SPREAD OVER THE EARTH
By Yoko Tawada
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
In the future conceived by Yoko Tawada, rising sea levels have swallowed Japan. The ‘land of sushi’, as it is now known, survives only in the kitschy marks its culture has left on the exotic imaginations of Westerners, and in the memories of Hiruko, who was studying abroad in Sweden when disaster struck, and perhaps the last Japanese on the planet. Now a stateless refugee, Hiruko migrates first to Norway and then to Denmark, where she finds a job teaching Panska (i.e. Pan-Scandinavian), the “homemade language” she invented, to immigrant children from the Middle East. .
The first in a trilogy, the bitingly funny “Scattered All Over the Earth”, Tawada reunites 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 just international, her writing is translingual; she leaves open the boundaries between languages and makes them cross-pollinate. Translating her into English is digging up linguistic layers: Panska reads like a Japanese parody of Nordic syntax, translated into a West Germanic language.
Wouldn’t it be easier to communicate in English? During a hesitant appearance on a Danish TV show, Hiruko is asked about people from countries that no longer exist. But in the future, Mexico’s booming economy will attract Spanish-speaking workers from California, China will stop exporting products, and no one in the United States will remember how to make anything. Europe’s welfare states are looking to cut costs, so “English-speaking migrants are sometimes forcibly sent to America,” Hiruko told the interviewer in Panska. “Frightening. having illness, so not being able to live in a country with an underdeveloped health care system.”
Through the TV show, Hiruko meets Knut, an amateur linguist. Together they traverse Europe on a picaresque search for one of Hiruko’s 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 liberal guilt. Then they join Nora’s lover, Tenzo, at a cooking competition in Norway, before heading back to the south of France to meet the enigmatic Susanoo, who is said to be from Japan but may in fact be a robot.
Each character in Tawada’s “band of zigzag travelers” is given chapters to tell in the first person. These narrow perspectives give rise to a comedy of cross-cultural misunderstandings that both advance the plot and serve as targets for Tawada’s sharp satire. Tenzo, for example, turns out to be Nanook, a Greenlander who goes to study medicine in Copenhagen, where he is mistaken for a citizen of the ‘land of sushi’. “It was much more fun to be labeled exotic than to be neutral,” he concludes, so he decides to give himself a “second identity.” He takes a Japanese name, learns the language and is apprenticed at a restaurant called Samurai. Nanook is shocked to learn that the chef is from China, not Japan, and that he learned how to make dashi in a hotel in Paris, not Tokyo. “If the original no longer exists,” says the chef, “you can do nothing but look for the best copy.”
Wise words. Far from offended by Nanook’s trickery, Hiruko recognizes a kindred spirit. His “Tenzo” may be a lie, but it is nevertheless a form of creative expression, no different from her Panska. When she calls it her homemade language, she herself is the house she means. “Panska was me,” Hiruko says. “A work of art that I had completely immersed myself in.” What’s true of Hiruko, Tawada suggests, holds true for everyone from the harmless Nanook to an ultra-nationalist named Breivik: Our national identities are essentially simulacra, copies of originals that no longer exist, if they ever did.
The apocalypse cleverly predicted by “Spread the Earth” will be combined and uneven. How the global north deals with the ensuing refugee crisis will depend in part on how quickly it gives up the view that nationalities are anything but virtualities. Judging by the recent migrant crises that underpinned Tawada’s novel, it’s a long-awaited lesson. By the time we read the final installment of the trilogy, the climate fiction scenario that Tawada drapes in the trappings of a picaresque comedy will no longer seem speculative.
