About the Book
It’s hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than Scattered All Over the Earth—Yoko Tawada’s rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change—but surprising her readers is what Tawada does best: its sequel, Suggested in the Stars, delivers exploits even more poignant and shambolic.
As Hiruko—whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue—and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko—and amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature)—they empower each other against despair. Coping with carbon footprint worries but looping singly and in pairs, they hitchhike, take late-night motorcycle rides, and hop on the train (learning about railway strikes but also packed-train-yoga) to convene in Copenhagen. There they find Susanoo in a strange hospital working with a scary speech-loss doctor. In the half-basement of this weird medical center (with strong echoes of Lars von Trier’s 1990s TV series The Kingdom), they also find two special kids washing dishes. They discover magic radios, personality swaps, ship tickets delivered by a robot, and other gifts. But friendship—loaning one another the nerve and heart to keep going—sets them all (and the reader) to dreaming of something more... Suggested in the Stars delivers new delights, and Yoko Tawada’s famed new trilogy will conclude in 2025 with Archipelago of the Sun, even if nobody will ever want this “strange, exquisite” (The New Yorker) trip to end.
About the Author :
Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has published several books—stories, novels, poems, plays, essays—in both languages. She has received numerous awards for her writing including the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, the Kleist Prize, the Goethe Medal, and the National Book Award. New Directions publishes her story collections Where Europe Begins (with a Preface by Wim Wenders) and Facing the Bridge, as well her novels The Naked Eye, The Bridegroom Was a Dog, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, The Emissary, Scattered All over the Earth, Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, Suggested in the Stars, and forthcoming in autumn 2025 is Archipelago of the Sun, the final novel in her Scattered trilogy.
Margaret Mitsutani has lived in Japan since the mid-1970s and was a finalist for the National Book Award for her translation of Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth and winner of the National Book Award for her translation of Tawada’s The Emissary. She also translates Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe.
Review :
"A weird and wonderful adventure."
"Trippy, poignant, and thoroughly inventive."
"Like Panska itself, the state of the world is veiled in strangeness. Tawada’s words are easy to understand—in this novel more than ever—and her dystopia is Day-Glo bright."
"Wonderful—what is truly affecting is Tawada’s language, which jumps off the page and practically sings."
"Reading Tawada you feel her subtle authorial presence, simultaneously guiding the reader ashore and casting us out to sea; paradoxically, both lead to a single destination. Where do we—along with Hiruko, Knut, Akash, Tenzo, Nora, and Susanoo—end up? It can only be described as somewhere soft and strange and new."
"This dystopian novel is riveting, bizarre as can be, and like nothing else I’ve ever read. I’m terrified not enough people will read it."
"Tawada is immune to the seduction of ideal worlds. Even when speculative, her fiction still manages to operate in the world that we actually inhabit: one characterized by slippages, ambiguity, and a history of territorial entanglements that began long before twentieth-century globalism—entanglements that, in fact, go back so far that they might be one of the few things coterminous with being human."
"The world is close to our own, suggesting that soon our boundaries will radically change. Tawada reminds us that we, too, might become refugees from lands that no longer exist—obliterated by nuclear mishaps, rising water levels, or arbitrary lines drawn in history textbooks."
"Tawada slyly interrogates shifting (disappearing) borders and populations, native (invented) identities, assumptions, and adaptations. Her most frequent translator, Mitsutani, brilliantly ciphers Tawada’s magnificently inventive wordplay."
"With Japan obliterated from the map in a postapocalyptic near future, a refugee builds a new life in Denmark, where her interest in languages draws her into a ragtag group of linguists. It turns into a wondrously complex story of cultures colliding, languages morphing, and hidden narratives. Once opened, it’s hard to pull away."
"Tawada’s carefully built story probes the concept of homeland and the meaning of language."
"So smart, subtle and cogent is Tawada's transformation of today's politics into a could-be tomorrow.... In Margaret Mitsutani's wonderful translation, Tawada's text—its softness and precision, the unexpected jumps and meanderings of characters' conversations and narrations—enraptures the reader."
