Book Salad

Book Salad meets on the last Tuesday of every month. To make a salad you put together lots of different things you'd like to eat, and we do the same. Every month, instead of reading one kind of book, we mix genres. We tend to read mostly imaginative fiction but occasionally we pick non-fiction, by authors from different ages and backgrounds.

For our first book of 2026, we will read 'Scattered All Over The Earth' by Yoko Tawada, an established author of eight novels, and the winner of many literary prizes. This book is the first in a trilogy set in a not-distant future where Japan has been swallowed by the sea and her people become climate refugees.

We are told about Hiruko and her children, who have relocated to Denmark and speak an invented language called Panska. Hiruko is on a search for those who know about her homeland and speak her mother tongue, and in a series of episodes we meet a cast of characters who help her. My description is based on reading a couple of reviews and peeking at a few pages, so it might turn out to be a very different book.

Here's the blurb:

Scattered All Over The Earth by Yoko Tawada

Translated by Margaret Mitsutan

"A mind-expanding, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship, difference and what it means to belong, by a National Book Award-winning novelist.

Welcome to the not-too-distant future. Japan, having vanished into the sea, is now remembered as 'the land of sushi'. Hiruko, a former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): 'homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. no time to learn three different languages. might mix up. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language most Scandinavian people understand'. Hiruko soon makes new friends to join her in her travels searching for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue: Knut, a graduate student in linguistics, who is fascinated by her Panska; Akash, an Indian man who lives as a woman, wearing a red sari; Nanook, an Eskimo from Greenland, first mistaken as another refugee from the land of sushi; and Nora, who works at the Karl Marx House in Trier. All these characters take turns narrating chapters, which feature an umami cooking competition; a dead whale; an ultra- nationalist named Breivik; Kakuzo robots; uranium; and an Andalusian bull fight. Episodic, vividly imagined and mesmerising, Scattered All Over the Earth is another sui generis masterwork by Yoko Tawada."

You're very welcome to join us in the first Book Salad of the New Year. We will meet on the last Tuesday of January, and we limit numbers to fifteen attendees.