The sushi restaurants in Yoko Tawada’s novel Scattered All Over the Earth bear a similar relation to the country of Japan: that is, a tenuous one. In one, a Danish linguist named Knut remarks to Hiruko, the novel’s Japanese climate refugee heroine, that he’s pretty sure sushi is Finnish. Her protests fall upon deaf ears. In another restaurant, the patrons are somewhat savvier, but a noxious mix of minimal knowledge about Japan and maximal white entitlement leads them to needle a server-cook named Nanook with questions about Buddhism, taking for granted that he’s from Japan. He is, in fact, from Greenland, and his coworkers hail from places like the United States and Vietnam.
