Suggested in the Stars by Yōko Tawada review – a linguistic odyssey

Reading Yōko Tawada is an immensely fun and occasionally bewildering experience. Suggested in the Stars, the second volume in the Japanese author’s Scattered All Over the Earth trilogy, combines a linguistic playfulness with a mind-expanding worldview. It’s safest not to assume that anything you think you know about reality is applicable in the world of this novel.

We pick up where we left off at the end of Scattered All Over the Earth, which appeared in English in 2022. Much of Tawada’s work is linked: in an earlier novel, The Last Children of Tokyo, Japan had isolated itself from the rest of the world. Here, Tawada goes one step further: Japan – or “the land of sushi”, as she calls it – has disappeared altogether, and no one knows why.

That leads us to the central conceit of the action-packed voyage in Scattered All Over the Earth: Hiruko, who went to study in Scandinavia, was unable to return to her home country after it vanished. She misses speaking her native language. So she and a group of friends have tracked down Susanoo, a sushi chef supposedly also from Japan, who is seeking treatment for a language disorder in a hospital in Copenhagen. Hiruko hopes to speak with Susanoo – but that will only be possible once his aphasia is cured.

Hiruko’s motley crew are all still here in this new volume: Knut, a Danish linguistics student; Nanook, who is a Greenlander but often mistaken as Japanese; Nora, a German increasingly concerned about her role in the climate crisis; and Akash, an Indian studying in Germany who is in the process of gender transition.

Each character takes a chapter in turn, resulting in a novel that is innately multifaceted. While Nora is kept awake thinking about how many nouns are “off-limits” to her because in German they are masculine, another character, Dr Velmer, is angered by the word “‘postcolonialism’ that immature, self-centred young people are so fond of using these days”.

Swedish Velmer, who is treating Susanoo for his aphasia, is the first person the group have come across who opposes their mission. He questions the point of providing Hiruko with the opportunity to speak her native language, asking why, if “the country where Susanoo’s mother tongue was spoken may no longer exist … what’s the point of recovering the language of such a place?” He turns to Knut: “As a student, you were never interested in Latin or Sanskrit, so why do you want to recover a dead language now?” Velmer becomes a kind of enemy to the group, but is also a wildly comic character. “Steady there, NORDLI,” he says, admitting he has “long had a habit of talking to Ikea furniture”.

Tawada has lived in Germany for most of her adult life and writes in both German and Japanese. Her books are interested in how meaning is gained and lost between languages, so to translate her fiction from Japanese to English is to reckon with the very meat of the story. Margaret Mitsutani’s work is exquisite. Her English rendering of “Panska” – Pan-Scandinavian, Hiruko’s creation, made up by blending Scandinavian languages – results in a perfectly comprehensible yet robotic-sounding dialect: “susanoo with me desires to speak not”. Elsewhere, two new characters speak in childlike rhymes, the silliness of which is particularly amusing in sober situations: “‘What’s wrong-bong?’ she asked, looking serious. ‘Did you see a ghost-most?’”

Questions about language and how it attaches us to nationhood – should we feel an innate connection to people with whom we share a language? Is nationalism ever a force for good? – pervade the novel. Amid the barminess of the storyline, they anchor the book to our ever more globalised world, with its acute refugee and immigration crises. Tawada has a clear message: “There are holes in the earth, but everything’s still connected.”

By the end of the novel there are still plenty of questions left unanswered. Did Knut’s father abandon the family because he thought his son was “delivering him a message from outer space”? And why does Susanoo seem to have stopped ageing? With any other author, you would expect to find out the answers in the final book of the trilogy. With Tawada – a blisteringly imaginative writer who could not care less about following expectations – there is no such promise. The uncertainty is thrilling.

• Suggested in the Stars by Yōko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani, is published by Granta (£12.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.