Trying to find a home in language

Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada, 2018

Globes and books

Scattered All Over the Earth, by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani, Granta Books, 2022. (Original publication date 2018)

Why write about it

This is a slight book, in my initial experience of it.  But it is one of the few novels that really, really thinks about what language is, what the meaning of language is, about what it means to be living in a second language, or to lose one’s first.  I’m not sure that I’ll reread it, but I read it this first time with pleasure, and can imagine that it might turn out to be one of those slow-burn novels that seem slight at first but that later come to seem surprisingly weighty.

How I came across it

A few years ago, before the pandemic, I was at the annual literature festival at the Louisiana Art Museum in Denmark.  Louisiana is a modern art museum with large gardens, and is located on the shore of the Öresund Strait, whose water separates Denmark from Sweden on its path between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea and eventually the Atlantic.  A few minutes up the road from the museum is Helsignør, which Shakespeare anglicized to Elsinore when he set his play in the castle there.  A hour away, in the other direction, the strait separates Copenhagen and Malmö, Sweden’s third biggest city.  During the War, people escaped the holocaust in Nazi-occupied Denmark by crossing it in tiny fishing boats.  Now, it has the feel, to anyone who has lived in New York, of the way the Hudson River separates Manhattan from New Jersey.  Once, I was having coffee on the waterfront in Malmö, looking out across the water, and heard two woman speak, in American English, about how they were going to cross “the river” to Copenhagen the next day, and felt great fellow-feeling.  It took a long time for me to experience the strait as what it is and not a strangely transposed Hudson River.

At the literature festival there were writers whose work I had been reading for decades and writers I had never heard of.  One was described as a woman who had moved from Japan to Germany to go to university, and who had stayed, becoming a fiction-writer, and who still wrote in both languages, sometimes translating her own work from one to the other.  Her best-known novel, according to the catalog, was told from the point of a view of a polar bear living in Berlin.  I had never heard of her.  I went to her event.

I saw a small, middle-aged-to-older woman on a stage being interviewed by a man who seemed somewhat younger.¹ I can’t remember now if the catalog described him as a book critic, a journalist, an editor, or a novelist, but one had the sense from the text that he was someone of stature in the Danish literary world.  And it was instantly obvious, once the interview began, that he was starstruck, slightly stunned, in the most wonderful way,  to be speaking with this particular writer.   I was interested in that;  it occurred to me that I had not often seen precisely that dynamic when it come to these ages and these genders.

It became clear within minutes that the interviewee was a major writer doing major things with language, and that it was bizarre that I had never heard her name.  But it also came out that her style was magical realism, which I have an aversion towards; and when the museum bookstore only had her work in Danish, which I don’t read, I didn’t pick the books up and merely kept her name in mind.

A couple of months ago I was in Copenhagen and had some extra time to stop by a favourite bookstore there.  This bookstore has a strong English-language literature section where I occasionally see things that I have not already read about in the British or American periodicals whose book sections I follow. (That experience — of encountering an English-language book entirely fresh, without having already read about it —  is a pleasure that one doesn’t  often get out in the Swedish countryside.)  On one of the tables was a paperback by the writer I had heard speak at Louisiana.  It felt more my style than the polar bear book, and I gladly bought a copy.

About the book

One could possibly call the tone of Scattered All Over the Earth magical realism, but it doesn’t have that feel of breaking-the-rules-of-the-world-in-creepy-ways that upset me when I read too much Gabriel Garcia Márquez as a child.

Scattered All Over the Earth is more like a gentle alternative timeline or near-future dystopia. In its world, much is as it is now, but Denmark no longer owns Greenland, and asylum-seekers in Europe who speak English might find themselves unwillingly sent on to the US, where they are welcomed due to a shortage of workers, but where social conditions, including access to health care, are notably inferior.  

Above all, when it comes to differences: a country that used to exist has recently vanished, along with its inhabitants, and very few in other countries remember its name or have more than a vague sense of it.  The vanished country’s main cultural exports — sushi, for example — are now ascribed to other countries.

The plot of the novel, to the extent that it’s plot-driven, is that a group of young people coalesce to help a young woman from the vanished country, now living in Denmark, to find a elderly man elsewhere in Europe who may or may not be the only other remaining speaker of her first language. The young people wander around Europe a little, seeking him out.

That’s all.  But the book is lovely.  It asks what it means to see a language as a home, or not to see it as a home.  What it means to create connection and distance though shared language. The book seemingly starts in Copenhagen because Tawada wants to use the similarities and differences between the Scandinavian languages to make a point:  one character, a linguist who needs to hide her ability to speak English if she wants to stay in Europe, creates a kind of idiolect that is equally understandable to speakers of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, and this idiolect’s like-home-but-not-like-home quality to her Danish friends becomes a leitmotif in the novel.  There are other themes too — parents and children, identity and perception of identity, various forms of romantic attachment — but this is above all a book about language, and I can’t imagine that there is anyone who is living in a second language, or who is related to someone who is, or who is a linguist, or who simply enjoys thinking about language, who will not be glad to have read it.

Margaret Mitsutani’s English translation is outstanding.  Never a sense of “this cannot be right” or “this must mean something else in the original than it means in English, even if the words themselves are the same;” just a sense of reading, and of reading something well-written.

1. However, I was wrong about the age difference that I perceived from the back of the room during the interview.   In the photos from the Louisiana event, the author looks barely middle-aged, much less “older,” and the interviewer turns out to be around the same age as she is.