Yoko Tawada’s latest brings back the same screwball gang of characters from her well-received 2022 novel Scattered All Over the Earth. (It’s part of an expected trilogy, but readers can easily dive in cold.) Central to the cast is Hiruko, a native of “the Land of Sushi”, whose homeland has vanished into the sea and who is now searching for someone else who speaks her mother tongue.
One possible candidate is Susanoo, who’s gone mute and taken up residence at a bizarre Copenhagen hospital under the care of a brusque and socially oblivious Swedish speech pathologist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of Ikea furniture. Hiruko and friends – speaking a mishmash of languages, including a homebrew mashup of Scandinavian tongues dubbed Paska – converge on the clinic, where they also encounter a pair of child dishwashers who live in the hospital basement and communicate in their own rhyming language.
It’s all truly bizarre, and written with a trademark sense of linguistic playfulness by Tawada, a polyglot Berlin local. The novel’s childish whimsy can verge on twee – but it’s rarely cloying, thanks to her peevish sense of humour and sheer charm. An unexpected delight.
- Available from New Directions (translation by Margaret Mitsutani).
