Scattered All Over the Earth

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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? According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. But their creator—a novelist, a poet, and a playwright—has chosen her estrangement. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo and lives in Berlin, writes books in German and Japanese, switching not once, like Vladimir Nabokov or Joseph Conrad, but every time she gets too comfortable, as a deliberate experiment. Her work has won numerous awards in both countries, even as she insists that there’s nothing national, or even natural, about the way we use words. “Even one’s mother tongue,” she maintains, “is a translation.”

Since the English translation of this novel came out in early March, critics have praised it as “mordantly funny,” or “deeply inventive,” and categorized it as “science fiction,” a “dystopia,” and even contrary to that, “the first great utopian novel of the 21st century.”

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Multiple prophetic viewpoints of a latter-day return of the house of Israel are provided in the Bible and other scriptures. [5] Major scriptural passages concern not just the gathering to their lands of inheritance but, more importantly, the restoration of the covenant house of Israel to their promised lands in the latter days. The return of the house of Israel in the last days seems to be in two phases: a gathering phase and a restoration phase . Gathering refers to their being brought together from their scattered places, whereas restoration refers to God’s renewal of covenants with them unto their lands of inheritance. This return of the house of Israel will reveal God’s great power and promises. As Jeremiah prophesied:

One of my favorites of her fictional experiments is the brilliantly absurd story “Saint George and the Translator,” from Facing the Bridge (2007), her second collection to appear in English. The protagonist is working on deadline from a borrowed house in the Canary Islands. “I’m translating a story from a foreign language into my own,” she explains with comical succinctness. Yet it doesn’t prove so simple. A friend advises: In the spiritual and religious realm, Christianity, which had its roots in earlier Judaic practice, has become the religion of 1.9 billion people, or 31.1 percent of the population of the world. The Judeo-Christian tradition, which derives from the spiritual labor of Abraham’s descendants, is a foundation of Western civilization, providing social and political values and the moral and ethical basis of the legal systems. That same tradition has made an emotional and psychological contribution in defining the value and purpose of life, the goodness of God, His love for all, and the Golden Rule as a guide for human conduct. In the social and cultural realm, the themes of the Bible have provided inspiration for great works of architecture, music, art, literature, and entertainment. 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. I am half-Japanese, half-Zainichi Korean, and have lived in the US for more than half my life. I have a green card instead of American citizenship, so it’s awkward for me to identify as an Asian-American. In an attempt to figure out where I fit in, I’ve been reading many books by and about Japanese, Japanese-American, half-Japanese, Zainichi Korean, and Asian-Americans—but it wasn’t until I discovered Yoko Tawada that I, an uncategorizable international person finally felt seen in a literary work. Worth emphasizing is Margaret Mitsutani’s incredible translation in Scattered All Over the Earth (2022). “Panska” is artificial, a somewhat messy amalgamation of various Scandinavian languages that were originally transcribed in Japanese. Tawada’s work is effectively a stunning quilt of languages layered atop one another. The author’s passion for language even leads her to question the conception of words that have problematic connotations.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. In Nashville, where strangers are generally friendly and chatty, I’m constantly asked about Japan and the experience of being Japanese in the South, and I can tell that it’s often coming from a place of pure curiosity as opposed to racist assumptions. In Scattered, a character from India experiences the same shift when she moves from London to Denmark. “Some people say that asking an Indian too many questions about India is a kind of prejudice… but that kind of prejudice I don’t mind at all.” 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. Tawada wrings a lot of punning mileage from the concept of a “mother tongue.” Her male characters are all in flight from women. Tenzo is fleeing not just Nora but also a Danish benefactor, who gave him a scholarship out of maternal affection for the “Eskimos.” Knut is avoiding his real mother, mostly because of her instinctive grasp of the way he uses language to evade responsibility. His repulsion leads him toward Hiruko, whose Panska sounds freeingly strange—but she, of course, is in the grip of an ambivalent longing for her native speech. The linguistic love triangles culminate in a somewhat chaotic dénouement, filled with comedy and coincidence. Hiruko does eventually find another native speaker, but the encounter comes with a twist that undermines the whole search. First published in Japanese in 2018, Scattered All Over The Earth reads like the Berlin-based Tawada's homage to her native country - she was born in Tokyo in 1960, but relocated to Germany when she was 22 and now writes in Japanese and German.

Physical/ medical: caring for each other (especially the helpless), medical discoveries and professionsThe choice between good and evil presupposes agency; the exercise of our agency activates the law of justice and its resulting blessings and punishments. Without choices, we cannot exercise agency and experience the full range of blessings and punishments (see 2 Nephi 2:5–27; Alma 12:31–32; 42:17–25). The Prophet Joseph Smith’s teachings as recorded in the Doctrine and Covenants indicate that blessings and punishments are predicated upon compliance or non-compliance with divine laws, commandments, and judgments (see D&C 82:10; 121:36–37; 130:20–21). The Lord is absolutely just in rewarding each individual according to his or her works based upon individual levels of knowledge, accountability, and motivation (see Romans 2:5–6; 2 Nephi 9:25; Mosiah 3:11; Alma 41:2–6; 3 Nephi 27:14). In essence, the law of justice might be ­illustrated as follows: In Chapter 2, Hiruko is working in Odense at a school where she teaches European languages and culture to immigrant children. She takes part in the television program and then meets Knut for dinner and discusses her plans to travel to Trier. Knut tells her about his mother, who has an unnatural fixation on Eskimo people.