Haruki Murakami's later books seeming as if they are written anticipating translation.
I am not at all interested in future books in this series.
There is quite a positive article in the FT on this novel: https://www.ft.com/content/257e1191-f...The second in a planned trilogy, Yoko Tawada’s Suggested in the Stars is the absurdist sequel to her equally comic and outré bestseller Scattered All Over the Earth (2022). In the prior novel, Hiruko is a young woman “from the land of sushi”, a lost archipelago located “somewhere between China and Polynesia”, which disappeared while she was studying abroad in Denmark. She bands together with a wildly disparate group encountered in her travels across Europe, abetting her search for others who might speak her own diminishing language.
Tawada supplies a brief summary and dramatis personae to this second novel in the series, presented, in all its urgent simplicity, as a sort of literary and erudite version of the popular 1970s children’s cartoon Wacky Races. Previous protagonists return, all converge on a target, and the cast is embellished with others similarly lacking in convention. Democratically, each takes a turn with the narrative: “Nora speaks”, “Knut speaks” and so forth. Voice (and voicelessness) are paramount.
The plot’s main objective is Susanoo, a sushi chef previously tracked down in Arles, France, by Nanook, a Greenlander who insists that he is of Eskimo origin, not Inuit. (Issues of identity and racial and gender stereotyping abound throughout the novel.) Susanoo is singled out as a possible Japanese speaker — except he suffers from aphasia and does not, in fact, speak at all.
Knut, a Danish linguist who first befriended Hiruko, has Susanoo brought to a Copenhagen hospital where he is put under the observation of Dr Velmer, a speech pathologist who plays the weird scientist trope to the hilt. Velmer enters into a relationship with an older colleague, Inga, more successful than his previous liaison (“a nurse in her twenties who looked like a little icefish, wore out my nerves and depleted my savings”). Otherwise known as “Mrs Nielsen”, Inga had sponsored Nanook’s studies in Germany: a combination of guilt at Denmark’s historical colonisation of Greenland and to compensate for her dysfunctional relationship with her own son — Knut. In a novel about connectivity, it is just one example of Tawada’s hugely enjoyable circularities and conundrums.
Hiruko had previously described herself as a “climate refugee” for which we are to assume the reason her country, most probably Japan, vanished. As with the earlier book, preoccupations with rising seas and human responsibility for global warming dominate, along with an obsession with semantics. “Sighs, too, emit carbon dioxide,” one person notes. Two supposedly minor characters, lonely dishwashers at the hospital in which Susanoo is being kept, communicate in a childlike rhyming language, echoed by Inga’s preference for the incoherent yet “magical explosives” that heralded the beginning of speech of Knut when a baby. The mourning for the primal element in human evolution is pervasive; Hiruko has defensively developed her own “Panska”, a form of pan-Scandinavian.
Tawada, who was born in Tokyo in 1960 and moved to Germany in the early 1980s, writes in both German and Japanese (ably translated here by Margaret Mitsutani). To date, more than a dozen of her books have been translated into English, among them The Bridegroom Was a Dog (1998), The Lost Children of Tokyo (2014) and Memoirs of a Polar Bear (2016). She has described her experimental approach, the constant shifting between borders and nationalities, thus: “Even one’s mother tongue . . . is a translation.”
In a book pulsating with idiosyncrasies and inventiveness it is the more reflective moments that hold most pleasure and satisfaction, such as Nanook’s spontaneous night-fishing trip with a German man while hitchhiking to Copenhagen, and an unexpected and exhilarating ride to Hamburg with a pair of seasoned motorbikers taken by Nanook’s girlfriend Nora and their Indian trans woman friend Akash, the calm and reasoned centre of the book — “talking has always been my way of staying healthy”. The same goal, different approaches: a lovely touch in a work of pluralism and belonging.
I'm not sure I'm that impressed by a reviewer who missed out on the fact that the hospital is based on the one at the centre of Lars von Trier's miniseries The Kingdom there are allusions to it - and to von Trier - as well as episodes based on scenes from the show throughout the novel. They also missed that the dishwashers are a version of the dishwashers who acted as a kind of Greek chorus in von Trier's series - one of Tawada's is even named after one of the actors who played them Vita Jensen. Von Trier's dishwashers were played by actors with Downs Syndrome and Tawada's characters are framed in the same way, the "special" language they devise is a response to the fact that some of the other staff fail to/refuse to properly listen to them because their pronunciation apparently differs from the standard. So, imo, labelling their language 'childlike' is a bit offensive/ableist, but then again aspects of Tawada's presentation weren't too good/positive either. Von Trier's series came out years ago when it was presumably enough in terms of representation/inclusivity to simply write/cast for actors with Downs Syndrome but Tawada is working in a very different era. So she doesn't have that excuse.
Her queer rep and Akash also caused a lot of problems for a number of readers. Many reviewers/readers found the portrayal and the presentation of trans identity highly offensive.
Japanese Literature
Books mentioned in this topic
Memorie di un'orsa polare (other topics)Facing the Bridge (other topics)
Memoirs of a Polar Bear (other topics)
Metamorphoses (other topics)
The Last Children of Tokyo (other topics)
More...
Part two of the trilogy, Suggested in the Stars is expected out the first (North America) and second (UK+) weeks of October 2024.
Yoko Tawada was born in 1960. She’s from Nakano, a special ward of Tokyo. Tawada’s father was a non-fiction translator, and he eventually opened a bookshop selling academic books from abroad. Her undergraduate degree is from Waseda, one of Japan’s most prestigious universities.
In 1982, Tawada graduated with a degree in Russian literature. She wanted to move to the Soviet Union to study Russian literature, but that was no easy feat in 1982. Instead, she moved to Hamburg to work for one of her father’s business partners in book distribution. Hamburg is a city in north central Germany. It was part of West Germany before German reunification in 1990. It was only about 30 miles or 50 kilometers from the border with East Germany.
By 1990, she had earned a master’s degree in contemporary German literature from Hamburg University. In 2000, she received her doctorate in German literature from the University of Zürich in Zürich, Switzerland. And in 2006, Tawada moved to Berlin, where she still lives.
While she was earning her master’s and PhD, Tawada was also writing fiction and poetry. In 1987, she published a bilingual German-Japanese collection of poetry. In 1991, Tawada won Japan’s Gunzo Prize for New Writers for her first novella, Missing Heels. And in 1993, Tawada won the Akutagawa Prize for her story The Bridegroom Was a Dog (trans. Margaret Mitsutani).
So Tawada is a Japanese writer who is a native Japanese speaker and writes literary Japanese but also lives in Germany and writes award-winning German prose and poetry. Tawada is just a singularly impressive writer to me, and really a testament to how limited the world is for monolinguals or people like me who only dabble in other languages.
I covered Tawada's biography at length in part-three of Read Japanese Literature's episode set on The End of the World! Japanese Apocalypse (https://readjapaneseliterature.com/20...), which includes a deep dive into her better-known The Emissary aka The Last Children of Tokyo. I also reviewed Scattered All over the Earth in the Asian Review of Books (https://asianreviewofbooks.com/conten...).
If you have other resources to add, please feel free to post them here.
As always, feel free to read in any language. Spoiler tags don't work on mobile. Our general policy is no spoilers until halfway through the month, then it's fair game.
I really look forward to discussing this one with you. It's a favorite!