Scattered All Over the Earth

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To adapt to his postapocalyptic reality and to care properly for Mumei, Yoshiro has had to transform himself, but he is in control of his remaking, painful though it is. If his old self isn’t suited to his new reality, he muses, My mother kept writing to her pen pal almost all the way up to her death. English became harder for her to write towards the end, her brain filling up with even more tumors. It became harder for me, too, to understand her poetic intentions. But the fact is, she kept trying. As a young woman, Tawada took the same six-thousand-mile railway trip, on a visit to Germany in 1979; she left Japan permanently three years later. “When I was a child, I thought all people in the world spoke only Japanese,” she has said. But a larger world of letters revealed itself through her father, who owned a bookshop in Tokyo and imported titles from abroad. Tawada studied Russian literature at Waseda University and yearned to pursue further study in the Soviet Union—an impossibility, as it turned out, because of the Cold War. Instead, Tawada went to Hamburg, where she initially took a job at one of the companies that supplied her father’s bookshop. At Hamburg University, she fell under the influence of writers like Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, Walter Benjamin, and especially Paul Celan, a German-speaking Jew from Romania, whose poetry became a model for her anti-nationalist vision of language and translation.

Completing the quintet is Akash, an Indian transgender woman who tags along after taking a fancy to Knut.Like avatars for their countries of origin or those dolls in native costume that travelers used to collect, the characters each represent a national type. The novel is narrated from their alternating perspectives, and each person is constantly remarking on the defining characteristics of the others. Hiruko (in Akash’s view) is like “an anime character, cute yet slightly creepy” (she also reminds Knut of a young Björk); Knut is a handsome blond northerner with impressive cheekbones; Akash wears only red saris; Nora is tall and commanding. Tenzo’s role in the story is based on mistaken conclusions drawn by the other characters about his origins, which he initially does nothing to clear up (“So that’s where he was from—the land of sushi”). Tawada’s gleeful use of stereotype seems at once designed to send it up (sometimes looks are deceiving) and to redeem it (isn’t stereotype just a kind of shorthand, like language itself?). Hiruko is from “an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia” that has completely vanished. The actual name of Hiruko’s country is obviously Japan. However, Tawada makes a point to never explicitly name the country of Hiruko’s birth. Rather, the readers begin to understand the soft power of Japan, as its pop culture and uniqueness are almost an entirely separate entity divorced from its country of origin.

Hiruko, in this sense, is in a deeply touching trip—dispensed of any material sense of a past, the Japanese language is the last and most emotionally charged axis in her sense of rootedness. For Tawada, language carries a specific form of memory and sense of belonging, which, in the face of atomization, becomes fraught and melancholic all at once. As the world becomes more interconnected and exophony becomes an excruciatingly contemporary condition, Tawada’s sci-fi becomes a recognizable parable for writers in exile or living abroad. Scattered All Over the Earth relies on the affect and importance of a mother tongue and, in the same movement, suggests that this is also form of fiction. It is then turned into an invention, a translation of something else, hovering between the purity of the kotodama and the sinfulness of the multilingual. The truly productive space, where Tawada displays all the force of her potential as a novelist, lies in the uncomfortable in-between.Assuredly, days are coming—declares the Lord—when it will no more be said, As the Lord lives who brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt, but rather, As the Lord lives who brought the Israelites out of the northland, and out of all the lands to which he had banished them. . . . Lo, I am sending for many fishermen—declares the Lord—. . . . And after that I will send for many hunters. . . . For My eyes are on all their ways, they are not hidden from My presence, their iniquity is not concealed from my sight. . . . Assuredly, I will teach them, once and for all I will teach them My power and My might. And they shall learn that My name is Lord [Jehovah or Yahweh] (Jeremiah 16:14–21). [6] Scattered All Over the Earth,” Tawada’s playful and deeply inventive new novel, isn’t quite a sequel to “The Emissary,” but it shares the conceit of a Japan amputated from the world. The first installment of a trilogy, it begins in Copenhagen, where a graduate student in linguistics named Knut is watching a televised panel on vanished countries. Among the speakers is Hiruko, a young woman originally from “an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia.” During her years of seeking asylum, she has invented a language called Panska, which is intelligible throughout Scandinavia. Knut is transfixed: “The smooth surface of my native language broke apart, and I saw fragments of it glittering on her tongue.” He finds Hiruko and joins her search for another surviving native speaker of Japanese. In Nashville, where strangers are generally friendly and chatty, I’m constantly asked about Japan and the experience of being Japanese in the South, and I can tell that it’s often coming from a place of pure curiosity as opposed to racist assumptions. In Scattered, a character from India experiences the same shift when she moves from London to Denmark. “Some people say that asking an Indian too many questions about India is a kind of prejudice… but that kind of prejudice I don’t mind at all.”

The novel contemplates beautifully the nuances of the Japanese language without veering into didactic territory - the use of the formal, distant anata vis-a-vis the casual kimi, both of which mean "you", or how the word natsukashii (nostalgic) "seemed to be made of mist, a mist I was wandering? through with unsteady steps". Allegory of the olive tree. A symbolic portrayal of these events is found in Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree. Zenos provides a profound prophetic overview of essential elements about the scattering and gathering of Israel. Although the scattering and gathering are literal, historical, physical events, they also reflect a more important dimension of a spiritual scattering, and in the latter days their gathering as seen in the mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The mission of the Church is to bring us unto Christ through missionary work, perfecting the Saints, and temple work. The inseparable relationship between the concept of gathering and the spiritual mission of spreading the gospel, nurturing members in the Church, and maintaining family ties is beautifully illustrated in the allegory of the vineyard recorded and commented upon in Jacob 5–6 in the Book of Mormon. Jacob records this allegory from the writings of an otherwise unknown prophet Zenos of the Old Testament period. The allegory is summarized in the following paragraphs, with a historical interpretation written in italics.In Tawada’s curiously placid future world, no one is surprised that Hiruko can communicate in a language of her own making. The host is politely interested, and Knut, a self-styled linguist watching from home, is smitten—even aroused—by her mingling of grammars. She calls her personal language Panska, for Pan-Scandinavian, and she explains that she began to speak it because as an immigrant she was shuttled among Scandinavian countries: “no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language.”

Modern conceptions of race, religion, sexuality, and language merge together and become nearly impossible to distinguish as separate concepts. Hiruko movingly explains, “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.”

Like Mr. Kundera, who wrote in Czech and then French, Ms. Tawada is dual-lingual novelist, alternating between Japanese and German, which she learned when she moved to Hamburg in the 1980s. “Scattered All Over the Earth”—written in Japanese and translated by Margaret Mitsutani—possesses both the looseness and wistfulness of extreme displacement. In its speculative setting, some unspecified disaster has caused Japan to disappear under the sea. Hiruko is one of countless refugees who have come to Europe—in her case, to Denmark, where she is hired to teach immigrant children about European culture. But rather than pine for her lost homeland or fully assimilate, Hiruko has followed an individual path of self-creation, synthesizing aspects of her different cultures into a unique whole, exemplified by a “homemade language” she has invented called Panska. These three covenant promises made to Abraham were only partially fulfilled some 3,500 years later as Europe came out of the dark ages of medieval feudalism. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, these three divine promises with Abraham have rapidly moved toward their fulfillment. It seems that the greatest blessings of Abraham’s posterity to the earth will occur in latter days as enlightened and righteous descendants fulfill special missions to God’s children. The house of Israel indeed has the mission in our times of taking the gospel message to all the world.