'Scattered All Over the Earth': Yoko Tawada's utopia rejects present-day conventions

It is perhaps unsurprising that a novel written by a Japanese author living in Germany, who regularly writes in both her native and adopted tongues, should focus so much on the nature of communication. The connection between language and identity is at the heart of "Scattered All Over the Earth," a new novel by Yoko Tawada, translated from Japanese into English by Margaret Mitsutani.

The novel’s protagonist, Hiruko, is a climate refugee cast adrift in northern Europe after Japan has succumbed to an unspecified environmental disaster. The Japanese populace is scattered all over the Earth, and it has been a long time since Hiruko has spoken to anyone in her first language. She works as a storyteller for children in Denmark, translating folk tales and legends into Panska, a language of her own invention based on a blend of Scandinavian languages. Armed with Panska and her own positive, can-do attitude, she is able to converse with anyone she meets but still yearns to speak Japanese.

This desire sets her on a journey that is something of a “Canterbury Tales” for the 21st century. As Hiruko travels around Europe, she collects a band of lost souls, each with a story to tell. Each chapter is told by a different character, giving rise to an orchestra of voices intermingling, echoing, reinterpreting and retranslating one another. This is a thoroughly modern novel that reflects the seismic changes technology and globalization have wrought on humanity.

The voices are all those of young people, comfortable with the idea of having fluid identities and being rootless. Toward the end of the novel, the rag-tag group congregates in a closed restaurant, where their connections, fears and expectations are laid clear across a symbolic roundtable. There is no judgement or rejection; acceptance is the watchword of the group until one of their mothers arrives and begins forcing old-fashioned ideas on them. She categorizes them by race, gender and nationality — effectively excluding Akash, a transgender woman from India, because she doesn’t neatly fit into the rigid definitions the older generation clings to.

Although the novel has been described as dystopian, in actuality, it is supremely utopian. Tawada looks at contemporary identity politics as a revolution that can bring people together, a potential way out of the hideous mess we've made of the world.

The dystopia is the present day in which the reader lives, the one remembered by the characters in flashbacks, where people fear increasingly authoritarian governments and nations are paralyzed in the face of an impending climate crisis. Hamstrung by an inability to see beyond the weight of systems and institutions, the world’s inaction literally sinks Japan beneath the waves. The broken society, for Hiruko and her friends, is behind them. Now they are rebuilding a new, better future severed from the binaries, assumptions and demands of their parents’ generation.

Through Hiruko’s use of Panska, Tawada proposes that identities tied to nationalities, race and gender are holding us back as a species. It isn’t unusual for multilingual speakers to fashion a new personality to go with a new language — our very thought processes adjust to fit into the rhythms of an existing language and culture. For Hiruko, however, the process is reversed. She does not change who she is to adapt to a certain language. Rather, she creates a way of communication that is simple, open and friendly. The honesty of Panska arises from Hiruko’s nature, and because the invented language doesn’t stem from a national identity, it isn't synonymous with a specific culture. It is, in Joycean terms, free from the nightmare of history.

Tawada's real skill as a novelist is in making none of this didactic. Instead, she uses the polyphonic structure of the novel and the natural positivity of her characters to carry the argument, allowing the reader to lose themselves in the beautiful language, vivid descriptions of near-future Europe and the exciting thought experiments of a post-climate crisis renaissance.

This is not a novel for grumpy curmudgeons confused by pronouns or those who hark back to a "simpler" past; this is the first great utopian novel of the 21st century. Through Hiruko, Tawada encourages us to reject the exclusive, miserly conservative tendencies of the day and embrace the promise of a youthful revolution.