14 S UNDAY, MARCH 13, 2022
IN THE FUTUREimagined by Yoko Tawada,
rising sea levels have swallowed Japan.
The “land of sushi,” as it is now known, sur-
vives only in the kitschified traces its cul-
ture has left on the exoticizing imagination
of Westerners, and in the memories of
Hiruko, who was studying abroad in Swe-
den when disaster struck, and may be the
last Japanese person on the planet. Now a
stateless refugee, Hiruko migrates first to
Norway, then to Denmark, where she finds
a job teaching Panska (that is, Pan-Scandi-
navian), the “homemade language” she in-
vented, to immigrant children from the
Middle East.
The first volume of a trilogy, the mor-
dantly funny “Scattered All Over the
Earth” reunites Tawada 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 simply
international, her writing is translingual;
she leaves the borders between languages
open and allows them to cross-pollinate. To
translate her into English is to excavate lin-
guistic strata: Panska reads like a Japonic
parody of Nordic syntax translated into a
West Germanic language.
Wouldn’t it be easier to communicate in
English? Hiruko is asked during a reluc-
tant appearance on a Danish TV show
about people from countries that no longer
exist. But in the future, Mexico’s booming
economy is attracting Spanish-speaking
workers from California, China no longer
exports products and no one in the United
States remembers how to make anything.
Europe’s welfare states are looking to cut
costs, so “english speaking migrants some-
times by force to america sent,” Hiruko
tells the interviewer, in Panska. “Frighten-
ing. illness have, so in country with unde-
veloped healthcare system cannot live.”
Through the TV show, Hiruko meets
Knut, an amateur linguist. Together they
crisscross Europe on a picaresque quest to
find one of Hiruko’s compatriots. They
travel to an umami festival in Germany,
where they meet Akash, a transgender stu-
dent from India, and Nora, a German with a
highly developed sense of liberal guilt.
Then they’re off to see Nora’s lover, Tenzo,
at a cooking competition in Norway, before
departing again for the south of France to
meet with the enigmatic Susanoo, who is
rumored to be from Japan, but may in fact
be a robot.
Each character in Tawada’s “band of
zigzag travelers” is given chapters to nar-
rate in the first person. These limited per-
spectives give rise to a comedy of intercul-
tural misunderstandings that both move
the plot forward and provide targets for
Tawada’s sharp satire. Tenzo, for example,
turns out to be Nanook, a Greenlander who
moves to study medicine in Copenhagen,
where he is mistaken as a citizen of the
“land of sushi.” “Being singled out as an ex-
otic was a lot more fun than being neutral,”
he concludes, so he decides to give himself
a “second identity.” He adopts a Japanese
name, learns the language and apprentices
at a restaurant called Samurai. Nanook is
shocked to discover that the head chef is
from China, not Japan, and that he learned
how to make dashi at a hotel in Paris, not
Tokyo. “When the original no longer ex-
ists,” the chef tells him, “there’s nothing you
can do except look for the best copy.”
Wise words. Far from being offended by
Nanook’s imposture, Hiruko recognizes a
kindred spirit. His “Tenzo” may be a lie but
it is nevertheless a form of creative expres-
sion, not unlike her Panska. When she calls
it her homemade language, she herself is
the home she means. “Panska was me,”
Hiruko says. “A work of art I’d poured my
whole self into.” 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.
The apocalypse that’s shrewdly forecast
by “Scattered All Over the Earth” will be
combined and uneven. How the global
north handles the resulting refugee crisis
will depend in part on the speed with which
it gives up the view that nationalities are
anything but virtualities. Judging by the re-
cent migrant crises that informed Tawada’s
novel, it is a long-overdue lesson. By the
time we are reading the trilogy’s final vol-
ume, the climate-fiction scenario Tawada
drapes in the trappings of picaresque com-
edy will no longer seem speculative. 0Small World
This novel lays bare the artificiality of national identities.
By RYAN RUBY
SCATTEREDALL OVER THE EARTH
By Yoko Tawada
Translated by Margaret Mitsutani
253 pp. New Directions. Paper, $16.95.
RYAN RUBYis the author of the novel “The Zero
and the One.” His criticism has appeared
most recently in The Nation and New Left
Review.
Yoko TawadaTHE THING I WASprepared to like least
about Amelia Morris’s funny and engross-
ing debut novel — new motherhood and all
the requisite growing pains — ultimately
became the thing I admired about it most. I
am someone who has always been suscep-
tible to the message that motherhood is
hard, joyless work, and, as I wrestle with
whether to join the club, I have been known
to ask friends what, if anything, they like
about having kids.
Leanne Hazelton, the narrator of “Wild-
cat,” answered that question for me in
tender, often quotidian ways. Every time
the baby (named “plain as day” Hank in a
self-important Los Angeles enclave of Ur-sasand Martines) spit up, developed a fe-
ver, cried, fell asleep or didn’t, I braced my-
self for certain catastrophe. There is an ad-
dictive tension to the story that is palpably
building to something — but that some-
thing wasn’t what I’ve been conditioned to
expect from a story about a first-time par-
ent in her 30s.
When we first meet Leanne, she is a new
mother, preparing for the publication of
her second book while grieving the unex-
pected death of her physician father, with
whom she had a strained relationship.
She’s excited for her first weekend away
since having Hank — Palm Springs to cele-
brate the fourth wedding anniversary of
her friend Regina Mark, bougie-bohemian
queen of Los Feliz. “But why your fourth
anniversary?” Leanne wants to ask, but
doesn’t. “Their friendship hadn’t typically
included questions like that — questions
that emphasized the discrepancies be-
tween their lifestyles.”
Regina comes to the door of her spectac-
ular desert home drunk and in a foul mood
— her husband is being roasted on Face-
book for a cringey fashion branding video,
and he has brought shame onto the family.
In her champagne-induced stupor, Regina
makes several egregious admissions. She
hasn’t read an early copy of Leanne’s book
because she doesn’t “want” to. Worse, she
refuses to vaccinate her daughter, Ursa
Major, because vaccines are “gross.”
It’s the wake-up call Leanne needs to see
that she has outgrown the friendship,
struck up 10 years ago when “she didn’t yet
understand the ways she was willing to
make herself small so that a female figure
mightlove her.” The mature thing to do
would be to walk away from Regina right
then and there — but where is the schaden-
freude in that?Between attempts to expose Regina for
the overgrown mean girl she is, Leanne
strikes up a new friendship with a fellow
writer she has become “mildly obsessed
with,” the child-free critically acclaimed
author Maxine Hunter, who offers some-
thing Regina never could — an authentic
connection. I enjoyed the development of
this friendship, though the prologue,
where Leanne welcomes Maxine and 30
mewling cats into her home, comes from a
moment in the story that is downright
petty.
The more powerful parts of the story
come from Morris’s witty observations.
“Most of the world seemed to agree on the
horribleness of internet trolls,” Leanne
thinks, while scrolling through the com-
ments on the viral video of Regina’s dippyhusband, “but what about all of the online
commenters who made you feel seen,
made you laugh out loud? They were the
opposite of trolls. They should get a name
too.” Brilliant — and whatever you want to
call them, Leanne herself is most certainly
one.
There are also poignant epiphanies
about family, which occur via a truce with
her Republican physician mother and a
severing of ties with her father’s embit-
tered widow. I reread that chapter several
times, feeling as if I’d had the wind
knocked out of me, and suspecting I wasn’t
reading fiction at all.
And of course, the takedown of Regina,
when it finally arrives, is a chef’s-kiss mo-
ment.
“Wildcat” was a book I couldn’t set down
for long. What was all this tension leading
to? That something wasn’t divorce, an af-
fair, tortured regret over giving up your life
for a tiny, demanding demon. That some-
thing was the realization that you’re con-
tent with your life and your choices, even if
every day isn’t easy, and that it’s time to
excise the people who can’t be happy for
you too — and maybe make them suffer,
just a little. 0Platonic BreakA novel considers the impact of motherhood on friendships.By JESSICA KNOLLWILDCAT
By Amelia Morris
304 pp. Flatiron. $27.99.JESSICA KNOLLis the author of “Luckiest Girl
Alive” and “The Favorite Sister.”Amelia Morris