Yoko Tawada's THE EMISSARY (Tr Margaret Mitsutani, Narr Julian Cihi)

When bands of elderly Japanese volunteered to help with clean-up at the nuclear plant in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, it felt very literary to me. Old men and women putting themselves in harm's way and at risk of much sooner and more painful deaths than they would otherwise expect, in order to preserve the health and genetic heritage represented by younger generations was incredibly heroic and self-sacrificing and epic. I remember wondering what kind of novels or poetry they might inspire. 

I never imagined it would be something quite like The Emissary*, though. 

In the world of The Emissary, the Fukushima story is turned inside-out. An unspecified disaster or Jackpot-style cluster of disasters has caused every nation to become a hermit kingdom, cut off from everywhere else so that each can work to solve its own problems and also insulate the less fortunate of other nations from the rapaciousness of its corporations. 

And in Japan at least, a generation of extremely elderly people are the only healthy humans left, functionally immortal. Their children were born substantially weaker and sicker, and every generation since has been in worse shape. Society has had drastically to change to cope with this reality, even to its holidays. Labor Day, for instance, is now considered a hurtful thing to celebrate when hardly any young people are capable of working, so it's been replaced by Being Alive is Enough Day. Children's Day has become National Apologize to the Children Day, and so on. 

Almost everybody has abandoned cities and the seashore as too dangerous and toxic; most now live in the countryside, near the mountains (of course I kept thinking of that remote part of Hokkaido where A Wild Sheep Chase finishes up) now and struggle to raise. their weak-necked, ancient looking, immunocompromised great-grandchildren, since the generations in between are mostly long dead. It's all very The Sheep Look Up, only the scope is much, much narrower.

Such, though he has elected to stay closer to Tokyo, is Yoshiro, healthy and hale and still jogging every morning in the company of a rented dog** at age 107, whose daughter has migrated to Okinawa and then whose grandson has succumbed to despair and addiction. Yorshiro now lives alone with tiny, sickly Mumei, his strangely wise and philosophical great-grandson, whom Yoshiro is already dreading the loss of as he steeps bread in soy milk; the boy's teeth are too weak to chew bread unless it's soaked and softened.

"Grown-ups can live if children die, but if grown-ups die, children cannot live," Mumei pipes up on the morning of the single day in which this novel -- barring lots and lots and lots of flashbacks, some of them quite extended -- takes place.

I make this novel sound quite bleak, and its milieu certainly is, but there are lots of lovely moments amidst the desolation; this is no The Road. Yoshiro is determined to do the best he can by Mumei, has even learned to sew to make clothing that accommodates Mumei's disabilities, clothing that Mumei's classmates frankly admire and hope to duplicate. There's also a brief visit from Yoshiro's estranged wife, come chiefly just to look at Mumei and reminisce with Yoshiro in several graceful scenes; we feel her wistfulness as she rides a rare train back to her lonely home elsewhere in Japan.

Meanwhile, greater forces have noticed Mumei, who is special even among a generation of special children. Mumei is smarter than most, especially when it comes to language (a particular joy of this novel, in which congratulations must go to translator Margaret Mitsutani as well as to Tawada herself, is its wistful playfulness with language and observations on how the changing world has produced changes in language that aren't only caused by Japan's increased isolation and estrangement from other countries and cultures). He is an ideal candidate someday to serve as an Emissary to what's left of international cooperative efforts, if he can possibly survive his childhood. If.

Typical of most of my visits through January in Japan, this short novel ends on an ambiguously hopeful note that it's left to the reader to interpret. The hopeful interpretation, fittingly, requires greater suspension of disbelief but is still bittersweet. Either way, one is left with an ah, me and a desire to Apologize to the Children.

*And yes, elephant in the room, I'm not only a Trekkie but a Niner, so this title was a lot to cope with. 

** Animals of any kind are rare; as someone in the novel observes, the only wild ones left in Japan are spiders and crows.