Interweaving plot strands, disrupted flashbacks, and non-linear perspectives “zip through the air, then stop, hovering for a second before taking off in a completely unexpected direction” like the long-forgotten dragonfly of Yoshiro’s youth. And yet despite the rather mundane plot-an aging grandfather nourishing his grandson and himself with familial and Japanese history-Tawada’s incongruous juxtapositions endow the story with a certain incommensurability. Although in failing health, Mumei evinces a psychological maturity that stands in stark contrast with the elder Yoshiro’s sound body but troubled mind, and their life together is an inverted blend of domestic dependency and duty. Set within this strange dystopian bricolage of a 21st-century preindustrial Japan are Yoshiro, a writer and centenarian, who cares for Mumei, his fifteen year-old, wheelchair-bound great-grandson. Tokyo’s streets are eerily deserted studying English is forbidden (along with reading foreign-language novels) cars as well as animals have disappeared people no longer use electrical appliances since they cause nervous disorders dandelions wield four-inch petals, salmon have stars all over their skin, and the word “healthy” no longer describes children (who now weaken and die young) while old people suffer under the strains of increasing strength and longevity. The country has suffered an unspecified disaster, or series of disasters, and consequently adopted a closed-door policy, sealing itself off from the outside world.

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.

Originally published in Japanese in 2014, The Emissary marks Tawada’s most recent book to appear in English translation on the subject. Twenty-one years later, the imagined world of nuclear disaster became reality when the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami resulted in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear incident. The only other living organisms are immense mutant dandelions, whose weighty yellow flower heads tower over the human figures. With the breach of six nuclear reactors, Japan’s residents flee to the sea, where most of them eventually drown, leaving a handful of humans amidst a radioactive landscape of blackened earth and sky.

In one nightmarish vignette from his 1990 film Dreams the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa imagines how life might look and feel following a nuclear meltdown in Japan.

The Emissary by Yōko Tawada