yōko tawada scattered all over the earth

It’s short but dense and richly inventive with an unusual folkloric aspect: sometimes a little perplexing but always engrossing and thought-provoking. Tawada’s famous for working in both Japanese and German, Germany having been her home for many years, but has settled on Japanese for this latest translated work.

The first in a projected trilogy, Scattered All Over the Earth builds on themes that will be familiar to regular readers of Yōko Tawada’s fiction. Tawada received the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1996, a German award to foreign writers in recognition of their contribution to German culture, and the Goethe Medal in 2005. Her Suspect on the Night Train won the Tanizaki Prize and Ito Sei Literary Prize in 2003.

In 1999 she became writer-in-residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for four months.

Tawada's Missing Heels received the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1991, and The Bridegroom Was a Dog received the Akutagawa Prize in 1993. In 1987 she published Nur da wo du bist da ist nichts-Anata no iru tokoro dake nani mo nai (A Void Only Where You Are), a collection of poems in a German and Japanese bilingual edition. She received her doctorate in German literature at the University of Zurich. Tawada was born in Tokyo, received her undergraduate education at Waseda University in 1982 with a major in Russian literature, then studied at Hamburg University where she received a master's degree in contemporary German literature. With its intrepid band of companions, Scattered All Over the Earth (the first novel of a trilogy) may bring to mind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or a surreal Wind in the Willows, but really is just another sui generis Yoko Tawada masterwork.Yōko Tawada ( 多和田葉子 Tawada Yōko, born March 23, 1960) is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany. Episodic and mesmerizing scenes flash vividly along, and soon they’re all next off to Stockholm. Her troupe travels to France, encountering an umami cooking competition a dead whale an ultra-nationalist named Breivik unrequited love Kakuzo robots red herrings uranium an Andalusian matador. homemade language.” As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as “the land of sushi.” Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): “homemade language. Picked up recently a new book on my Kindle and starting to read it today: A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian new novel by Yoko Tawada, winner of the National Book Award.

Yōko tawada scattered all over the earth