Born in Tokyo in 1960, Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German: she has received the Akutagawa, Kleist, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Tanizaki prizes, as well as the Goethe Medal. Her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. Rivka Galchen in the New York Times Magazine hailed her work as “magnificently strange.” Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada (sharing her National Book Award) and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).
"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*
"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."
*Ryan Ruby - The New York Times*
"Wonderful—what is truly affecting is Tawada’s language, which
jumps off the page and practically sings."
*Juan Vidal - NPR*
"Threats abound—a changing climate, terrorism, and hostile
political structures create danger and uncertainty—but these
characters carry within themselves the seeds of a possible new
world. Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth is a cheerful
dystopian novel that celebrates inventiveness, possibilities, and
human connections."
*Foreword Reviews*
"Tawada expands upon the themes of language, immigration,
globalization, and authenticity which underpin this slyly humorous
first installment of a planned trilogy."
*Kirkus, Starred Review*
"Tawada slyly interrogates shifting (disappearing) borders and
populations, native (invented) identities, assumptions, and
adaptations. Her most frequent translator, Mitsutani, brilliantly
ciphers Tawada’s magnificently inventive wordplay."
*Booklist*
"Playful and deeply inventive."
*Julian Lucas - The New Yorker*
"“Monet’s colors change with each brushstroke, yet his landscapes
appear as a whole,” Knut reflects, and Ms. Tawada’s characters are
similarly impressionistic: mobile, protean and evanescent, whirled
together in a manner that can seem insubstantial but combines to
form a vision of beauty and calm."
*Sam Sacks - The Wall Street Journal*
"Reading Yoko Tawada is a marvel…Scattered All Over the Earth is a
reflection on language, migration and identity that manages to be
entirely unpredictable."
*Declan Fry - ABC (Australia)*
"For a book about the end of the world as we know it, Yoko Tawada’s
Scattered All Over the Earth is awfully cheery… [I]t’s possible to
not understand someone even when you speak the same language, and
to use different words but still recognize each other well."
*Eve Sneider - Wired*
"Tawada’s satirical tone and flirtation with sci-fi are intensely
original."
*Julia Kornberg - Bookforum*
"This dystopian novel is riveting, bizarre as can be, and like
nothing else I've ever read. I'm terrified not enough people will
read it. "
*Kamil Ahsan - NPR*
"Reading Tawada you feel her subtle authorial presence,
simultaneously guiding the reader ashore and casting us out to sea;
paradoxically, both lead to a single destination. Where do we—along
with Hiruko, Knut, Akash, Tenzo, Nora and Susanoo—end up? It can
only be described as somewhere soft and strange and new."
*Matthew Janney - Financial Times*
"The world is close to our own, suggesting that soon our boundaries
will radically change. Tawada reminds us that we, too, might become
refugees from lands that no longer exist—obliterated by nuclear
mishaps, rising water levels, or arbitrary lines drawn in history
textbooks."
*Emma Heath - Cleveland Review*
"With Japan obliterated from the map in a postapocalyptic near
future, a refugee builds a new life in Denmark, where her interest
in languages draws her into a ragtag group of linguists. It turns
into a wondrously complex story of cultures colliding, languages
morphing, and hidden narratives. Once opened, it’s hard to pull
away from."
*Publishers Weekly*
"Tawada is immune to the seduction of ideal worlds. Even when
speculative, her fiction still manages to operate in the world that
we actually inhabit: one characterized by slippages, ambiguity, and
a history of territorial entanglements that began long before
twentieth-century globalism—entanglements that, in fact, go back so
far that they might be one of the few things coterminous with being
human."
*Reed McConnell - The Baffler*
"As she encounters people from all over the globe, Tawada’s
carefully built story probes the concept of homeland and the
meaning of language."
*Mahita Gajanan - Time Magazine*
"Tawada builds from many points of view and moves fluidly between
characters who express themselves in Danish, English, German, and
Japanese, for a resulting work that must have been a puzzle to
translate. Indeed, the resulting insights on language and cultural
meaning leave me with the pleasant feeling that new neurons are
connecting in my brain. She leaves some major ambiguities for her
readers, but I feel content closing the book to ponder them."
*Emma Brown - The International Examiner*
"Like Panska itself, the state of the world is veiled in
strangeness. Tawada’s words are easy to understand—in this novel
more than ever—and her dystopia is Day-Glo bright. "
*Natasha Wimmer - The New York Review of Books*
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