Scattered All Over the Earth

In a near future, the island nation once known as Japan has slipped beneath the sea, and its language and culture survive only in scattered exiles. Hiruko, a climate refugee living in Scandinavia, has invented a patchwork tongue she calls Panska to make herself understood — but she longs, above all, to speak her mother language again, and to find anyone who still can.

Her search sends her across Europe in the company of an ever-growing, delightfully mismatched band of fellow travelers: a linguistics student, a transgender Indian man, an Inuit-seeming sushi chef, and others, each carrying their own dislocations. Told in rotating first-person voices, their quest becomes a playful, melancholy meditation on language, migration, and belonging in a borderless world.

The opening novel of Yōko Tawada's acclaimed dystopian trilogy, translated from the Japanese, is inventive, warm, and quietly profound.