Scattered All Over the Earth
by Yoko Tawada
Book Club Spotlight
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📚 My Take
One of this month’s book club reads was Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada. It is strange in the best way. Quiet, speculative, and just disoriented enough to mirror the world it is trying to describe.
The story follows Hiruko, a woman from a vanished Japan, who now travels through Northern Europe giving language lessons while trying to explain where she is from and what it means to have no homeland. She speaks a made-up language called Panska, a blend of the tongues she has picked up. What begins as a simple TV segment becomes a drifting, multilingual road story with an oddball cast: a linguist, a trans student, a sushi chef, and a nationalist German man she cannot quite shake off.
This is not a novel driven by action. It is built on tone, space, and miscommunication. But I found myself completely pulled into it. The way language shapes belonging, the friction between national identity and human connection, the weird humor, it all worked. It reminded me that what we understand about someone is often just what we are capable of translating.
Also… I am a language nerd, so this scratched an itch in all the right ways.
It is the first in a trilogy, though I did not know that going in. It still works as a standalone, but if you like your stories tied up with a bow, fair warning this one floats.
🔗 Links
Check your library on WorldCat
If you enjoy speculative fiction that’s more quiet than chaotic, this is one worth picking up.
If the mood of this one speaks to you, you might also enjoy the sense of detachment in Pizza Girl, or the spare, surreal tone of The Beggar Student. Both explore grief, identity, and emotional fragmentation in different ways.
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My Asian Era is where literature meets culture — thoughtful reviews, quiet voices, and stories worth slowing down for.
