In Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth trilogy—translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani—German, Greenlandic, French, Latin, Japanese, and Marathi interact, unheimlich, unhomed, free-floating alongside homemade dialects like Pan-Scandinavian (panksa for short—to be or not to be confused with polska), and the words of menus, robots, art, and ruins [1]. In an era of displacement, migration, and climate disaster, language is a collector of fleeting global coincidences. It cannot be fixed. 

Suggested in the Stars is the newest addition to Tawada’s ambitious series. In it, rhyming games, dinner plate divination, TV drama play-acting, and astronomical linguistics join her complex and shimmering constellation of signification systems. But perhaps the most pronounced language in this darker installment is silence. Questions about it get ricocheted by the book’s many characters, although they are never quite answered: “What is the difference between silence in a single language, and silence in several different ones?” “Can silence be a commercial product? How are prices determined anyway?” “The inability to speak is certainly an illness. But then again, there are diseases you recover from by not talking.”

In the previous book, we met Hiruko, a woman from the “land of sushi”—an alternate-reality Japan that disappeared due to a mysterious environmental disaster. She embarks on a journey to find another native speaker of her “lost” language, accompanied by a Danish linguistics student named Knut. Along the way, the two collect a group of friends from across the world, who together ultimately find Susanoo, a shipbuilding student from Japan, now living as a sushi chef in Arles. The only problem is that he can’t (or won’t) speak to Hiruko. Determined to help, our travelers pledge to take Susanoo to a doctor in Copenhagen to cure his aphasia. 

While Scattered Across the Earth brought us to the grand Roman ruins in Trier, Germany, in an extended, twisted joke, Suggested in the Stars dumps us out in the creepy half-basement of a derelict hospital straight out of Lars von Trier’s medical drama “The Kingdom.” We spend a great deal of time in the mind of Velmer, a casually bigoted doctor. He’s a supremely unlikable character, who is semi-aware of his role as the antagonist in whatever drama is playing out here. “If people have a bad impression of me,” he says, “it must be because some outside force assigned me the role of villain before I even got here.” 

Occasionally Velmer conducts some “medical tests” on Susanoo, which mostly consist of trying to get him to speak to teddy bears. And of course, Velmer tries to understand Susanoo’s silence in terms of scientific taxonomies: 

“Type A: Looking away while silent. Type B: The silent stare. Type C: Moving the lips without producing any sound whatsoever. Type D: Looking silently downward. Type E: Staring blankly, silently into space. Type F: breathing irregularly, yet silently. Type G: Silently swallowing saliva. Type H: Sitting silently with clenched fists.” 

However, deep down, Velmer seems convinced Susanoo simply might have just forgotten Japanese—no big deal, as far as he’s concerned. He’s much more interested in his love affair with a nurse named Inga (Knut’s mom).

It's a relief when we return to the minds of the protagonists we met in book one. Much of the rest of the novel unfolds through a series of flashbacks, retracing each character’s journey to Copenhagen via shifting first-person narratives. Tawada's chapter titles mark these shifts. However, it is Mitsutani's attention to voice that makes these different perspectives complete and convincing. These passages are dreamy and surreal, and language itself seems to propel the characters on their way across Europe. For instance, Nora, a well-meaning but controlling German, and Akash, a voluble, go-with-the-flow trans woman from India happen to mention the word “strike” in a conversation. A minute later, the world’s airport workers go on strike, leading the two to hitch a ride on the back of some goth’s motorcycles. Nanook, a student from Greenland, who feels suffocated by Nora (his girlfriend), travels solo, hitchhiking up the Rhine. He gets hungry, and as soon as he thinks of the word "sushi" finds himself in the back of a van full of fishing rods with a man named Schuppenauer—a pun on the German word for fish scales and Schopenhauer, a philosopher mentioned in passing in an earlier chapter.

It’s no wonder, then, that when everyone finally gathers at the hospital and Susanoo chooses to speak, he is careful with his words. There’s reason to be fearful of language and its cascade of consequences. In the novel’s deflationary climax, Susanoo is not cured. There is no emotional “returning home” to speech. Instead, he turns into a psychological manipulator, unleashing a verbal tirade aimed at controlling each character in the hospital room. However, Susanoo’s efforts to disarm those around him ultimately fail, and the scene devolves into a chaotic argument (and dance number—you’ll have to read it to believe it).

Scenes like this showcase Mitsutani’s translating at its finest. Here, she captures the distinct voices of each character, which could easily get muddled in the clash. Yet there’s still a smudgy, evocative interconnectedness to it all. A translation of Tawada’s work could easily fall into the trap of tokenism—accruing languages for the sake of accruing languages, weirdness for the sake of weirdness. But Mitsutani never loses sight of the subtle and dialectical nature of Tawada’s project. Suggested in the Stars brilliantly exemplifies not only what multilingual writing can be, but also how it is further enlivened through translation.