Details

ISBN-10: 0811229289
ISBN-13: 9780811229289
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: 03/01/2022
Dimensions: 8.00" L, 5.10" W, 0.60" H

Scattered All Over the Earth

Translator: Margaret Mitsutani

Paperback

Price: $16.95

Overview

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, 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 soon makes new friends. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra-nationalist named Breivik; unrequited love; Kakuzo robots; red herrings; uranium; an Andalusian matador. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm.

With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.

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Reviews
Magnificently strange. Tawada is reminiscent of Nikolai Gogol, for whom the natural situation for a ghost story was a minor government employee saving up to buy a fancy coat, the natural destiny of a nose to haunt its owner as an overbearing nobleman.–Rivka Galchen "New York Times Magazine"
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Details

ISBN-10: 0811229289
ISBN-13: 9780811229289
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date: 03/01/2022
Dimensions: 8.00" L, 5.10" W, 0.60" H
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