🌟 "Scattered All Over the Earth" by Yoko Tawada

Translated from Japanese into English by Margaret Mitsutani. I fell in love with Yoko Tawada's writing last year and I've been reading through all of her available works since then. This was another success for me. It's the first in a trilogy, so I have more to look forward to. In this book the world is much the same and also very different. We follow a few characters while in the background a dystopia is slowly revealed. The set-up for the characters almost feels like an RPG: party members get gathered one by one for a journey through culture and language. I think the characters might be controversial to some. I think they're all interesting, but they're also flawed people who do questionable things, have some unpopular views and use some outdated terms. Because the story is told from multiple points of view, we see the characters as how they experience themselves and as how they're perceived by others. It's fun to see where these personas match up and in what ways they differ a lot.…