AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FORM OF FACE
Scattered All Over The Earth by Yoko Tawada; translated by Margaret MitsutaniGrantaJune 2022Selected by Barbara Epler
In her mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel, Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada views (through friendship and linguistic ingenuity) the world’s climate disaster and its attendant refugee crises. Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the Earth, is remembered as “the land of sushi”. Hiruko, a former citizen and now a climate-change refugee, 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 makes new friends and is soon off travelling with her intrepid band of companions. This happily mind-bending masterwork brings to mind a 21st-century Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows. – Barbara Epler
I was really getting fed up with this programme. While I was still wondering whether I should change the channel a man from the former Yugoslavia, a woman from the former Soviet Union, and a few others came on and said their bit for the cameras.
I listened to them, getting more and more irritated. They sounded almost proud of coming from countries that didn’t exist any more. As if that somehow made them special. We’re not living in the Kingdom of Denmark any more, so couldn’t you say we’ve lost our country, too? Our ancestors had a sprawling kingdom that encompassed Greenland, † but now we live in this one tiny country on the edge of Europe. That change didn’t happen in my lifetime, but couldn’t you say I’m the second generation of people who lost their country?
Actually, I’m sure our official loss of Greenland has something to do with my mother’s strange affliction. Otherwise, she wouldn’t always be going on about Eskimos as if they were her own children. Now she’s paying tuition for a young Eskimo guy who’s studying to be a doctor. I’m her own son, but when I want to go abroad and ask her for help with travel expenses she’ll turn away and say something like, “Sorry – don’t have any to spare right now.”
I suddenly remembered I’d promised my mother I’d go over to her place for dinner that night. Going out in the rain was too much trouble. I decided to text her and say I’d caught a cold. If I phoned her she’d immediately know I was lying.
While these thoughts were running through my head a close-up of an entirely different sort of face appeared on the TV, and I slid off the sofa for a closer look. There used to be a popular anime called The Cosmos Where Rain Never Falls and she reminded me of the heroine. Apparently from an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia, she’d come as a foreign student, planning to stay for just a year but then a couple of months before she was supposed to go home, her country disappeared. She hadn’t seen her family or friends since. Hearing that I swallowed hard, as if my mouth was full of lemon juice, but she just calmly went on talking. Her face was like the sky with the northern lights – bright yet dark. What really got to me, though, was the language she was speaking. I could understand it all right, but it wasn’t Danish. It was much crisper, more staccato. For the first few seconds I thought it might be Norwegian, but no. It sounded closer to Swedish, but definitely wasn’t that either. ‡ I was staring at the close-up of her mouth on the screen as if I wanted to kiss it, which was embarrassing, so I turned away for a minute, and when I looked back again I thought I saw a resemblance to that Icelandic singer Björk when she was young. Could this woman be speaking some Icelandic language? She’d said she was from an island. Iceland is an island, too. But what about the geographical position? True, global warming is melting the Arctic ice, making new oceanic currents, but you never hear anything about Iceland being swept all the way over toward China and Polynesia. So what language was she speaking anyway? The moderator must have been wondering the same thing.
“Tell me,” she asked, “what is this language you’re speaking so fluently?”
For the first time, the woman smiled. “homemade language,” she said. “no place to return. in gothenburg studied, but couldn’t extend. so to trondheim went. one-year scholarship. spring, summer, autumn, winter quickly passed. what to do? trouble, but found job in odense. again moved. recent immigrants wander place to place. no country obliged to let them in has. not clear if they can stay. only three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most scandinavian people understand.”
“Wouldn’t English work as well?”
“english speaking migrants sometimes by force to america sent. frightening. illness have, so in country with undeveloped healthcare system cannot live.”
“Do you want to stay in Denmark permanently?”
“yes. hoping denmark afloat stays, not to bottom of sea sink.”
I’d planned to do nothing this Sunday afternoon, but now my heart was pattering like a small drum. I felt a rush, like a street performer when a crowd starts to gather. The name Hiruko, J. flashed across the bottom of the screen. ◉
† In Tawada’s novel, Denmark has ceded or lost Greenland, though in reality Greenland is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. Donald Trump tried to buy it from the Danes in 2019, but his offer was rejected.
‡ Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are linguistically similar enough that speakers of each tend to understand the other. Although although written Norwegian is very similar to Danish, spoken Norwegian more closely resembles Swedish.