Scattered All Over the Earth

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In the spiritual and religious realm, Christianity, which had its roots in earlier Judaic practice, has become the religion of 1.9 billion people, or 31.1 percent of the population of the world. The Judeo-Christian tradition, which derives from the spiritual labor of Abraham’s descendants, is a foundation of Western civilization, providing social and political values and the moral and ethical basis of the legal systems. That same tradition has made an emotional and psychological contribution in defining the value and purpose of life, the goodness of God, His love for all, and the Golden Rule as a guide for human conduct. In the social and cultural realm, the themes of the Bible have provided inspiration for great works of architecture, music, art, literature, and entertainment. It’s possible to interpret the novel as a cozy, upbeat response to global crisis. The young characters celebrate their differences while at the same time eliminating all barriers to communication, setting off on adventures together that are designed to heal in some small way the wounds of planetary dysfunction. Tawada suggests as much herself: “In this novel, I wanted to focus on a small group of people making their way through that world, to write about the bond of friendship that holds them together.” Still, it’s hard not to prefer Yoshiro’s deep-rooted, loving steadfastness in The Emissary to the rather machinelike chumminess of Hiruko and her friends. 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) Scattered All Over the Earth,” Tawada’s playful and deeply inventive new novel, isn’t quite a sequel to “The Emissary,” but it shares the conceit of a Japan amputated from the world. The first installment of a trilogy, it begins in Copenhagen, where a graduate student in linguistics named Knut is watching a televised panel on vanished countries. Among the speakers is Hiruko, a young woman originally from “an archipelago somewhere between China and Polynesia.” During her years of seeking asylum, she has invented a language called Panska, which is intelligible throughout Scandinavia. Knut is transfixed: “The smooth surface of my native language broke apart, and I saw fragments of it glittering on her tongue.” He finds Hiruko and joins her search for another surviving native speaker of Japanese. Knut and Hiruko’s travels feature companions who also become narrators, creating a kaleidoscopic array of languages and personas: there is Akash, an Indian trans woman who studies the dynamics of sex and gender; Nora, a precocious, bourgeois German fashioning herself after the teachings of Karl Marx; Nanook, an Indigenous Greenlander who discovers his life in Denmark is easier if he pretends to be from Japan; and Susanoo, the other Japanese migrant in the country, who grew up in a fishing town that was scattered by the development of a nuclear planation and, later, the unnamed catastrophe. They are all displaced in their own way, and each is dusted with the ashes of the Soviet Union, the United States, and, in Trier’s Porta Nigra, the Roman Empire.

According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. But their creator—a novelist, a poet, and a playwright—has chosen her estrangement. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even natural, about the way we use words. “Even one’s mother tongue,” she maintains, “is a translation.” Hiruko’s native language has long been lost, her island devoured by water. She was a refugee in Norway and Denmark, where she finally settled and developed the language she calls Panska, which draws on the resemblances between Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Panska, or Pan-Scandinavian, helps her move between countries and communicate with other immigrants. Spiritual/ religious: world religions, gospel truths, priesthood blessings, scriptures, prophets, temples, missionary work Pattern of scattering and gathering. Of particular interest is the notable pattern of the scattering, which began in the eighth century BC, and the gathering of the house of Israel, which began with the Restoration and has not yet been completed. The pattern is found often in the scriptures: the first shall be last and the last shall be first (see Matthew 19:30; D&C 29:30). This pattern was also prophesied concerning the scattering and gathering of Israel (see Jacob 5:63).Before…I wrote in German or in Japanese. Separate books. But I had the feeling the force of one language must come near the other…. I wrote five sentences in German and translated them into Japanese, and then continued the text in Japanese, five sentences, and then translated those into German, and so on.

Tawada unveils another undeniable truth: woven into languages are the threads of loss and pain sewn by its speakers. As more and more languages become globalized, the very nature of speech will become stained with the experiences and cultures of people across the world – weakening the very idea of a “native tongue.” In Chapter 1, a Danish linguistics student named Knut sees a woman on a television show who claims to be from a country that no longer exists. Her name is Hiruko and she speaks a homemade language she created drawing from different languages in the Scandinavian countries where she has been living. Knut is fascinated by Hiruko's story and calls the television station to ask if he can meet her. Hiruko agrees to meet Knut and the two go out to dinner together. She tells him that she is trying to find another person from her home country. She has heard of one person living in the German city of Trier. Knut agrees to travel there with her. As can be seen by the earlier historical review and the basic outlines shown above, important elements of the gathering of the house of Israel have occurred in the past few centuries, especially since the Church was established in 1830. Significant historical events in Church history, Jewish history, and Nephite/ Lamanite history demonstrate that God has certainly not forgotten Jacob’s family. These modern events are in partial fulfillment of key ancient prophecies and promises of God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as found in the scriptures. [4]

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. Comedy is everywhere, in each one of us,” wrote Milan Kundera, “it goes with us like our shadow, it is even in our misfortune, lying in wait for us like a precipice.” For Mr. Kundera, Stalinism was the tragedy that had to be met with frivolity. For novelists today, misfortune is often imminent rather than actual, taking the form of looming environmental and technological apocalypses. The rising ocean of dystopian fiction tends to be bleak and cautionary, but a few books have approached catastrophe through the universal language of humor: Joy Williams’s “Harrow,” for instance, and now, less caustically, Yoko Tawada’s ”Scattered All Over the Earth.” Hiruko and Knut set off together to look for other survivors from Hiruko’s vanished homeland who might speak the same mother tongue. The first place they visit is an “Umami Festival” being held in the German city of Trier. Slated to speak at the festival is Nanook, a Japanese chef conducting research on umami flavors. While this might sound like a horrific situation to some, I’ve found that being as strange as a talking polar bear comes with its benefits. In Tokyo, my outward appearance blended in with most people around me, but inside I was a foreigner yearning to get out. In New York, where most people around me also came from other countries, no one bothered to ask me about Japan because they thought it was impolite, or worse, they thought they already knew everything they needed to know. 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.

In Tawada’s dreamlike travelogue “Where Europe Begins,” an early short story, a young Japanese woman travelling on the Trans-Siberian Railway tries to identify where, exactly, one continent shades into another, but none of the passengers can agree. Gradually, she descends into a trance brought on by reading Tungus and Samoyed fairy tales, which cut across the journey like a polar wind. The woman learns from an atlas that Japan is, tectonically, a “child of Siberia that had turned on its mother and was now swimming alone in the Pacific . . . a seahorse, which in Japanese is called Tatsu-no-otoshigo—the lost child of the dragon.” She begins to dread the finality of arrival. Worth emphasizing is Margaret Mitsutani’s incredible translation in Scattered All Over the Earth (2022). “Panska” is artificial, a somewhat messy amalgamation of various Scandinavian languages that were originally transcribed in Japanese. Tawada’s work is effectively a stunning quilt of languages layered atop one another. The author’s passion for language even leads her to question the conception of words that have problematic connotations. In Chapter 3, an Indian person named Akash who is transitioning from male to female observes Knut and Hiruko at the Luxembourg Airport. Striking up a conversation, he learns they are going to Trier. Knowing the city well (and feeling a romantic attraction toward Knut), Akash offers to show them around. Knut and Hiruko are looking for a man named Tenzo, who will be putting on a presentation about dashi, an ingredient in Japanese food, at the Karl Marx House Museum. Hiruko believes that Tenzo is from her home country. The group has lunch together and then walks through the ruins of a Roman bathhouse, where they come upon a blonde woman.The following chart summarizes how Abraham’s family has contributed to the different important areas of our lives: In Chapter 6, Hiruko arrives in Oslo, where she meets Nora and Akash, who was sent by Knut in his place, supposedly because Knut's mother is ill. Hiruko meets Tenzo/Nanook at the restaurant where the cooking competition is being held, and immediately knows he is not Japanese. Tenzo/Nanook admits the ruse, and Hiruko convinces him to tell Nora the truth. The cooking competition is called off because a dead whale washes up on the beach and both Tenzo/Nanook and the restaurateur who was holding the competition are suspected of harming it, but they are ultimately cleared of these charges. 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] 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]

Thus, the gathering of Israel in the last days will be recognized as a greater miracle than when the Lord earlier delivered Israel out of Egypt.These three covenant promises made to Abraham were only partially fulfilled some 3,500 years later as Europe came out of the dark ages of medieval feudalism. Since the middle of the fifteenth century, these three divine promises with Abraham have rapidly moved toward their fulfillment. It seems that the greatest blessings of Abraham’s posterity to the earth will occur in latter days as enlightened and righteous descendants fulfill special missions to God’s children. The house of Israel indeed has the mission in our times of taking the gospel message to all the world. Hanging over the search for a native speaker is all the ethnocentric baggage that the concept implies. When Hiruko and the others reach Oslo, they find that they have arrived in the wake of Anders Behring Breivik’s devastating 2011 mass shooting, a grisly protest against immigration. The atrocity functions as a strange footnote to their adventure: Tenzo is meant to compete in a dashi competition at an Oslo sushi restaurant owned by an ultranationalist who also happens to be named Breivik—and who soon falls under suspicion of killing a whale. The turn of events skewers Japanese and Norwegian nationalism (both countries attempt to justify whaling through appeals to culinary tradition) by undercutting each society’s imagined uniqueness. Recipes, whales, and words all get around; even in a culture’s most chauvinistic totems, Tawada seems to say, there are traces of the foreign.