The Emissary

Beautiful and haunting, meditation on ability, parenthood and intergenerational relationships. Every other page has a turn of phrase that is liable to wow. Lightness and heaviness mix freely in a brief novel that doesn't overstay its welcome.

Once you’ve opened the cover and started reading The Emissary, you quickly learn that there’s been a disaster in Japan—possibly nuclear, as fallout is hinted at. Japan has pulled back and quarantined itself from the world. [I’m posting this in mid-2021 and quarantines are far too familiar.] And then words start to disappear from the language. Also, all wild animals have vanished, other than crows and spiders. Oh, and men are now going through menopause. The elderly have become the healthiest part of the population, and children are very weak and fading more every day. Politicians are now committing suicide in ever increasing numbers. Tawada’s imagination has been given a kickstart and is spinning rapidly.

Our characters are Yoshiro, who is the great grandfather to Mumei. When Mumei’s teeth fall out, in a very sweet moment, the great grandson lightheartedly tells his great grandfather, “Don’t worry, Great-grandpa, sparrows get along fine without teeth.” It becomes evident that Mumei has become even kinder and more tolerant as the weaknesses of his body become more and more evident.

The book is a very bleak portrait of today’s Japan, a country that has seen more than its share of troubles in recent years. Passively, the population has become more aged, as that percentage of the people is rapidly increasing and graying. More actively, linked disasters have assaulted the country in the form of the 2011 tsunami and the subsequent radiation leakage at the heavily damaged nuclear power plant at Fukushima. A review of the book said, “With the ghosts of Fukushima never far from the novel’s margins, the Japan of The Emissary is hallucinatory, contaminated, and distinctly foreign in a familiar way.”

Away from the subject of the book, but reflecting on Tawada’s style, there’s this. I found a story about a bizarre public reading she gave in which she was reading one of her poems, one that she had written on a white glove. When she finished all the words there, she simply turned the glove inside out and continued reading. This appeals to me probably far more than it should, but it does.

The simple words of this slim book are fascinating. I was previously completely unaware of the surreal strangeness of her writing. That writing shows such great promise and creativity, but in this novel, it seems that it just may have been edited and polished too much, to the point where it had more shine than substance. A New York Times review summed it up. “From a writer with Tawada’s gifts, mere beauty can be a disappointment.” Her active mind was so curious and stylish, that I’m sure to give another of her books a try in the future.

In this smothering marshmallow apocalyptic book a starving and isolated Japan is run by healthy elderly moving spryly into their second century caring for great-grandchildren who can hardly move for themselves. The author portrays a fey and fragile future, then has enough of the whole thing and brings it to a strange and abrupt end.

Interesting until the last 20 pages or so. I didn't care for the ending.

In a vaguely distant future Japan that has reverted to extreme isolationism in the face of an ecological or man-made disaster, an elderly (but still vibrant) great-grandfather, Yoshiro, is the sole carer for Mumei, his great-grandson. Along with aggressive restrictions against foreign ideas, technology, and words, nature itself has rebelled. The lives of the young are excessively precarious, either due to mutation or some other change. Mumei, for example, loses all of his baby teeth at once, has difficulty walking, and has a peculiar relationship to his own sensations and emotions. But Yoshiro’s care for him is unquestioned, despite his own failed marriage and earlier experiences with his own daughter and grandson. There is a recurring mention of emissaries, both in the form of a novel that Yoshiro wrote years earlier but never managed to get published and in the need for actual emissaries to go abroad surreptitiously in order, perhaps, to reforge Japan’s ties with the wider world.

This is a strange, almost oblique, novel. The characters are nearly transparent. So much so that you may begin to think that it sounds like a novelization of a futuristic Japanese anime. I found that although the overall story was curiously compelling, I never felt at home in the story. And I wasn’t certain that the transformation at the end was fully earned (a point which might hold for early points as well). However, the premise was so out-there that I would certainly be willing to read further works by Tawada on the basis of this one.

Gently recommended.

Towada is an absolutely brilliant writer! She seems to be a unique voice, akin to Orwell & Kafka. Set in dystopian Japan, after the nation has chosen to isolate itself from all other nations, the reader is witness to the lives of Yoshiri and his great grandson, Mumei, as they navigate the rigid rules of the new society. Part satire, part dark foretelling of the future of our world when horribly contaminated, I found myself chuckling and grimacing within a single paragraph. Ms. Towada's use of language is exquisite! Great novella!

An interesting post-Fukushima novel – worth reading, but, unfortunately, far from captivating.

This book is set in a future Japan after a series of world wide catastrophes have radically changed societies. The cause of the problems is not explained but it is strongly hinted that they were man made, environmental degradation caused by greedy over usage. Most countries have adopted a isolationist policy, limiting their citizens movements to their own country. Much, though not all of the countries infrastructure has been destroyed or become inactive. In this setting the older generations are strong and healthy, almost immortal, while each succeeding generation is increasingly weaker.

The two protagonists are Yoshiro and his great grandson Mumei who Yoshiro is raising. Yoshiro is strong and healthy even though he is over one hundred, but Mumei is weak, barely able to walk and plagued with health issues. Despite this Mumei maintains a stoic attitude feeling no self pity, even though Yoshiro constantly worries about him.

As the book progresses we are given some hints about what caused this state of affairs in the world. We learn about Yoshiro's daughter, grandson and wife. The world that Y&M live in is described in a whimsical and poetic fashion which I found quite enjoyable. Things aren't explained fully they are often just hinted at with striking contrasts and similarities between the book's world and ours.

My one complaint was with the ending of the book. It is a pretty short book to begin with (my English translation was 138 pages). The last dozen pages don't make much sense. There seemed to be a buildup to a particular conclusion but the author didn't carry it through and just abruptly ended the book.

I would still recommend the book, however, for the authors whimsical style and his observations on human society and peoples relationship with the environment.

Beautifully written. Sad and scary.

'The Emissary' is a curious little book, packed with oversized ideas. A post-apocalyptic Japan is reeling in isolation, old people don't die and young people are fragile and evolving along a different path. Yoshiro, the great-grandfather and an author, raises Mumei, the great-grandson with untethered curiosity and a fascination with language; Mumei's father is a gambling addict and unable to be responsible, the mother died in childbirth; the grandparents live in Okinawa, now tenuously part of Japan; great-grandmother is a teacher in Shikoku. The great-grandmother and Yonatani, the elementary school teacher, are part of a loosely knit organization to track and identify children as potential 'emissaries' to go abroad--both as ambassadors and to allow foreign doctors to study the children's fragilities. Is it important to know what caused the apocalypse? Probably not. Should the reader know more about the context or outcome? Again, probably not. The enigma is left to the reader's interpretation. What I found enjoyable was the sense of language in the writing (even in translation), the wildly creative world and its cryptic relation to the past and future, the enigmatic plot, the shifting point of view, and the ambiguity of the end. Any other approach would have been too neat.