Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada
Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada
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Scattered All Over the Earth

Author: Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani

Narrator: Cindy Kay

Unabridged: 7 hr 46 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/01/2022


Synopsis

A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language."

As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they're all next off to Stockholm.

With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.

About Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960, moved to Hamburg when she was twenty-two, and then moved again to Berlin in 2006. She writes in both Japanese and German, and has received the Akutagawa Prize, the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the Tanizaki Prize, and the Goethe Medal.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Liong on August 17, 2022

I like the author, Yoko Tawada's writing style and the way she presented the story in this book. Each chapter has a different person telling their story from their point of view and all the stories are finally related together. There are few people characters and languages and even different races inc......more