In Trier, Hiruko and Knut meet Akash, from India, and a German woman called Nora. In fact, Nanook turns out to be an Eskimo from Greenland. The first place they visit together is an Umami Festival in the German town of Trier, where there is to be a talk by Nanook, who is billed as a Japanese chef who is studying umami. He comes across Hiruko randomly on a television chat show, and soon joins her travels. Knut lives in Denmark, where he is a graduate student of linguistics. On her travels, she falls in with a group of companions from different ethnic, national, and linguistic backgrounds. She sets off in search of fellow survivors who might remember her vanished homeland and the language once spoken there. Scattered All Over the Earth is the story of a young woman from Niigata called Hiruko, whose homeland has vanished from the face of the earth while she was studying in Europe. In this article, we introduce Taiyō Shotō (Islands of the Sun), which concluded the trilogy when it was published in Japan last October. The remaining two volumes in the trilogy are due to appear in English over the next couple of years. Although Tawada’s novel eventually missed out on the prize, the English translation was chosen by Time magazine as one of its 100 Must-Read Books of 2022. Last fall, the English version of Tawada Yōko’s novel Chikyū ni chiribamerarete (translated by Margaret Mitsutani as Scattered All Over the Earth) was a finalist in the Translated Literature category at the US National Book Awards.
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