The Japanese novelist explores the relationship between language and national identity, in the second part of her Scattered All Over the Earth trilogy

Reading Yōko Tawada is an immensely fun and occasionally bewildering experience. Suggested in the Stars, the second volume in the Japanese author’s Scattered All Over the Earth trilogy, combines a linguistic playfulness with a mind-expanding worldview. It’s safest not to assume that anything you think you know about reality is applicable in the world of this novel.

We pick up where we left off at the end of Scattered All Over the Earth, which appeared in English in 2022. Much of Tawada’s work is linked: in an earlier novel, The Last Children of Tokyo, Japan had isolated itself from the rest of the world. Here, Tawada goes one step further: Japan – or “the land of sushi”, as she calls it – has disappeared altogether, and no one knows why.