The Emissary By Margaret Mitsutani
Margaret Mitsutani Ô 3 download
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. The Emissary
I have no idea what I just read but I enjoyed reading it 9780811227629 Short, strange, and whimsical, The Emissary tracks Mumei, a sickly child, and his great-grandfather Yoshiro as the pair wanders about post-apocalyptic Tokyo. An environmental catastrophe has left Japan with immortal elders and weak youths, and prompted the nation to sequester itself from the rest of the world. In delicate and ethereal prose, the author captures the loneliness of Mumei and Yoshiro’s daily routines, and describes the changes in their country’s customs since the time of ecological ruin. The serenity of the novella is occasionally punctured by flashes of trauma or fury. Readers searching for a well-structured story will be disappointed, but Tawada’s style is mesmerizing. 9780811227629 Full of metaphors and unexplained reversions of normal society, this book felt more as a setup to something than a finished end product - 1.5 star
We follow Yoshiro and his great grandson Mumei, who has many physical disabilities being one of the The Last Children of Tokyo in this post apocalyptic novella. After an unnamed cataclysm Japan is thrown back at itself and the references to shinto, buddhism and Japanese myths and folktales are abundant. Also language is closed off from the outside world and changes in isolation, with foreign words disappearing and kanji changing meaning. Interestingly enough this is also an important topic in a book of another Japanese author: The Memory Police that was shortlisted for the International Bookerprize 2020.
The pacing in this book is peculiar. We have 140 pages of basically an aging man bringing his sick great grandchild to school and then suddenly, with 30 pages to go, there is a time jump of around 7 years and some semblance of action. Meanwhile characters don’t really get into focus, Mumei seems saintlike in his acceptance of the situation while Yoshiro is a sort of walking Wikipedia article.
Mood and atmosphere is certainly present, an interesting world and pretty images is not the problem. However I do feel Yōko Tawada takes on a lot for such a short book: aging, nationalistic isolation and environmental collapse. Even the sidewalks in this world need to be transformed to unbreakable glass slabs instead of moving the actual story along.
There are transformations from male into female (hello Orlando!) and so much exposition on the various changes after the mysterious calamity.
We have internet down, so now robotized pigeons (because GPS is apparently still a thing?) instead of email.
There is so much going on in the setting that the whole story itself feels underdeveloped.
Rarely I feel a book would be better being longer, but here it is the other way around
The Last Children Of Tokyo (or The Emissary) reads like a long teaser and did not satisfy in my opinion. 9780811227629 The dentist in this story was 105 years old. ( normal adult age).
As a science-fiction book - we immediately suspend belief... we learn this generation has pretty much stopped dying.
A young boy Mumei loves going to the dentist - sitting in the big chair and listening to the dentist speak to him.
Mumei tells the dentist he likes worms much more than milk.
The dentist then goes into a monologue about the brain and the ‘other brain’ - meaning the intestines.
I immediately thought about Mary Roach’s book “Gulp”.
I found it interesting that this ‘is’ supposed to be a futuristic science fiction book -
But from my nutritional reading today there’s nothing futuristic at all about what the author said about the ‘brain-of-the-intestine’, reflecting the condition of a persons physical health being more accurate than the upper brain itself. The author’s futuristic knowledge- has turned out to be quite truthful according to medical research today.
Medical scientists have already proven that the people’s condition of the intestines affects the health of many other vital organs in our body....but I enjoyed this part of the story... it was totally engaging.
I like the interaction between this impressionable young boy and his intrigue with this dentist.
I enjoy Japanese books. I expect their stories to be ‘different’. I don’t expect to understand everything ...( which I didn’t in this slim book), and I liked some parts more than others - rather understood some parts more than others.....
but I enjoyed the the characters, and the whimsical prose.
Mumei - sweet - wise - and fragile is the great-great grandson of Yoshiro - who, like the dentist, is also over 100 years old. This story mostly follows their relationship.
We get to look at what is happening to the younger generation. We can see how much they have lost.
I thought about the younger generation today -and how much more challenging it is for many of them today to ‘thrive’ financially- than in generations past. Everything seems harder ( a shrinking society on many levels)
The under-current atmosphere in this story was frightening, sinister, and mysterious, but the storytelling relationships between the characters were charming & sweet.
This book looks at morality:
...differently than Atul Gawande’s book, ( totally different style), than “Being Mortal”....
But in both books we can’t help but think about aging, frailty, death, one’s declining years, and a life with meaning.
Compelling thoughts linger.....
The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor meltdown in 2011... was a major accident by the international atomic Energy Agency.
This national trauma was inspire by the Yoko Tawada in writing this story. Her book gives us a bleak look at a diminished world.
3.7 stars 9780811227629 !! NOW AVAILABLE !!
”For an old man like Yoshiro, time after death no longer existed. The aged could not die; along with the gift of everlasting life, they were burdened with terrible task of watching their great-grandchildren die.”
Set in the Japan of the future, this story focuses on Yoshiro and his great-grandson, Mumei. What has transpired in the past is vaguely touched on, but never really fully explained. Countries are no longer in communication with one another - the whole world has changed. The older generation can’t die, the younger generations struggle to thrive.
”As a child he had assumed the goal of medicine was to keep bodies alive forever; he had never considered the pain of not being able to die.”
There are almost no animals; there are dogs which one can rent for a run, a “lope.” An end-of-the-world scenario.
I can’t say that I ‘loved’ this, or even ‘enjoyed’ reading it. It seemed disjointed, which seemed to be intentional - but it didn’t make it more or less enjoyable even thinking that was a possibility. It had me contemplating what her message was, and there were some moments where I recognized the message she was trying to relay. Commentaries on the overly-politically-correct attempts to please all. The renaming of holidays to achieve this.
”’Labor Day’ became ‘Being Alive is Enough Day.’”
I’m not the target audience for this, but I’m also not sure who is. It felt as though the author wrote this only for her own entertainment, that it wasn’t really meant to be enjoyed or even necessarily appreciated by others, just a message to be conveyed.
Pub Date: 24 APR 2018
Many thanks for the ARC provided by New Directions / W.W. Norton & Company 9780811227629
The Emissary has a layer of whimsy that contradicts the horrors of the post-apocalyptic story it tells. This contradiction is compelling, but also distancing. Take away the whimsy and what's left reminds me of Ibuse's Black Rain, the story of a young woman's slow death from radiation poisoning following the bombing of Hiroshima, as told through her uncle's diaries. Both novels tell the story of a young person with no future, and of a civilization with no hope. They both beautifully capture the stoic-with-a-smile fatalism of Japanese culture, too, where people honor their obligations even in the most apocalyptic circumstances. But Ibuse's novel is almost unbearably truthful and intimate, whereas Tawada's has a sheen of light-hearted detachment. Ibuse's novel is unforgettable, and Tawada's novel never became more than a what-if exercise: interesting to read, full of fascinating detail about one possible future, but lacking any deeper follow-through to make it memorable.
9780811227629 This is a strange short novel, a near future Japan that has once again shut itself off from the world, after environmental issues have caused the elderly to live longer while the children seem unsustainable.
To me this novel connects to The Vegetarian by Han Kang and Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin. The strangeness, the environmental impact causing a change in behavior, the inability the humans in the stories have to change what feels inevitable. 9780811227629 Now - under the better US English title The Emissary - winner of the first National Book Award for translated literature.
The aged could not die; along with the gift of everlasting life, they were burdened with terrible task of watching their great-grandchildren die.
The Japanese novelist Yōko Tawada writes, unusually in both German and Japanese. Her previous novel in English translation, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, rendered from the German by the excellent Susan Bernofsky. featured strongly in awards: winning the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, at the time of this review shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, and was also longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award Longlist, and a nominee for the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize.
The Emissary (my preferred English language title - see below) is from a Japanese language original, but the translation by Margaret Mitsutani (who translated Kenzaburō Ōe's An Echo of Heaven as well as a previous Tawada novel) is of an equally high standard.
'Still in his blue silk pyjamas, Mumei sat with his bottom flat on the tatami. Perhaps it was his head, much too large for his slender long neck, that made him look like a baby bird. Hairs fine as silk threads stuck to his scalp, damp with sweat. His eyes nearly shut, he moved his head as if searching the air, trying to catch on his tympanic membrane the scraping of footsteps on gravel. The footsteps grew louder, then stopped. The sliding door rattled like a freight train, and as Mumei opened up his eyes, morning light, yellow as melted dandelions, poured in. The boy threw back his shoulders, puffed out his chest and stuck out both his arms like a bird spreading its wings.'
The Emissary tells the story of a centenarian Yoshiro and his great-grandson Mumei, set in a near-future Japan. A combination of both natural disaster, an earthquake with echoes of that in Saramago's The Stone Raft which has moved the islands of Japan further from the Asian mainland, and unspecified man-made ecological catastrophe's has led to a world rather different to ours today. The elderly generation seem to be immortal (or at least none have died) while in contrast the young are weak and deformed - typically wheelchair bound by their mid-teens and with short lifespans.
'The baker was “young elderly,” a phrase that had once cracked people up but was now standard usage. People weren’t even called “middle-aged elderly” nowadays until they were well into their nineties, and the baker was barely into his late seventies.
...
The names of some of the older holidays were changed: “Respect for the Aged Day” became “Encouragement for the Aged Day,” while “Children’s Day ” was now “Apologize to the Children Day”; “Sports Day” was changed to “Body Day” to avoid upsetting children who were not growing up big and strong.
...
A popular manga entitled A Message from the Sea Breeze , about a foot messenger with the legs of a Japanese antelope and a map of every town in the country in his head, inspired lots of children to dream of becoming foot messengers when they grew up, though the general deterioration in physical strength among the young would make that impossible — in the near future, young people would probably all work in offices and physical labor would be left to the elderly.
Don't expect from the novel any rationale for how this all works. This is speculative fiction but in the literary rather than genre sense where, for good or ill (good in my view), the focus in not on creation of a coherent world but rather a metaphorical literary device. Similarly the perspective is narrowed to that of a few characters - we get little view of the issues in wider society (rather like Saramago's Blindness versus his later sequel of sorts Seeing).
Indeed rather quirky metaphors are par for the course in the novel:
'The dentist explained that diarrhea is the intestines ’ method of getting rid of whatever they decide is poisonous as quickly and efficiently as possible. The brain in the head is well known, the dentist went on, but the intestines are actually another brain, and when these two brains disagree the intestines always get the upper hand. This is why the brain is sometimes called the Upper House, and the intestines the Lower House. Because Lower House elections are held often, it is generally believed that it’s the Lower House that truly reflects shifts in public opinion. In the same way, because the contents of the intestines are constantly changing, the intestines reflect a person’s physical condition more accurately than the brain.
dietary issues being a key concern in this world, both the fragile digestive system of the young and the contamination of the food supply, Mumei's teeth also suffering from calcium deficiency.
According to one theory, it’s best to get your calcium from the bones of fish and animals. But they have to be from before the earth became irreversibly contaminated. So some people say we should dig way, way down underground to find dinosaur bones. In Hokkaido there are already shops that sell powder from ground Naumann Mammoth bones they’ve dug up there.”
In this new world, Japan has reverted to Edo-era isolationism - one of the novel's seeming (and prescient - this was published in 2014) themes - being the rise of political nationalism. As Yoshido tries to explain:
'“Every country has serious problems, so to keep those problems from spreading all around the world, they decided that each country should solve its own problems by itself. Remember when I took you to the Showa-Heisei Museum? All the rooms were separated by steel doors, so if a fire starts in one room it can’t spread to the next one.”
“It is better that way?”
“I don’t know if it’s better or not. But at least this way there’s less danger of Japanese companies making money off the poor people living in other countries. And there are probably fewer chances for foreign companies to make money from the crisis we’re having here in Japan, too.”
Mumei looked puzzled, as if maybe he sort of understood, but not quite. Yoshiro was always careful not to tell him that he didn’t really support Japan’s isolation policy.'
Language is key to the novel including the deliberate erasure of foreign, particularly English, loan words.
'The ability to understand even a little English was evidence of old age. As studying English was now prohibited, young people didn’t know even simple words like on and off. It was okay to study other languages such as Tagalog, German, Swahili, or Czechoslovakian.'
Leading to some new words....
'Long ago , this sort of purposeless running had been referred to as jogging, but with foreign words falling out of use, it was now called loping down, an expression that had started out as a joke meaning “if you lope your blood pressure goes down,” but everybody called it that these days. And kids Mumei’s age would never have dreamt that adding just an e in front of it the word lope could conjure up visions of a young woman climbing down a ladder in the middle of the night to run away with her lover.'
and deliberately encouraged misreadings
'The Tengu Company was based in Iwate Prefecture, and inside each shoe Iwate was written in India ink with a brush, followed by the kana for ma and de. * The younger generation, who no longer studied English, interpreted the “made” on old “Made in Japan” labels in their own way.'
with a footnote: 'The Japanese word made (pronounced mah-day) means “to” or “until,” so Iwate made would mean “to Iwate.”'
Others refers to Chinese symbols:
'Children without parents had long since ceased to be called “orphans”; they were now referred to as doku ritsu jido, “independent children.” Because the Chinese character for doku looks like a dog separated from the pack who survives by attaching itself to a human being and never leaving his side, Yoshiro had never felt comfortable with the phrase.'
But in a world where the young have no knowledge of non-Japanese culture, Mumei is special - and hence perhaps suitable to be an emissary:
'Where could the boy have picked up such a foreign-sounding sentence, when books — even picture books — were no longer being translated?'
The translation issues indeed start with the title. The Japanese word used for Emissary is phonetically kentôshi, literally ambassadors dispatched to Tang' (per https://wiki.samurai-archives.com/ind...) and, in the story, an idea develops to send one of the young people as a emissary to China. That word is normally written 遣唐使 but Tawada has rendered her title in different characters 献灯使, which carries a literal implication of 'bearer of light.' The subtle change is a little lost in the English-US title; but at least it preserves a key part of the sense - bizzarely the English-UK version of the novel has gone for The Last Children of Tokyo, which is perhaps more attention grabbing and representative of the story, but not what the original was called at all.
The next arises in the first line. In Japanese Mumei's name is written 無名 which could be literally rendered 'no name', but is usually used for unknown/anonymous (as in for example 無名 戦士の墓 - 'Tomb of the Unknown Soldier'.) The English reader, as pointed out in the excellent Complete Review review (http://www.complete-review.com/review...), has to wait until about halfway through for his great-grandfather to explain the, deliberate, choice of name while one assumes readers of the original would immediately have been alert to the nuance.
But otherwise Mitsutani copes very well, resorting to footnotes only twice (once mentioned above) and using a good blend of direct translation, adaption and judicious inclusion of untranslated (but phonetically rendered) words, even once some Japanese characters.
Overall:
The writing in the novel is excellent, although it did feel that for a Western audience it is packaged to tick the post-Murakami quirky and twee box. And the translation copes brilliantly with many tricky issues. And for such a short novel it manages to touch on three key mega-trends - the ageing Japanese population, isolationist nationalism and environmental degradation.
But ultimately this fell between the two stools of a short-story and a fully-realised novel, too long to be the former but much too under-developed to be the latter. Worthwhile but a little unsatisfying - 3 stars.
Thanks to Netgalley / Portabello for the ARC.
A recommended review:
https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/b... 9780811227629 It became apparent rather early on, that I was going to have a profound difficulty in immersing myself in this story. The main issue that caused this, was the disjointed plot. There really was NO plot, and just when I thought one was starting up, it fell flat, and I was sitting there rolling my eyes.
The back cover I feel was misleading. I was promised to be enchanted, and unsettled, and frankly, I was neither of these. I was glad, however, once I had finished reading the final page. I mean, what was this book supposed to be about? There was a complete lack of character development, which obviously left me not really caring about them, and then we return to that odd, disjointed plot again, which was exasperating as hell.
There were some sparsely written sentences in here, that made me raise an eyebrow, and think Hmm, that was an interesting sentence but unfortunately, the sentence made little impact on me, because my mind was so exhausted attempting to figure out just what was going on.
I do feel this book could have had the potential to be something better than this, but instead I've finished this feeling disappointed and washed-out.
9780811227629 With children like this having children of their own, it was no wonder the world was full of children. pg. 74
Great little book (138 pages), I've read it before and it is a book I really enjoy.
Sometimes I find it difficult to review great books. I don't know what to say except This is SO good! and You should read it.
Yōko Tawada is a genius, frankly, and this book showcases that and her amazing writing style.
It takes place in the future: children are born sickly, are unable to walk by age 15, are weak, frail, and need constant care. Adults are the strong ones, especially the elderly, who get older and older without falling sick or getting weak. People are living into their 100s (109, 115) with no disease or weakening. The new generation isn't so lucky. The elderly are spry - running, working hard, long days, and raising their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
As a result of the contamination, Japan has isolated itself, walled itself off from the outside world. So has almost every other country. It's 'for protection.' But not every Japanese person agrees with the government's isolationist policies.
The book focuses on Yoshiro, who is raising up his great-grandson. It devastates him to see his weak and suffering great-grandson, but the boy is cheerful and never complains. He always tries to cheer up his great-grandpa, who is one of the people who remembers how things were in the before-times.
It's clear that Yōko Tawada probably wrote this in a response to Fukushima Daiichi, but this is actually perfect reading for a pandemic. It fits in very nicely with what's going on now, in 2020.
Yōko Tawada's genius is in a.) her amazing writing skillz. She puts words together beautifully and makes reading a joy. And in b.) her ideas and concepts about the future and where things might end up. She's not writing a satire, but she's brushing up against one: exhibiting ideas in the vein of George Orwell or William Gibson.
We never truly know what the future might hold, and things we never foresee can one day become everyday mundane facts of life. Which this Covid-19 pandemic illustrates PERFECTLY and this chilling and tantalizing concept is captured in this novel. Yoshiro is living in a future he never could have imagined as a child or a teenager.
Years ago when I used to go to New York to sell my knives it didn't seem far at all - distance is odd that way.
His voice dropped to a raspy whisper on New York. There was a strange new law against saying the names of foreign cities out loud, and although no one had been prosecuted for breaking it yet, all the same people were very being careful. Nothing is more frightening than a law that has never been enforced. When the authorities want to throw someone in jail, all they have to do is suddenly arrest him for breaking a law that no one has bothered to obey yet. pg. 30
Yōko Tawada is smart. The book is smart. I recommend reading it.
The only drawback here is that it is not a traditionally plotted book. This book does not have a real conclusion or a true plot. Instead, it showcases a few days in this incredible future. People who enjoy a traditional story arc are not going to be happy with this one.
While it wasn't clear whether or not Yoshiro's generation would really have to live forever, for the time being they had definitely been robbed of death. Perhaps when their bodies had reached the end, even their fingers and toes worn down to nothing, their minds would hang on, refusing to shut down, writhing still inside immobile flesh. pg. 93
TL;DR I recommend this brilliant little book. Whether you stay for Yōko Tawada's beautiful writing or her thought-provoking ideas about the world around her and its possible future - there will be something for you to enjoy here. The only off-putting thing for some readers may be the book's lack of a traditional 'plot.' The book is worth reading and I encourage everyone to give Yōko Tawada's work a chance. You can get lost in this short, consuming, futuristic little novel. It's fascinating and you don't only have to rely on Yōko Tawada's ideas to keep you interested - she also writes skillfully.
NAMES IN THIS BOOK
ETA: UPDATE 01/06/21
Years ago when I used to go to New York to sell my knives it didn't seem far at all - distance is odd that way.
His voice dropped to a raspy whisper on New York. There was a strange new law against saying the names of foreign cities out loud, and although no one had been prosecuted for breaking it yet, all the same people were very being careful. Nothing is more frightening than a law that has never been enforced. When the authorities want to throw someone in jail, all they have to do is suddenly arrest him for breaking a law that no one has bothered to obey yet. pg. 30
Duterte retroactively enforcing a law against Maria Ressa. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/bu... 9780811227629
