The Meiji period in Japan was the main stage for the country’s overall modernization. Starting in 1868, with the crowning of fourteen-year-old Emperor Meiji, the island started to reshape itself from being an isolated, feudal society under Chinese influence and entered an increasingly interconnected, Westernized world. Nineteenth-century Japan, Mizumura explains, wanted to move away from the Sinosphere toward creating international networks, particularly with the American and British Empires. During this period, linguistic debates ensued as to how to create a new version of Japanese—one statesman, Mori Arinori, going so far as to claim that Japan should “yield to the domination of the English tongue.” Other members of the intelligentsia wanted to replace Japanese characters with Romanized ones, making it a horizontal language, read from left to right. And although these proposals were never executed, the Meiji Restoration decided to cut a considerable number of Chinese characters and incorporate, instead, more vernacular syllabary ideograms. Nowadays, the Japanese language looks like a combination of easy-to-memorize syllabaries ( katakana for foreign loan words and hiragana for Japanese words) and harder-to-memorize kanjis (simplified versions of the Chinese ideogram system). Modern Japanese, Mizumura explains, was a modern invention, a fiction that accompanied the assimilation of Japan into the early stages of Western forms of capitalism. While I might be losing my ability to speak fluent Japanese the way I used to, I’m finding deeper connections with these Nashvillians than if I were to simply walk into a room filled with people who speak Japanese. A language, after all, is not just about the spoken and written word. It’s also about sharing food, music, plants, and art. It wasn’t until I came to a place where Japan was so distant from me that I realized I’d rather be half-fluent in a language but make one lasting friendship, than become fluent in multiple languages and have no one to talk to and become vulnerable with. Throughout Scattered, different characters provide separate reasons for why the concept of a native language or a mother tongue is “rather childish.” When Hiruko realizes that the person she thought was Japanese actually was something else, she surprises herself with her own reaction: “When I found out we didn’t share a mother tongue, I wasn’t disappointed in the least. In fact, the whole idea of a mother tongue no longer seemed to matter; this meeting between two unique speaking beings was far more important.” The novel, a finalist for a 2022 US National Book Award in the category of translated literature, is the first installment of a trilogy. The sequel, Hoshi ni honomekasarete (Written in the Stars), was published in 2020, and the concluding volume Taiyō shotō (Islands of the Sun) came out in October 2022. Physical/ medical: caring for each other (especially the helpless), medical discoveries and professions

Perhaps, we are not as different as we have been led to believe. The concept of a “global culture” and the impending doom set on humanity by ecological disasters puts a kind of melancholic tint on “Panska,” as it was born out of necessity and devastation rather than pure linguistic innovation. Knut, a man with the privilege of still having a home country, describes Hiruko’s “homemade language” as being like “Monet’s water lilies. The colors, shattered into pieces, were beautiful but painful.” Tenzo, originally a Greenlander, is described as an “Eskimo” throughout the story, despite that term having racist and offensive implications. He explains that “people who consider the word ‘Eskimo’ racist think it’s enough to just replace it with ‘Inuit’, even though strictly speaking not all Eskimos are Inuit.” Through Tenzo’s perspective, Tawada casts an uncomfortable spotlight on the perhaps simulated discomfort that many non-natives exhibit over the treatment of indigenous people. Tenzo is not the only character “driven into an ethnic corner.” Everyone in Tawada’s novel experiences what it’s like to be exoticized. Foreignness is all just a matter of perspective. My mother was the farthest thing from a “tiger mom,” never forcing me to go to Japanese school on Saturdays like other Japanese families, encouraging me to go forward with my studies in English even if it meant our conversations would continue to sound confusing to outsiders. Over the years, my mother, too, began to learn English as a hobby, taking the TOEIC English proficiency test for fun. She prided herself on being able to watch episodes of Sex and the City without using Japanese subtitles. Once I corrected this to “it was heartwarming,” the squirmy part no longer made sense, and I would lose so much of what she had originally wanted to convey. To her, the word “heartwarming” was not about a warmth on the heart but the heart squirming like a worm. In Japanese there’s a phrase that can be translated to “the heart quivers,” which might be what she had in mind. Hers was a phrase that existed just between the two of us, a quirky inside joke that I still carry with me more than a year after her death.

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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. 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. Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): 'homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'.

Tawada, who lives in Berlin and writes in Japanese and German, has a tendency to borrow fantastical premises from folk tales that dip into mind-bending hypotheticals: What if a woman married a dog? What if it’s the children who grow ill, and the elders who thrive? What if an anthropomorphic polar bear in East Germany becomes a bestselling memoirist? What if Japan no longer exists? That’s the premise of her latest novel, Scattered All Over the Earth , which follows six individuals of various national, ethnic, and gender identities, who somehow come together to aid a Japanese woman named Hiruko find another person who can speak with her in her native language. Meanwhile, Hiruko has invented a new language called Panska (a word combining “pan” and “Scandinavia”) which can be understood by most Scandinavians, but is so distinct that she is the only one who can speak it. The novel’s narrators rotate between the six characters as they travel together throughout Europe, looking to help Hiruko but also themselves.She gets tip-offs after appearing on a variety programme about lost languages, leading to a multi-city quest across Europe with an expanding ragtag entourage of characters. 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.

In Zenos’s extensive allegory, the roots of the natural tree were the only thing that could ultimately produce and preserve good fruit. These roots are the Abrahamic covenant and our ancestral ties to it. We nurture these roots as we perform vicarious ordinances for our deceased ancestors through temple work. The natural branches of the olive tree, like our established families in the Church, propagate themselves abundantly, complementing and reinforcing each other while drawing their strength from the roots of faith and righteous tradition. We nourish these branches as we perfect the Saints in the household of faith. The grafted branches that also bear good fruit are converts to the Church from among the gentiles. We multiply and strengthen these branches as we proclaim the gospel to all peoples through missionary work. Thus, Zenos’s allegory of the olive tree portrays the threefold dimension of fulfilling the mission of the Church. [3] From the twentieth-century dystopia that was the Soviet Empire, Tawada has moved on to dystopias of our own times. The Emissary, inaugural winner of the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2018 and to my mind her best novel—luminous and humane while as bracingly weird as ever—is a kind of shadow companion to Scattered All Over the Earth (itself billed as the first book in a trilogy). In The Emissary, Japan has become cut off from the world for reasons that aren’t entirely clear but seem to be a combination of nuclear disaster, climate change, and an earthquake. In its isolation, it outlaws the use of foreign words; the knowledge of other countries fades. Yoshiro, once a novelist, is now more than one hundred years old, but in the toxic new climate of Japan, the elderly live on and on, tending to the nation’s frail and failing children. Yoshiro’s great-grandson Mumei is tottering and birdlike, with wispy hair and wobbly teeth. Yet he is marvelously cheerful: his generation is “equipped with natural defenses against despair.” 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] The novel contemplates beautifully the nuances of the Japanese language without veering into didactic territory - the use of the formal, distant anata vis-a-vis the casual kimi, both of which mean "you", or how the word natsukashii (nostalgic) "seemed to be made of mist, a mist I was wandering? through with unsteady steps".The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Tawada, Yoko. Scattered All Over the Earth. New York: New Directions, 2022. Modern conceptions of race, religion, sexuality, and language merge together and become nearly impossible to distinguish as separate concepts. Hiruko movingly explains, “When you think about it, since we’re all earthlings, no one can be an illegal resident of earth. So why are there more and more illegal aliens every year? If things keep on this way, someday the whole human race will be illegal.” 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.