The central character, Hiroku, originally from Japan, left before it was mysteriously wiped from the map. The chapters are all first-person accounts from a crew of global misfits-migrants and exiles, foreigners and social outcasts. In Scattered All Over the Earth, foreignness permeates every scene. Cold Enough for Snow employs subtler prose that traces the emotional associations evoked by the palpable, sensory presence of Japan.
Scattered All Over the Earth is a broad, kooky, character-driven dystopia that revolves around Japan’s absence. As their characters seek connection through language in foreign countries, both authors question what it means to belong, but they frame the tension between being an insider and an outsider through opposite lenses. Scattered All Over the Earth is set in a future where Japan no longer exists.īoth Tawada and Au use place as a way to write about identity over time-about the selves that inhabit the here and now, and the past selves, overlaid onto the landscape like variegated watermarks. In Cold Enough for Snow, the narrator meets her mother in Tokyo in the hopes of rekindling a fraught mother-daughter connection. The books are Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au and Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada.
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