Scattered All Over the Earth

About

Japan has vanished. Not conquered, not destroyed — simply gone, swallowed by environmental catastrophe and now remembered only as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, a former citizen and climate refugee, teaches immigrant children in Denmark using Panska, a language she invented by blending all the Scandinavian tongues. She is searching for another Japanese speaker — anyone who remembers the language that is disappearing along with the country that created it. Yoko Tawada's cheerfully dystopian novel is a story about language, identity, and what survives when a nation ceases to exist. Hiruko's quest is simultaneously comic and profound — a road trip across a transformed Europe where borders, languages, and identities have all become provisional. A novel about the last speaker of a lost language — and the joyful, desperate act of inventing new ways to be understood.