The Emissary

by Yoko Tawada, Margaret Mitsutani (Translator)

Overview

Winner of 2018 National Book Award in Translated Literature

Library Journal Best Books of 2018

Yoko Tawada’s new novel is a breathtakingly light-hearted meditation on mortality and fully displays what Rivka Galchen has called her “brilliant, shimmering, magnificent strangeness”

Japan, after suffering from a massive irreparable disaster, cuts itself off from the world. Children are so weak they can barely stand or walk: the only people with any get-go are the elderly. Mumei lives with his grandfather Yoshiro, who worries about him constantly. They carry on a day-to-day routine in what could be viewed as a post-Fukushima time, with all the children born ancient—frail and gray-haired, yet incredibly compassionate and wise. Mumei may be enfeebled and feverish, but he is a beacon of hope, full of wit and free of self-pity and pessimism. Yoshiro concentrates on nourishing Mumei, a strangely wonderful boy who offers “the beauty of the time that is yet to come.”

A delightful, irrepressibly funny book, The Emissary is filled with light. Yoko Tawada, deftly turning inside-out “the curse,” defies gravity and creates a playful joyous novel out of a dystopian one, with a legerdemain uniquely her own.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811227629
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	214,996
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German and has received the Akutagawa, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso and Tanizaki prizes. Last year her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award.

Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada and Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate Kenzaburo Oe.

Editorial Reviews

01/29/2018
An anxious writer frets over his wastrel of a great-grandson in this inventive dystopian novel from Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear). Its environment “irreversibly contaminated,” near-future Japan has been cut off from the outside world, leaving 108-year-old Yoshiro trapped with his great-grandson Mumei in a spartan “temporary” house. The population is divided between those born before the calamity—whose life spans have been mysteriously lengthened—and those enfeebled by it: “The aged could not die; along with the gift of everlasting life, they were burdened with the terrible task of watching their great-grandchildren die.” Yoshiro dreams of escape, but it is Mumei who, despite his inability to walk or chew properly, is selected as one of several “especially bright children to send abroad as emissaries.” Mumei’s deteriorating condition is signalled by his hair turning grey, and soon he begins having difficulty breathing. These health problems complicate his potential deployment; while he awaits a decision, he turns to the more urgent task of comforting Yoshiro. Tawada’s novel is infused with the anxieties of a “society changing at the speed of pebbles rolling down a steep hill,” yet she imagines a ruined world with humor and grace. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

The Emissary carries us beyond the limits of what is it is to be human, in order to remind us of what we must hold dearest in our conflicted world, our humanity.

Sjón

"Like sashimono woodwork, Tawada needs no exposition to nail down her dystopia. The Emissary achieves a technically impossible balance of open-hearted fable and cold-blooded satire."

Financial Times

Recessive, lunar beauty [with] a high sheen. Her language has never been so arresting—flickering brilliance.

Parul Sehgal - The New York Times

"Everywhere in the Japan of Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, strange mutations unfold. In the years (perhaps decades, or perhaps generations) since an environmental catastrophe, the basic tenets of biology have broken down. Children are born weak, with birdlike bones and soft teeth. The elderly, in turn, are youthful, athletic, seem to have been ‘robbed of death’. Men begin to experience menopausal symptoms as they age. Everyone’s sex changes inexplicably and at random at least once in their lives...Tawada has gifted us a quiet new magical realism for the Anthropocene."

Rebecca Bates - The White Review

Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, uses a light tone that frequently leans into gentle abstraction and wry humor, producing a slim novel that charms as much as it provokes reflection.

Kiri Falls - The Japan News

Charming, light, and unapologetically strange...There’s an impish delight in [each] sentence that energizes what is otherwise a despairing note. Tawada finds a way to make a story of old men trapped in unending life and children fated to die before their time joyful, comic, and—frankly—a huge comfort.

J.W. McCormack - BOMB

A Hieronymus Bosch–like painting in novel form. Tawada's charming surrealism imparts an off-kilter quality to her work that would make it feel slight, if it weren’t for the density, precision, and uniqueness of her mind. A slim and beguiling novel in Margaret Mitsutani’s enchanting and flawless translation.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett - Public Books

A phantasmagoric representation of humanity’s fraught relationship with technology and the natural world.

Brian Haman - Asian Review of Books

An airily beautiful dystopian novella about mortality. Tawada’s quirky style and ability to jump from realism to abstraction manages to both chastise humanity for the path we are taking towards destruction and look hopefully toward an unknown future.

Enobong Essien - Booklist

A mini-epic of eco-terror, family drama and speculative fiction. Tawada’s interest is satirical as much as tragic, with public holidays chosen by popular vote (Labour Day becomes Being Alive Is Enough Day) and a privatized police force whose activities now centre on its brass band. It’s this askew way of looking at things amid the ostensibly grim premise, and a sprightly use of language that makes The Emissary a book unlike any other.

Guardian

"Like sashimono woodwork, Tawada needs no exposition to nail down her dystopia. The Emissary achieves a technically impossible balance of open-hearted fable and cold-blooded satire."

Financial Times

Wonderful—what is truly affecting is Tawada’s language, which jumps off the page and practically sings.

NPR

01/01/2018
Japanese-born, Germany-based Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear) writes facilely in both languages and creates incomparable award-winning fiction that defies easy labels. Tawada's latest in translation (smoothly rendered by Mitsutani, who also translated one of Tawada's earliest works, the three-storied The Bridegroom Was a Dog) introduces a symbiotically bonded duo who are a century apart in age. At almost 108, Yoshiro still jogs every morning for half an hour—with a rented dog. His reason for (still) living is Mumei, his daughter's son's son—to get him up, dressed, mandarin-juiced, out the door to practice walking a few steps, then biked the rest of the way to his elementary school. In this alternate future, everything—soil, sky, oceans—is potentially poisoned, most animals have disappeared, and even the children face extinction. Only the elderly seems to have long, long life—perhaps more curse than blessing as they bear the responsibility for being guardians to fragile, weakened new generations unprepared for survival. And yet despite his seemingly truncated prognosis, Mumei's outlook remains full of insight and charm. VERDICT Blending fairy tale, dystopian warning, peculiar mystery, cultural critique, and multigenerational family saga, Tawada's latest literary, linguistic mélange should satiate even the most discerning international fiction aficionados.—Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

Library Journal

2018-02-06
In this slim, impactful novel, surrealist master Tawada (Memoirs of a Polar Bear, 2016, etc.) imagines a dystopian Japan reckoning with its own identity.In the wake of an economic and environmental tragedy that eerily echoes 2011's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government implements an "isolation policy," cutting the country off from the outside world. Central Tokyo is deserted, the country's soil is contaminated, its plants have mutated, and its people are living under a capricious governing body that has not only waged a war on words (the term "mutation" having been replaced by the more agreeable "environmental adaptation"), but has proven to have a penchant for tinkering with the laws: "Afraid of getting burned by laws they couldn't see, everyone kept their intuition honed as sharp as a knife, practicing restraint and self-censorship on a daily basis." A writer unsettled by the turn his country has taken, Yoshiro's main concern is the declining health of his grandson, Mumei. In this new era, children are wise beyond their years, but their bodies are brittle, aging vessels, and the elderly have become a new kind of species, cursed with the gift of everlasting life, "burdened with the terrible task of watching their great-grandchildren die." Left in Yoshiro's care after the death of his mother and disappearance of his father, Mumei, feeble (and toothless) as he is, fills his grandfather's interminable days with life. Despite the gloomy circumstances, Tawada's narrative remains incandescent as she charts the hopeful paths both grandfather and grandson embark upon in their attempt to overcome mortality's grim restraints. Striving to persist in a time when intolerance abounds and "the shelf life of words [is] getting shorter all the time," Mumei's searching curiosity and wonder toward the world inspire faith that, even in the darkest of days, humanity cannot be forsaken.An ebullient meditation on language and time that feels strikingly significant in the present moment.

Kirkus Reviews

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