Scattered All Over the Earth

In this acute meditation on language and culture from the National Book Award–winning Tawada (The Emissary), Japan vanishes beneath climate-changed waves, trapping Japanese national Hiruko in Denmark. There, she teaches immigrant children through picture dramas while purveying a delightfully grammar-fractured language she’s invented called Panska (pan-Scandinavian). Amateur linguist Knut reaches out after hearing her on a TV show, and they travel Europe together in search of speakers of her native language. Their first stop is Trier, Germany, for a Umami festival at the Karl Marx House; there, they meet the gender-nonconforming Akash from India, who escorts Asians throughout the continent. The lecture they had planned to attend by famed chef Tenzo is cancelled owing to political unrest in Norway, where he is trapped—as Huriko points out, Japanese people are now without a country and hence a passport, making travel difficult—and so they head off to Oslo and eventually meet up with a Greenland Inuit sushi chef. From an argument over whether pizza can be considered Indian to Hiruko’s fear of being sent to the United States, which needs English-speaking immigrants, the narrative is a study of culture as constantly shape-shifting.