Scattered All Over the Earth

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Knut is a graduate student of linguistics at a university in Copenhagen. One day he comes across a television panel featuring people who grew up in countries that no longer exist. He becomes fascinated by a young Japanese woman called Hiruko, who appears on the program speaking an unfamiliar language that turns out to be a homemade form of “Pan-Scandinavian.” 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. 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).

She goes on to give a more political account of Panska’s origins, explaining that immigrants used to end up in one country, needing to learn only one language, but now they are constantly in transit and a hybrid is required. Perhaps Panska is a miracle, heralding the inception of a harmonious postnational world. (And what better place for its birth than the model countries of Scandinavia?) Or perhaps it is a tragic necessity, a tool forced upon Hiruko by the disappearance of her homeland and her status as a passportless migrant. Tawada, who lives in Berlin and writes in Japanese and German, has a tendency to borrow fantastical premises from folk tales that dip into mind-bending hypotheticals: What if a woman married a dog? What if it’s the children who grow ill, and the elders who thrive? What if an anthropomorphic polar bear in East Germany becomes a bestselling memoirist? Tawada has always had a talent for ventriloquizing eccentrics, following singular minds through fugue and limbo. “Scattered All Over the Earth” departs from this model by introducing a team of such characters—a shift from exploring the inner worlds of linguistic displacement toward Babel-like allegory. As metafiction, it succeeds brilliantly, sketching a grim global dilemma with the sort of wit and humanism that Italo Calvino, in a discussion of lightness in literature, described as “weightless gravity.”

Like Mr. Kundera, who wrote in Czech and then French, Ms. Tawada is dual-lingual novelist, alternating between Japanese and German, which she learned when she moved to Hamburg in the 1980s. “Scattered All Over the Earth”—written in Japanese and translated by Margaret Mitsutani—possesses both the looseness and wistfulness of extreme displacement. In its speculative setting, some unspecified disaster has caused Japan to disappear under the sea. Hiruko is one of countless refugees who have come to Europe—in her case, to Denmark, where she is hired to teach immigrant children about European culture. But rather than pine for her lost homeland or fully assimilate, Hiruko has followed an individual path of self-creation, synthesizing aspects of her different cultures into a unique whole, exemplified by a “homemade language” she has invented called Panska. In place of the original tree’s natural branches, the Lord grafted in branches of wild trees as a stimulant in hope that they might bear good fruit if nourished by strong roots (verses 9–12). Rejected by Israel, the gospel was given to the gentiles in Palestine and throughout the world. For a while, the wild branches did bear good fruit, but in time they began to overrun and sap the strength of the roots (verses 15–18; 29–37). The early apostolic Christian Church flourished among the gentiles but soon fell into apostasy. The natural branches scattered through four parts of the vineyard also started to bear good fruit, but in time they all turned wild (verses 19–29, 38–47). Scattered Israel also received Christ and His gospel but fell into apostasy. They visit Trier to meet Nanook, and make friends with Akash, an Indian, and Nora, a German. Akash is a transgender person who dresses in red saris. Nora works in a museum and has a keen concern in environmental issues. She is also Nanook’s former girlfriend. As I spend more time in Nashville, I’m also meeting Americans who are passionate about Japan in a way that surpasses my own knowledge of the country and its customs. There’s a woman who leads forest bathing tours inspired by the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku; a ramen chef whose passion originated from once hosting a Japanese exchange student; and a half-Japanese mom who can hear the subtle difference when her baby babbles with her English-speaking grandparents and her Japanese-speaking ones.

She gets tip-offs after appearing on a variety programme about lost languages, leading to a multi-city quest across Europe with an expanding ragtag entourage of characters. The Meiji period in Japan was the main stage for the country’s overall modernization. Starting in 1868, with the crowning of fourteen-year-old Emperor Meiji, the island started to reshape itself from being an isolated, feudal society under Chinese influence and entered an increasingly interconnected, Westernized world. Nineteenth-century Japan, Mizumura explains, wanted to move away from the Sinosphere toward creating international networks, particularly with the American and British Empires. During this period, linguistic debates ensued as to how to create a new version of Japanese—one statesman, Mori Arinori, going so far as to claim that Japan should “yield to the domination of the English tongue.” Other members of the intelligentsia wanted to replace Japanese characters with Romanized ones, making it a horizontal language, read from left to right. And although these proposals were never executed, the Meiji Restoration decided to cut a considerable number of Chinese characters and incorporate, instead, more vernacular syllabary ideograms. Nowadays, the Japanese language looks like a combination of easy-to-memorize syllabaries ( katakana for foreign loan words and hiragana for Japanese words) and harder-to-memorize kanjis (simplified versions of the Chinese ideogram system). Modern Japanese, Mizumura explains, was a modern invention, a fiction that accompanied the assimilation of Japan into the early stages of Western forms of capitalism. Assuredly, days are coming—declares the Lord—when it will no more be said, As the Lord lives who brought the Israelites out of the land of Egypt, but rather, As the Lord lives who brought the Israelites out of the northland, and out of all the lands to which he had banished them. . . . Lo, I am sending for many fishermen—declares the Lord—. . . . And after that I will send for many hunters. . . . For My eyes are on all their ways, they are not hidden from My presence, their iniquity is not concealed from my sight. . . . Assuredly, I will teach them, once and for all I will teach them My power and My might. And they shall learn that My name is Lord [Jehovah or Yahweh] (Jeremiah 16:14–21). [6] 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.In Yoko Tawada’s latest release of dystopian fiction, Scattered All Over the Earth (2022), “the land of sushi” (presumably Japan) disappears due to global warming and rising sea levels. As a result, the country lingers on only in its kitschy and most digestible form. While no one remembers the actual name of the disappeared land, people do reminisce on anime, miso soup, and cosplay. (Author Yoko Tawada) Japan was already gone in more ways than one. Urbanization led to the leveling of the country’s sacred mountain ranges. The nation’s sex drive had become “practically extinct.” The overworked and neglected Japanese people eventually could not “distinguish between the virtual and real worlds” once human connections became a luxury most people could not afford. Japan was not the only country destined for disappearing. The apocalypse casts a shadow that spreads over Europe, where environmental poisons decimate populations of oceanic wildlife. Israel’s punishments follow the classic pattern of the law of justice: our actions or reactions to the laws of God and the universe lead to certain consequences, which will result in experiences and feelings, which bring either happiness or sorrow into our lives. The law of justice relates to the other divine laws and provides the means by which people receive their just reward. In essence, the law of justice might be ­summarized as follows: The following chart summarizes how Abraham’s family has contributed to the different important areas of our lives: As seen from the chart above, the later Arab tribes included descendants of both Abraham (primarily through Ishmael’s lineage) and Lot. Note how the ancestors of the Arabs multiplied into more nations and greater numbers far more rapidly and extensively than the Israelites, who were descendants of Jacob, just one of the twenty-one known grandsons of Abraham (see 1 Chronicles 1:29–34). [1]

The following is just a brief sampling of how Abraham’s descendants (including the Arabs, Israelites, and Jews) have blessed the peoples of the earth, especially since the Savior’s earthly ministry. Abraham’s posterity has blessed humankind through three great religions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—and these blessings have reached into all dimensions of our lives.

What if Japan no longer exists? That’s the premise of her latest novel, Scattered All Over the Earth , which follows six individuals of various national, ethnic, and gender identities, who somehow come together to aid a Japanese woman named Hiruko find another person who can speak with her in her native language. Meanwhile, Hiruko has invented a new language called Panska (a word combining “pan” and “Scandinavia”) which can be understood by most Scandinavians, but is so distinct that she is the only one who can speak it. The novel’s narrators rotate between the six characters as they travel together throughout Europe, looking to help Hiruko but also themselves. 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. Tawada wrings a lot of punning mileage from the concept of a “mother tongue.” Her male characters are all in flight from women. Tenzo is fleeing not just Nora but also a Danish benefactor, who gave him a scholarship out of maternal affection for the “Eskimos.” Knut is avoiding his real mother, mostly because of her instinctive grasp of the way he uses language to evade responsibility. His repulsion leads him toward Hiruko, whose Panska sounds freeingly strange—but she, of course, is in the grip of an ambivalent longing for her native speech. The linguistic love triangles culminate in a somewhat chaotic dénouement, filled with comedy and coincidence. Hiruko does eventually find another native speaker, but the encounter comes with a twist that undermines the whole search.

Tenzo, originally a Greenlander, is described as an “Eskimo” throughout the story, despite that term having racist and offensive implications. He explains that “people who consider the word ‘Eskimo’ racist think it’s enough to just replace it with ‘Inuit’, even though strictly speaking not all Eskimos are Inuit.” Through Tenzo’s perspective, Tawada casts an uncomfortable spotlight on the perhaps simulated discomfort that many non-natives exhibit over the treatment of indigenous people. Tenzo is not the only character “driven into an ethnic corner.” Everyone in Tawada’s novel experiences what it’s like to be exoticized. Foreignness is all just a matter of perspective. Jacob later says more about the Jews in 2 Nephi 10:7–9: “But behold, thus saith the Lord God: When the day cometh that they shall believe in me, that I am Christ, then have I covenanted with their fathers that they shall be restored in the flesh, upon the earth, unto the lands of theiBy the time of Abraham’s entrance into Canaan, it appears that some faithful communities of children of God were scattered throughout the world. The Jaredites, a Semitic people of Book of Mormon fame, had left Babylonia much earlier and were already well established in the Americas (see Ether 1–2, 6). And as Abraham left Ur and traveled southwestwards towards the western regions of the Fertile Crescent, Melchizedek, the righteous high priest, reigned over Salem in Canaan (see Genesis 14:17–20). Also around this time, Job was a just and faithful patriarch in Uz, a land eastward of Canaan (see Job 1:1–5). Abraham was selected to receive special covenant promises that would carry through to the end of this earth’s history and into eternity.