*Disclaimer: I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.


I am participating the the Asian Readathon this month and thought I'd concentrate on getting through some of my NetGalley books, something that is the focus of most of my reading so far this year.

I went into The Last Children of Tokyo knowing nothing about it and have finished it with very mixed thoughts. Having no chapter breaks, and very few paragraph breaks, meant that I read the book in it's entirety within 24 hours; I needed to know what was going on and the writing style really propelled me through the narrative. The author drops you straight into this future Japan with little in the way of context and expects you to acclimatise to it. However, though I liked the idea of this slightly science fiction setting, it didn't feel developed enough for me. Aspects of the world building made it feel futuristic while others more historical. I found the ageing issues difficult to grasp and although this was prevalent throughout the story, it never became any clearer to me.  

Overall, I liked reading this book but I have put it down feeling confused and not quite satisfied. Some of the blame for that should be placed on the blurb as I feel it gives away too much of the story, featuring aspects that don't happen until the final ten percent of the book. I would recommend this if you like light sci-fi and contemporary stories with a speculative twist, but unfortunately this wasn't for me.

2 out of 5 stars!

A short, strange novel. What happens if we live well into old age but that the world is stricken by a sickness that means children never grow into adulthood?

An interesting premise for a novel but the possibilities were not fully explored.

Thanks to NetGalley for an advance copy in return for a review.

This didn't work for me. The premise was intriguing but didn't satisfy and I didn't find the writing enjoyable enough that I could overlook that. The plot seemed underdeveloped and I was unable to feel any emotional connection to the characters. So many of the ideas were interesting but went nowhere. And just when I thought it about to get going, it ended.
While many readers will find this book thought provoking and profound, those looking for a thumping good story will be disappointed.

An unusual take on the future of aging and intergenerational responsibility. The setting is vivid, but not all of the characters are fully fleshed out.

In "The Last Children of Tokyo," Yoko Tawada envisions a future in which the elderly enjoy vitality and immortality, while the life expectancy of children scarcely borders on adulthood. The reasons for the environmental disaster that has led to Japan's isolation are unknown; however, this new and harsh reality depicts a country lacking animals - except dogs, cats and rabbits - and resources, from electricity to food. Mirroring Memoirs of a Polar Bear, the use of restrictive language demonstrates the author's habit of projecting her interest in linguistic determinism (for example, there are no orphan children, but "independent" children).

In this dystopia, Yoshiro's life revolves around the care of his great-grandson Mumei. Their well-being is constantly threatened by these unknown external factors that have drastically altered their lives: children with digestive systems that barely tolerate food, with teeth so weak that they cannot chew fruits, unable to walk for more than twenty steps without help ... Trapped in a constant worry, Yoshiro is torn between the nostalgia of a distant past and a new reality where it is common to watch new generations pass away.

A novella deftly written, loaded with symbolism and satire. Despite managing to generate a certain level of curiosity, its lack of development has failed to evoke any emotions beyond that. An intriguing concept, yet probably too ambitious for its short length.

Yoko Tawada's latest book is a novella set in a dystopian Japan where climate change and disease have forced the country to close its borders - no one is allowed in or out. Even foreign words are banned.
Yoshiro is bringing up his great-grandson, Mumei in a world where the old still work and only get older, and children get sick and die young. The rest of the family have left Tokyo or died.
"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."
Getting Mumei to eat or get dressed is a constant battle; like all children his teeth are soft, he is underweight and at risk of an infection. If he expends too much energy getting dressed, he won't be able to walk to school.
The future is bleak. And yet the writing is effortlessly light and often darkly humorous: People aren't called "middle-aged elderly" until they're well into their nineties. Children without parents aren't orphans but "independent children".
A surreal story about human love in the face of an unimaginable future, this is a thought-provoking short novel; it's images of damaged children living in a ruined world will stay with you. A cautionary tale for our troubled times.

This was such a surprising gem of a book. It's a sad, sweet and bizarre look at a bleak future Japan, where borders are closed, soil is contaminated, foreign words are banned, the elderly live much longer than usual and the children die young. Despite the extraordinary circumstances there is a lack of sensationalism or outrage in the main characters, which ultimately is what left me thinking about this book after I finished it. A wonderfully unique dystopian novella.

This is a unique tale where children have many health issue, such as soft boiled me and teeth as they do not absorb calcium, but the already aged population are still healthy and spry at over a 100 years old and expect to live forever.

It tells about the relationship between Mumei and his great grandfather, Yoshiro, who looks after him and clearly dotes on him. He often weeps to see poor Mumei struggle, but he always reassures Yoshiro, that he can manage.

I found the insights into Japanese culture fascinating from foods, the interaction between people and even the Japanese style towels.

The story does jump from different perspectives and times but I didn’t find it confusing and it just built the story and characters well. Yoko Tawada, has written an almost poetic tale and she made Mumei and Yoshiro so real I felt for them both and the atmosphere she built stayed with me for some time. I will be reading this again, probably several times. I loved it.

Yoko Tawana has written a thoroughly compelling tale where the elderly live forever but the children age fast. Mumei is very young, intelligent and confident but he is aging fast. His bones and teeth are soft and his hair turns white, all while in the care of his great grandfather who adores him. Most of the children in the tale are looked after by grandparents as the children’s parents have left them behind through various circumstances, It’s a great tale with insights in to Japanese culture which I found fascinating. It is a thought provoking tale and at times sad but shows how strong the human spirit can be. I loved it.

I would like to thank the author/publisher/NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a fair and honest review

This was an enjoyable Japanese dystopian novella. The plot did get a bit chaotic but I've come to expect quirky, chaotic writing from Japanese novellas.

This was an interesting and quick read, but overall it didn't really work for me. I found the writing to be quite chaotic and so I couldn't get invested in the characters or story.

It is hard to know whether to call this a novel, or a novella – coming in at around 100 pages it feels a bit in between. And as such I felt that, as much as I enjoyed the book, I felt that it was too short and the ideas that the book deals with could have merited a much deeper and longer treatment.

In a dystopian view of future Japan, a massive earthquake has shifted the country even further away from its neighbours, central Tokyo is a deserted wasteland, and children are born prematurely old, while the older generations remain energetic and look after the young. This is the story of Yoshiro, over 100 years old and still jogging to keep fit, and his great-grandson Mumei (literally ‘no name’). Living has become a fight to survive in many ways – the earth has been so contaminated food is hard to grow, wild animals have ceased to be seen in Japan, telephones no longer exist, climate change has created extremes of weather. To deal with this Japan has turned-in on itself once again, following an isolationist policy and banning all talk of anything foreign or the use of foreign words.

Into this world has come Mumei, who we learn ‘possesses a certain kind of wisdom’ that Yoshiro has not seen in a child before. This talent makes him the object of interest for a secret government scheme to send emissaries abroad, and by the end of the book he has indeed been chosen. Now 15 years old, and possibly having changed sex into a female, unable to walk and in a wheelchair, he is to be sent to India where medical examination will help future generations. And so ends the book, in a slightly mysterious, mystical scene by the sea which deliberately seems to leave our reading of the story open to interpretation.

There is no doubt that Tawada is a very good writer, and the premise behind this book is certainly intriguing. But as I have said, I felt that it could easily have been developed into a longer novel, some of the dystopian themes could have been explored in more detail, and the changes in Mumei in the second part of the book could have been detailed more. But then I guess this is what Tawada intended, to leave us wondering, to have a slightly ethereal tone to the book, to ask questions and not answer them. It’s well worth a read – I think I will need to go back some time in the future and re-read the book and I know that I will get even more from it on a second reading. Yes, I would recommend this – but as a book to make you think, which is always a good thing!

"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/index.php?title=Kentoshi) 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/reviews/tawaday/emissary.htm), 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.