This review is part of a special week of pieces here at Strange Horizons which focus on speculative fiction in translation published by US small presses. These publishers are being impacted by the Trump administration's recent revocation of a number of grants made by the National Endowment of the Arts. Rachel Cordasco has compiled a list of works appearing in recent years from these houses. The health and breadth of speculative fiction relies on the work of these presses. Please support them and their work.

Archipelago of the Sun is published in the US by New Directions.

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When Yael van der Wouden’s parable of historical trauma, The Safekeep (2024), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize last year, much was made in some quarters of the author’s choice of language. The novel is written in English, not van der Wouden’s primary Dutch. Consequently, Miranda France wrote in the TLS that “[w]hile reading The Safekeep, my fingers itched for a red pen”:

The solecisms have either been deliberately employed by the author or, one assumes, deliberately uncorrected by her editors. Their effect is to make this story about Dutch people actually sound Dutch, without any intervening contrivances by a translator.

France didn’t find this effect wholly satisfying (nor did she clarify what Dutch people sound like), but for my part I found The Safekeep refreshing and surprising. In my view, not the least factor in the novel’s success is how it deals with, deploys, and reframes language. The Safekeep didn’t win the Booker, but earlier this year it did win the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and van der Wouden gave a moving speech in which she came out as intersex, speaking for the first time about an adolescence in which “all at once my girlhood became an uncertain fact.” The Safekeep is a novel about unmoorings, and its approach to language helps express its uncertainties, encode its unspokens—and effect self-discoveries.

This is a technique very familiar to readers of Yoko Tawada, a Japanese novelist who lives in Germany and often writes not in her native but her adopted language. Tawada’s English translator, Margaret Mitsutani, must thus consider how to present dissonances perhaps more deliberate than, but otherwise not dissimilar to, those I find to be so productive in van der Wouden. France may call these, too, contrivances, but I think it's better to acknowledge that Tawada is unusually interested in the gaps between languages, and slippages between meanings.

In Archipelago of the Sun—the final volume of a recent trilogy of novels which also features 2022’s Scattered All Over the Earth (地球に散りばめられて [2018]) and 2024’s Suggested in the Stars (星に仄めかされて [2020])—Tawada follows a group of characters who have each chosen a form of exile or alienation. Together, they travel east towards a Japan that seems to have long since disappeared beneath the ocean, receding into memory, even myth.

Originally published under the title 太陽諸島 in 2022, the book is long on language. The protagonist, Hiruko, has invented a tongue of her own she calls Panska, which she speaks in private with those closest to her, and whose strange grammar and vocabulary begin to shadow everyone’s thinking; the ship on which the characters travel boasts a passenger manifest of notably international make-up, where mealtimes are defined by seating plans based on nationality and language group; and stops are made throughout the novel at various ports—in Poland, Latvia, Russia—during which cultures are investigated and misunderstandings tentatively resolved.

Throughout, the overriding tone is one of eerie neutrality. Few opinions are held unrelentingly, fewer still identities are fixed or reliable; the plot proceeds not linearly but circularly, and even shifts in narrator and point of view have little impact on tone. In this translation, Tawada’s prose is characterised by a gentleness, a sense that the novel’s characters deserve space and, if not agreement or even understanding, then a certain sort of respect. In this way, Tawada holds room for her characters, and doesn’t seek to impose frameworks or—dread word, this—themes upon them. Instead, with perhaps the special capacity of a bilingual author writing in the knowledge she will be translated, Archipelago of the Sun breathes. Spare, demotic, and material, the novel’s sentences—most of which constitute dialogue between inquisitive characters—rarely even draw inferences from their own material. Instead, they make room for themselves, carve out not niches but whole caverns, in which these people may dwell.

I had never once looked for the outline of my homeland. Since I’m not a bird, I can’t see the area when I live from the air. Human beings have to walk on their own two legs, so they see only what’s in front of them. They can gaze up at tall buildings, or at cliffs along the shore, or stop in at the souvenir shops that line the port, but they can’t check the shape of the country where they live from above. If they’re planning a trip, they may look at a map of the city they’ll visit, but if they’re already living in a place, they usually don’t bother. (p. 97)

This capacious quality feels especially important to the novel’s approach to futurology. If Japan has really disappeared, it seems reasonable to think that the novel takes place in a future transformed by climate change. Refugee status and exile are common in the novel (“[t]he term ‘permanent resident’ was now obsolete” [p. 193]), and few characters possess a rooted sense of place.

That the novel proceeds in transit, with various nations and traditions all represented onboard a ship which constantly seems about to weigh anchor again, defines this queasy lack of centre. But the characters themselves for the most part accept this way of life with the same openness and curiosity that the novel itself applies to them. These, in other words, are people who have adapted to a world we would perceive as irredeemably awful: whole countries disappearing, societies and cultures awash, all that is solid evaporating into water-heavy air. Yet Tawada’s characters live on, seem often even to be optimistic and hopeful.

This isn’t a cosy dystopia so much as it is a challenging world in which people are refusing to exhibit a dystopian mien. They are making do; they are even mending. “Sounds like a dangerous gray zone,” one character cautions another. “Not especially,” they respond brightly. “What’s really gray right now is the weather” (p. 104). Another takes inspiration from “the samurai, people who could easily cross borders and move freely between the worlds” (p. 158). Despite what in many novels of climate fiction would be a sinking, fallen world, the speed of innovation in robotics remains so fast that “there’s nothing to learn from previous generations” (p. 170); and even in a world of rising sea levels, we come to see that “[e]ach island in an archipelago […] is independent, but not alone. They’re held together by invisible movement” (p. 212).

Ultimately, this is a novel in which humans quietly learn how to live differently, together (“no one is really ‘outside’ of society” [p. 162]). A lot of how this is done is via language, or at least via the bringing together of languages. Much of the novel takes place in conversations between characters interested in the different words they use for the same things, or how one language captures a particular idea or feeling or object with more clarity than another. Of course, barriers of language and culture exist. Hiruko wants “to tell [a group of Russians] there are no martial arts in Eskimo culture, but […] didn’t speak Russian” (p. 112) [1]; her lover, the Dane Knut, is asked by another character, the Greenlander Nanook, if he read the Japanese play Nyonin Aishi “in the original,” and Nanook “looked disappointed” when Knut confirms he did not (p. 158). But more often, even the differences between languages are productive.

Nanook, who has been learning how to write Japanese throughout the novel, notices that the Japanese characters for “bird” and “island” are alike (p. 211); Knut observes that “the referent of ‘you’ is interchangeable. Which means it’s empty” (p. 83); Hiruko finds that “[t]hings I could never explain in my native language come out naturally in Panska” (p. 127). These small, almost existential, breakthroughs don’t obliterate the challenges of the world—“Since I started living in Europe,” Hiruko admits, “I’ve sometimes felt like an imaginary person” (p. 138)—and the group’s resident (though usually wrong) pessimist, Susanoo, is familiar with despair: “What good is hope,” he asks, “when we’re all drowning in the sea of fate?” (p. 73). But in this novel the potential for forward movement is inherent in communication and exchange—in seeing human language as an open mode of transmission, rather than a set of mutually exclusive codes.

“My future is clouded in mist,” Nanook reflects at one point, “and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. It’s an anxious time for me, yet here I am, on a journey with no fixed destination” (p. 173). In a novel that insists that it is—that we are—on “a journey without an answer” (p. 213), his equanimity is a leitmotif. The calmness of the novel is in this sense characterised not by the inertia of neutrality but by the generative possibility of attentive intuition. When is a solecism not a solecism? When an island is also a bird.

Endnotes

[1] It's not clear why Mitsutani opts throughout the novel to have Nanook apply this word to his people. But it's worth noting that there are very good reasons why she might have selected “Inuit” instead. [return]