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SCATTERED ALL OVER THE EARTHBy Yoko TawadaTranslated by Margaret Mitsutani

In the future imagined by Yoko Tawada, rising sea levels have swallowed Japan. The land of sushi, as it is now known, survives only in the kitschified traces its culture has left on the exoticizing imagination of Westerners, and in the memories of Hiruko, who was studying abroad in Sweden when disaster struck, and may be the last Japanese person on the planet. Now a stateless refugee, Hiruko migrates first to Norway, then to Denmark, where she finds a job teaching Panska (that is, Pan-Scandinavian), the homemade language she invented, to immigrant children from the Middle East.

The first volume of a trilogy, the mordantly funny Scattered All Over the Earth reunites Tawada with Margaret Mitsutani, the translator with whom she shared a National Book Award for The Emissary in 2018. Tawada, who has lived in Germany for 40 years, writes in both Japanese and German. More than simply international, her writing is translingual; she leaves the borders between languages open and allows them to cross-pollinate. To translate her into English is to excavate linguistic strata: Panska reads like a Japonic parody of Nordic syntax translated into a West Germanic language.

Wouldnt it be easier to communicate in English? Hiruko is asked during a reluctant appearance on a Danish TV show about people from countries that no longer exist. But in the future, Mexicos booming economy is attracting Spanish-speaking workers from California, China no longer exports products and no one in the United States remembers how to make anything. Europes welfare states are looking to cut costs, so english speaking migrants sometimes by force to america sent, Hiruko tells the interviewer, in Panska. Frightening. illness have, so in country with undeveloped healthcare system cannot live.

Through the TV show, Hiruko meets Knut, an amateur linguist. Together they crisscross Europe on a picaresque quest to find one of Hirukos compatriots. They travel to an umami festival in Germany, where they meet Akash, a transgender student from India, and Nora, a German with a highly developed sense of liberal guilt. Then theyre off to see Noras lover, Tenzo, at a cooking competition in Norway, before departing again for the south of France to meet with the enigmatic Susanoo, who is rumored to be from Japan, but may in fact be a robot.

Each character in Tawadas band of zigzag travelers is given chapters to narrate in the first person. These limited perspectives give rise to a comedy of intercultural misunderstandings that both move the plot forward and provide targets for Tawadas sharp satire. Tenzo, for example, turns out to be Nanook, a Greenlander who moves to study medicine in Copenhagen, where he is mistaken as a citizen of the land of sushi. Being singled out as an exotic was a lot more fun than being neutral, he concludes, so he decides to give himself a second identity. He adopts a Japanese name, learns the language and apprentices at a restaurant called Samurai. Nanook is shocked to discover that the head chef is from China, not Japan, and that he learned how to make dashi at a hotel in Paris, not Tokyo. When the original no longer exists, the chef tells him, theres nothing you can do except look for the best copy.

Wise words. Far from being offended by Nanooks imposture, Hiruko recognizes a kindred spirit. His Tenzo may be a lie but it is nevertheless a form of creative expression, not unlike her Panska. When she calls it her homemade language, she herself is the home she means. Panska was me, Hiruko says. A work of art Id poured my whole self into. What is true of Hiruko, Tawada suggests, is true of everyone from the harmless Nanook to an ultranationalist called Breivik: Our national identities are at bottom simulacra, copies of originals that no longer exist, if they ever did.

The apocalypse thats shrewdly forecast by Scattered All Over the Earth will be combined and uneven. How the global north handles the resulting refugee crisis will depend in part on the speed with which it gives up the view that nationalities are anything but virtualities. Judging by the recent migrant crises that informed Tawadas novel, it is a long-overdue lesson. By the time we are reading the trilogys final volume, the climate-fiction scenario Tawada drapes in the trappings of picaresque comedy will no longer seem speculative.

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When Nations Disappear, What Happens to Nationalities? - The New York Times