![]() ![]() ![]() “Scattered All Over the Earth”-written in Japanese and translated by Margaret Mitsutani-possesses both the looseness and wistfulness of extreme displacement. Tawada is dual-lingual novelist, alternating between Japanese and German, which she learned when she moved to Hamburg in the 1980s. Kundera, who wrote in Czech and then French, Ms. The rising ocean of dystopian fiction tends to be bleak and cautionary, but a few books have approached catastrophe through the universal language of humor: Joy Williams’s “Harrow,” for instance, and now, less caustically, Yoko Tawada’s ”Scattered All Over the Earth.” For novelists today, misfortune is often imminent rather than actual, taking the form of looming environmental and technological apocalypses. Kundera, Stalinism was the tragedy that had to be met with frivolity. ![]() “Comedy is everywhere, in each one of us,” wrote Milan Kundera, “it goes with us like our shadow, it is even in our misfortune, lying in wait for us like a precipice.” For Mr. ![]()
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