Scattered All Over the Earth

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The following chart summarizes how Abraham’s family has contributed to the different important areas of our lives: 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. Although the Lord promised the house of Israel great blessings as the heirs through Isaac and Jacob of the full Abrahamic covenant, these blessings were conditional upon their exercising their agency in righteousness as they honored their covenants with God. Because of Israel’s disobedience to covenant promises with the Lord, the children of Israel were scattered among the nations of the earth, as the Lord had warned, but with the promise of an eventual gathering (see Deuteronomy 29–30).

Worth emphasizing is Margaret Mitsutani’s incredible translation in Scattered All Over the Earth (2022). “Panska” is artificial, a somewhat messy amalgamation of various Scandinavian languages that were originally transcribed in Japanese. Tawada’s work is effectively a stunning quilt of languages layered atop one another. The author’s passion for language even leads her to question the conception of words that have problematic connotations. Hanging over the search for a native speaker is all the ethnocentric baggage that the concept implies. When Hiruko and the others reach Oslo, they find that they have arrived in the wake of Anders Behring Breivik’s devastating 2011 mass shooting, a grisly protest against immigration. The atrocity functions as a strange footnote to their adventure: Tenzo is meant to compete in a dashi competition at an Oslo sushi restaurant owned by an ultranationalist who also happens to be named Breivik—and who soon falls under suspicion of killing a whale. The turn of events skewers Japanese and Norwegian nationalism (both countries attempt to justify whaling through appeals to culinary tradition) by undercutting each society’s imagined uniqueness. Recipes, whales, and words all get around; even in a culture’s most chauvinistic totems, Tawada seems to say, there are traces of the foreign. This story is itself translated, of course—by Mitsutani from the Japanese—and it is a bravura performance. Elsewhere, Mitsutani and Susan Bernofsky, Tawada’s translator from the German, perform impressive feats with her linguistic effects (and her simplest sentences, too—few things are as hard to translate as artful candor or casual vernacular). Some interlanguage play is surely lost; in the Japanese version of Scattered All Over the Earth, for example, “Hiruko” is rendered in Latin script, making the character a kind of Western-Japanese hybrid not unlike a young woman in an earlier story who is described as “start[ing] to have one of those faces like Japanese people in American movies.” But what is lost in one place is compensated for elsewhere. Japanese words as foreign objects (usually in transliterated form) are very much a part of Scattered All Over the Earth. Spiritual/ religious: world religions, gospel truths, priesthood blessings, scriptures, prophets, temples, missionary work

The prophet Zenos talks about the Jews in 1 Nephi 19:15–16: “Nevertheless, when that day cometh, saith the prophet, that they no more turn aside their hearts against the Holy One of Israel, then will he remember the covenants which he made to their fathers. . . . And all the people who are of the house of Israel, will I gather in, saith the Lord” (emphasis added). The first condition and promise identified is a change of attitude that leads to a gathering phase for the house of Israel to the lands of their inheritance. Hiruko and Knut set off together to look for other survivors from Hiruko’s vanished homeland who might speak the same mother tongue. The first place they visit is an “Umami Festival” being held in the German city of Trier. Slated to speak at the festival is Nanook, a Japanese chef conducting research on umami flavors. My mother was the farthest thing from a “tiger mom,” never forcing me to go to Japanese school on Saturdays like other Japanese families, encouraging me to go forward with my studies in English even if it meant our conversations would continue to sound confusing to outsiders. Over the years, my mother, too, began to learn English as a hobby, taking the TOEIC English proficiency test for fun. She prided herself on being able to watch episodes of Sex and the City without using Japanese subtitles. The displacement is yet more surreal in “Memoirs of a Polar Bear,” a saga published in 2011 about three generations of ursine acrobats in Berlin. It is, as improbable as it sounds, a historical novel: Tawada fictionalizes the lives of Tosca, the Canadian-born star of the East German state circus, and her son, Knut, whom she rejected at birth, and whose miraculous survival at the Berlin Zoo sparked a worldwide craze in the early two-thousands. Tawada augments the family with an imperious matriarch from Moscow, who defects to West Germany and writes a best-selling memoir entitled “Thunderous Applause for My Tears.”

If I just have someone to talk to, that will be enough," says Hiruko, craving the familiarity of the Japanese vocabulary and the soft caress of the language's intonation.

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While this might sound like a horrific situation to some, I’ve found that being as strange as a talking polar bear comes with its benefits. In Tokyo, my outward appearance blended in with most people around me, but inside I was a foreigner yearning to get out. In New York, where most people around me also came from other countries, no one bothered to ask me about Japan because they thought it was impolite, or worse, they thought they already knew everything they needed to know. Knut and Hiruko’s travels feature companions who also become narrators, creating a kaleidoscopic array of languages and personas: there is Akash, an Indian trans woman who studies the dynamics of sex and gender; Nora, a precocious, bourgeois German fashioning herself after the teachings of Karl Marx; Nanook, an Indigenous Greenlander who discovers his life in Denmark is easier if he pretends to be from Japan; and Susanoo, the other Japanese migrant in the country, who grew up in a fishing town that was scattered by the development of a nuclear planation and, later, the unnamed catastrophe. They are all displaced in their own way, and each is dusted with the ashes of the Soviet Union, the United States, and, in Trier’s Porta Nigra, the Roman Empire.