In this odd story we have Hiruko, a refugee from the largely forgotten Japan which has disappeared as a result of the climate emergency. Based in Denmark she meets Knut a linguist student who is interested in Hiruko's "homemade" language Panska, which is a mixture of Scandinavian languages that can be superficially understood by speakers of any of the individual languages. As they travel to a Festival of Umami where Hiruko hopes to connect with another Japanese person. Along the way they meet several other characters, primarily Akash, an Indian trangender woman.

There are some interesting musings on language and culture, borrowings, corruptions and influence but the story itself is disjointed and incoherent. There's an awful lot of misgendering and transphobia directed at Akash, whose character is also largely built of negative stereotypes. For a story about language I was extremely frustrated by a lack of real analysis of the power of language to impact people e.g., pronouns in favour of having characters argue about the meaning of similar words that exist in different languages. There's also a curious lack of differentiation between the inner voices of the characters, they all sound the same.

I really don’t know how I feel about this book. It took me forever to read because I kept putting it down and thinking of maybe leaving it. I really like the premise and the concept but there wasn’t enough of a story to keep me hooked in.

For me personally, I couldn’t quite grasp this book. I kind of enjoyed it, but also felt it was a little flat at the same time. The same as the authors previous book, BUT this one did have chapters which was great!

Maybe I will give it a reread

An interesting and thought-provoking novel about identity and language, involving a cast of characters across the spectrum. Slow at times, and as a first book in a proposed trilogy it naturally ends with an open-ended feeling, nonetheless this is a beautifully written and human piece of writing. 4 stars.

I had quite mixed feelings on this one. The premise was intriguing, and the storyline interestingly woven together across the odd cast of characters. I loved the focus on language and culture, and the exploration of what mattered and what defined a person's belonging or origin.

However, as many others have said, it does have its problems. On one side, I believe there's an issue with a translation from the Japanese - a trans character is repeatedly misgendered and oddly described, and I feel like this may not happen in the original language. This is either poor work on the translator's behalf, or poor writing from the author, but I don't know which.

Also, the characters themselves are quite strange, and you don't really get to know or understand any of them. Their motivations are tenuous and I just couldn't get a grip on how each really felt during all the POV switches. The plotline is also a bit up and down - I kept on reading as I was intrigued as to where it would go, but the ending really disappointed me. I do think an open ending can work, but it felt like I was missing half the book.

Overall, I would consider reading Tawada's work again, but I don't think I'd return to this novel.

I was offered this book as an ARC via NetGalley and was intrigued by the premise. The novel is vaguely reminiscent of a daisy chain story where each chapter leads to the next narrator. At times the switches felt a little disjointed as many involved flashbacks from the time the previous chapter left off. I think my biggest issue with the novel was that I didn't really engage with any of the characters. Perhaps it is just me but they all felt as though they were on their own agendas despite forming a 'team' and I am not sure how many people have the ability to just drop everything in their lives to tag along on a linguistic adventure. Readable but I won't be going back to it any time soon.

I really struggled with this book and almost had to tap out. The synopsis sounded great and concept could have been awesome, but something about the way the trans character was represented did not sit right with me. Not only this but the writing I found really difficult and was confused quite frequently. It's a shame because I wonder if this was a translation or localisation issue, as Yoko's work I have previously loved.

Whenever I was reading Scattered All Over the Earth, I was enjoying Tawada’s prose and I will definitely check out more of her writing because I loved the style. However, I put this book down many many times and would not have finished it if I were not providing a review.

I was really unsure about the representation of a trans character who appears to be repeatedly misgendered throughout the book and that completely distracted me from the plot. I liked the role of linguistics and the underlying sense of growing culturally but this was completely hamstrung by my question regarding language and the trans character. I also felt the ending was very abrupt. Without greater research, I would hesitate to recommend a book that appears to be transphobic. However, if I have misunderstood, I think there are lots of people who will love the sort of philosophical approach to how language works for us.

Really enjoyed the beginning and how there is a desi trans character mentioned in the book... until I looked up reviews and saw the trans character gets misgendered by everyone else. I don't want to read that even if I was enjoying the concept of the novel so far.

Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada review – Impending Diasporas and Disasters</b>

A multi-cultural band of language enthusiasts help a displaced woman in this first tale of a near-futuristic trilogy.

Best known for her works The Memoirs of a Polar Bear and The Last Children of Tokyo,Yoko Tawada’s latest work is set not in one place, but throughout Scandinavia in a future where Japan has been lost beneath the sea. An episodic tale that does not follow one but many different characters, a multi-cultural band of misfits and language enthusiasts, most notably Knut, a language student, who becomes deeply entranced by Hiruko, a native of “the land of sushi”, when he first hears her speak “Panska”, her own invented language – universally understood by most Scandinavian peoples. They set out to find Hiruko another Japanese person so they can hear an authentic conversation in an endangered language.

The concept of the story is interesting and at several points is quite humorous, yet it misses the mark. The way that it is written does not fulfil expectations. The main obstacle to the success of the story is that the characters share the same voice. Expectations would suggest that these characters from diverse backgrounds would speak differently. However, there are hardly any distinguishing features to the characters. Another key issue is that the only LGBTQ+ character, Akash, is misgendered throughout the novel. Despite these shortcomings, the story has promise and can be redeemed in the upcoming sequel.

The novel calls into question what it means to be a native speaker of a language. This work requires patience, but Tawada’s insightful, intriguing prose offers more than meets the eye and creates an agreeable, supportive cast that becomes a close-knit group of friends over the course of their shared journey.

I would like to thank Granta Publications and Netgalley for the privilege of reading this novel as an ARC. I would also like to thank Yoko Tawada for this thought-provoking novel. I am absolutely in love with the cover art and will purchase a paperback in the future.

DNF @ 45%

Some of this book presented an interesting commentary on language and how this affects our society, but I really just didn't care about any of the characters and nothing interesting enough was happening to keep me engaged. I felt quite a lot of what the author was trying to say had been lost in translation, not helped by the quite harmful and honestly odd portrayal of a trans character. Shame because the UK English edition has a beautiful cover, and I thought I'd enjoy this.

In the near future, Japan has disappeared. A Japanese woman named Hiruko is now working as a teacher for immigrant children in Denmark and has invented her language called Panska. On her journey to find more people who speak her native tongue, Hiruko collects a group of diverse friends as she travels across the globe. This fascinating study of how people adapt to where they find themselves and how they learn to communicate really kept me hooked. It’s about language, immigration and the importance of finding others like you. The characters are all very interesting and it was really lovely to see them all have a deep understanding of each other.

Did not finish.

Writing style (not dialogue, that made sense) was tricky to engage with and the main character’s personality and distain for computer games and casual fat-shaming wasn’t for me.

Dystopian novels are not my preferred read, but the premise of "Scattered All Over the Earth" by Yoko Tawada made me curious, especially that I have lived in both, Denmark and Germany, and wanted to explore the vision of these countries in the dystopian context.

The story itself, meaning what is going on between the main characters, wasn't as interesting to me as the backdrop that appears in their narratives. The world that Tawada imagined and described via first-person accounts is very complex in terms of understanding the impact of climate change, climate-led immigration, globalisation on people's lives, as well as identities, i.e. the way Nanook describes how his family life and relations looked like after Greenland became agricultural.

Reading "Scattered All Over the Earth" felt to me like playing a video game, in which exploring the map is way more interesting than the main mission, hence only a 3 star rating. I'm afraid that this storyline isn't engaging enough that its setting makes up for it.

I received a free copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review

a what-if scenario that feels like one big conversation. a sense of loss all the way through. in a world where Japan has ceased to be and a citizen has taken refuge in Scandinavia desperately trying to hang on to her native language, she tries to find people that share the tongue. The story is very slow-paced [almost a little
too slow-paced] and can be very hard to follow what is going on but the feeling of a lost and found group of people is done so well that it's like a particularly mournful slice of life tale. 3/5 overall.

I read Scattered All Over The Earth in a vaguely jet-lagged haze in a sunny afternoon in Providence Rhode Island. Its central concept, of displaced people without a homeland finding some kind of sense of place in language, dead languages, made up languages, someone elses languages food and culture was very attractive to me on that afternoon where I too was abroad, sharing a language and later that afternoon spending time with refugees all of whom now had a new language. I do think the afternoon and how I read it contributed to my sensation in reading it, in retrospect I worry that it is too structured, that it reaches for comparisons and similarities in language families which might not exist. And of course, the book has itself been translated - and I wonder if there is a cultural chauvinism at the heart of some of the character choices (the Greenlander who passes in Europe as Japanese feels unlikely to me).

There is something that is quite seductive about its set up, even if the initial narrator is a college drop-out, and most of its other characters are twenty-somethings who circle interests either in linguistics or sushi. When coming across a TV interview with a woman displaced from a Japan that no longer exists, and having moves around much of Scandinavia, she has developed her own argot of languages which seen intelligible by all Northern Europeans. Tawada riffs on this with other forms of linguistic, or physical characteristics as we bounce between some compelling and other less characters. It all ends up as more of a philosophical La Ronde than perhaps a compelling narrative, and Tawada does seem to ignore the existence of already successful combinatoric languages like Pidgin and constructed languages like Esperanto.

Scattered All Over The Earth is a pretty quick and conversational read. Episodic with its characters it does seem to rely on its structure to finally engineer a final gathering of all these diverse characters who all have a linguistic quirk. Its forgiving of its (made up) characters foibles, and a broadly satisfying denouement. But after my afternoon in the sun aspects hung on me for days where I wanted to pick at its take on language, and what I increasingly saw as flaws in its own status as a translated artefact.

First of all, thank you to Granta Publications and NetGalley for this ARC! This review was written voluntarily by me.

Truthfully, I do not know how to start this review because frankly, this book is not an easy read for me. I actually liked the world where the story is set which is dystopian near future (even though it is quite hard for me to imagine worldbuilding), their adventure and friendship but the characters kind of overwhelmed me. This is my first book from the author thus I am not really familiar with the author’s writing style. For me, the writing does not really confuse me so much even though I do not really read literary fiction. It is like I do understand the writing most of the time, but I am kind of overwhelmed with the messages intended by the author in the story. I do understand the main theme of the story which is for me language and communication but there are a lot of smaller topics that are addressed by characters that sometimes overwhelm me. Because each chapter is from a character’s POV, the author can address some topics based on the characters and their situation. Plus, long and heavy chapters are also quite tough for me to read due to my usual reading preference. However, the topics addressed by the author in this story are still interesting to me. In my opinion, this book is still a good book, but it just may not be for me.

Genre: #Dystopia #JapaneseLiterature #Fiction

I was truly impressed, amazed, lured by this book from its first pages.

Possibly it’s because I’m a migrant myself and often came across similar situations, I could resonate so well with this book. It also has a typical charm of Japanese literature, and leaves so much behind after reading it.

Main character – Hiruko, is from the land that no longer exists. She was born in Japan, but in Denmark where she lives now, her country is known a “Land of sushi”.

Everything in this book evolves around language, culture and personalities of the people from different parts of the world. And misconceptions, mainly how major part of European population see’s foreigners.

Through the course of the book, Hiruko uses self-made language “panska” in which she tries to describe things that she sees around her. One of my favourite parts of the book are explanations of words/meanings, that are not translatable into the foreign language.

Hiruko tries to find a person from her land, so she could speak her mother tongue with them, but in the end, she discovers that it’s not the language that unites us.

This book will definitely be going into my “recommend to everyone” reading list. So many ideas to reconsider after reading it and so important to see human beings outside of the boxes created by the society.

Thank you Granta books from Advanced readers copy, in exchange for honest review.

The idea of Japan disappearing is an intriguing response to that nation’s demographic crisis, the logical conclusion to the problem of a declining population. But this novel steadfastly refuses to do anything interesting with it. Plot is very much backgrounded in favour of character exploration, but I didn’t find any of the characters especially engaging, and didn’t really care about any of them. File under missed opportunity.

Firstly, I'd like to thank NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an early copy of this publication in return for an honest review.

This is the story of a group of young people from different cultures and language backgrounds bumping into each other in a world where climate change (and low birth rates) has eliminated several island nations, including Japan. The protagonists re-evaluate themselves, their cultures and their background through the intersections between themselves and their environment. The author connects cultures, languages, historical time periods, and educational disciplines even.

The main themes, at least as they came across to me, dealt with what makes us human and what differences really matter, the role "native" cultures play in our lives, and what it means to navigate non-native cultures and environments.

In some ways it's a nice work of art. The use of language is peculiarly beautiful, and linguistics plays a very dominant role in the narrative. A specific quote really stood out for me, as an example: "So dashi is the total sound coming from an orchestra, while umami is the music". The dialogues come across as being sculpted with a hair thin scalpel. The book is brief and actually a rather easy read, despite it's complex narrative structure. The lack of a clear storyline is compensated by the constantly uplifting and surprising form.

Despite all the above, I can't say I enjoyed the book tremendously. It's a personal preference more than anything else. This book is a beautiful form - exquisite and captivating in its beauty. The function is lacking - there is no clear narrative, some of the characters are more developed than others, but all are rather shallow. In some ways - this for me comes across as an example of post-modern art in fiction. I understand why people might like it, but I need much more function to be a fan. Some books (the best ones!) do both. This one excels in form.