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Book Reviewed by:On the heels of Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada's new and irresistible Suggested in the Stars carries on her band of friends' astonishing and intrepid adventures.
It's hard to believe there could be a more enjoyable novel than Scattered All Over the Earth―Yoko Tawada's rollicking, touching, cheerfully dystopian novel about friendship and climate change―but surprising her readers is what Tawada does best: its sequel, Suggested in the Stars, delivers exploits even more poignant and shambolic.
As Hiruko―whose Land of Sushi has vanished into the sea and who is still searching for someone who speaks her mother tongue―and her new friends travel onward, they begin opening up to one another in new and extraordinary ways. They try to help their friend Susanoo regain his voice, both for his own good and so he can speak with Hiruko―and amid many often hilarious misunderstandings (some linguistic in nature)―they empower each other against despair. Coping with carbon footprint worries but looping singly and in pairs, they hitchhike, take late-night motorcycle rides, and hop on the train (learning about railway strikes but also packed-train-yoga) to convene in Copenhagen. There they find Susanoo in a strange hospital working with a scary speech-loss doctor. In the half-basement of this weird medical center (with strong echoes of Lars von Trier's 1990s TV series The Kingdom), they also find two special kids washing dishes. They discover magic radios, personality swaps, ship tickets delivered by a robot, and other gifts. But friendship―loaning one another the nerve and heart to keep going―sets them all (and the reader) to dreaming of something more... Suggested in the Stars delivers new delights, and Yoko Tawada's famed new trilogy will conclude in 2025 with Archipelago of the Sun, even if nobody will ever want this "strange, exquisite" (The New Yorker) trip to end.
In Suggested in the Stars, Knut brings Susanoo—successfully found, but seemingly unable to speak—to a speech loss doctor he knows in Copenhagen so that Susanoo can regain his native language and speak with Hiruko, although this ongoing plot device that worked so well in the first book loses its luster a bit over the course of this one. The hospital in Copenhagen, as well as the speech doctor Velmer, are explicitly cribbed from Lars von Trier's The Kingdom, a Twin Peaks-like horror TV series (references to the director and the series pepper both novels). It's a fun choice, but also an early sign that Tawada's playfulness and irreverence are getting a bit unwieldy. Velmer is a great character—everyone thinks he's scary and cruel, but in his head he's a friendly guy just telling it like it is, a disconnect that Tawada plays to great comedic effect. In the Kingdom-like hospital, with older characters like Velmer and Knut's mother playing foils to the younger generation, we get funny and substantial conversations about language, flirtatious banter, and personality clashes—scenes and stories that remind us of how complex and interesting the world is...continued
Full Review
(1213 words)
(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).
In Yoko Tawada's novels Scattered All Over the Earth and Suggested in the Stars, characters retell stories from the Kojiki, translated as "Records of Ancient Matters" or "Records of Ancient Things." The Kojiki is the oldest text from Japan, written mostly for the purpose of establishing a clear line of descent from the Shinto gods and the supreme sun goddess Amaterasu to the emperors of the 7th and 8th century CE. The Kojiki was written using Chinese characters to represent Japanese sounds, because there was not yet a way to record Japan's spoken language when it was created. The book is divided into three parts, the first of which describes the many Shinto gods and recounts the stories or myths about them, which are often violent and ...
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