Over the course of her travels she has cobbled together her own hybrid language. Since then, she has moved from place to place as a migrant across Scandinavia. Hiruko is originally from Niigata but her homeland has disappeared while she has been studying abroad. He becomes fascinated by a young Japanese woman called Hiruko, who appears on the program speaking an unfamiliar language that turns out to be a homemade form of “Pan-Scandinavian.” One day he comes across a television panel featuring people who grew up in countries that no longer exist. Knut is a graduate student of linguistics at a university in Copenhagen. Over the course of the novel, they are led toward a certain goal, growing to form an impromptu community thrown together by chance and sharing the same destiny. There are six main characters, who take turns narrating chapters from his or her own perspective (although divisions of gender are not especially important in the story either), describing their own lives and backgrounds. Chikyū ni chiribamerarete, Tawada Yōko’s latest novel to be translated into English (by Margaret Mitsutani, as Scattered All Over the Earth), is the first installment of a trilogy whose narrative transcends barriers of ethnicity, nationality, and language.
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