Winner of the 2017 Prize Goncourt, newly translated to English and published by Picador UK in January 2019.
⭐⭐⭐ ½
What is the purpose of novels like this one, with stories that stick closely to real historical events?
I can only suppose that here, one purpose was to relate history in a style different from a serious non-fiction history book. And, if you are not otherwise very interested in the minutiae of the events, and don't object to the addition of the occasional sneeze, speculation on how a historical figure felt, and conversations about [classical] music politicians were known to like, it makes for more lively reading.
The other is perhaps to get the attention of that subgroup of literary fiction readers who rarely pick up a history book - especially in a case like this, where historical events are related with an eye to contemporary political relevance; it is one of the countless books that could share the title The Nazis: A Warning from History. It addresses support for the Nazis from German big business of the 1930s, and the stages of the Austrian Anschluss.
The Order of the Day is very short and was first published, in France, in May 2017 so it's reasonable to assume it, or most of it, was written in 2016 - although French writers were already concerned about the rise of nationalism a little earlier: there are several far-right characters in Virginie Despentes' Vernon Subutex 1, released in January 2015.
In 2016, analogies between the Nazis, the 1930s, and current global politics seemed urgent and novel to Anglo-American readers of centre and left-leaning mainstream news, but over the last 2-3 years they have become commonplace cliché, and been joined or superseded by more nuanced comment that we should be mindful equally of similarities and of differences. So The Order of the Day does not feel as fresh and timely as it may have when it was entered for (and won) the 2017 Prix Goncourt.
In a recent discussion thread, The Order of the Day was mooted as a potential inclusion on next month's Booker International longlist, as a 'Brexit book'. However, in the UK, the Brexit vote created divisions which do not mirror those in the novel, especially as readers of translated literary fiction are more likely than the average person to be Remain supporters, and most moderate individuals are tired of the accusation of "Nazi" being flung around by both sides. The Order of the Day is bookended by chapters indicting German captains of industry for financially and politically enabling the rise and endurance of Hitler's regime; they felt that a Nazi government would provide a stable environment for business. (For those outside the UK, big business is overwhelmingly in favour of remaining in the EU, and this is known to probably everyone in the country who's able to understand the news - but the idea of 'dark money' backing a no-deal Brexit only has currency among politics geeks on the left.) Near the end of the book, Alfried Krupp - son of one of those business leaders, and who, behind a facade of good publicity for making reparations to Jews, is said to have made anti-Semitic remarks and dragged out the reparation negotiations deliberately - "would nonetheless become one of the most powerful figures in the Common Market, the king of coal and steel, a pillar of Pax Europaea." The pro-European idea of the Pax Europaea as a strategy to prevent a similar war or repression happening again does not obviously come up in the book. Nazi entanglement with German manufacturing is shown as an inescapable legacy, in the same way that historians of colonial slavery in the Americas have shown that its influence remains with us not only because of racial inequality, but in via Western taste for sugar, coffee and cotton.
I don't think The Order of the Day works as a Brexit novel specifically- it is better seen as one relating to the rise of the far right in general, and a cautionary tale about the complacency of neighbouring countries - British and French inaction and appeasement are prominent in the diplomatic scenes.
Although recent events do not bear out some of Vuillard's details:
It’s strange how the most dyed-in-the-wool tyrants still vaguely respect due process, as if they want to make it appear that they aren’t abusing procedure, even while riding roughshod over every convention.
Whilst it is overkill to describe Trump as a tyrant, this generalisation about dangerous political leaders is clearly not true of him.
Other reviews, and blurbs, for the book have described it as narrating a series of steps by which the Nazis rose to power and war became inevitable. However, it jumps straight from the meeting of business leaders with Hitler in early 1933, to the 1938 "summit" which preceded the Anschluss. There are many points in between which could have been highlighted if charting that trajectory was the novel's aim, not least Britain and France's impassive stance on Nazi involvement in the Spanish Civil War. It isn't clear to me why Vuillard has chosen the Anschluss as his focus (perhaps he is implying that another power should have invaded and destroyed the broken-down German materiel near Linz, starting the war earlier) - but it was quite interesting, as I haven't studied the political history of WWII formally since secondary school, and most of my own reading has been about social history or tactics. There were quite a few details here I hadn't heard before, or had long forgotten. I suppose I've never actively sought this stuff out because I still find it a bit distasteful reading about the Nazi leadership without comedy to take the edge off - these warmongers without whom none of my grandparents would have met, and two of them would not have had to hide in cargo crates - and in some echo of that, I felt slightly nervous through the 1930s and the war in the book, and relaxed once the narrative got to the Nuremberg Trials and we've 'survived'.
The first review I read of this book was from the Spectator, posted in a Goodreads discussion thread. There was some suggestion that the Spectator reviewer disliked the book because of opinions in the narrative. Not those about Hitler and other major politicians, which it describes as 'uncontroversial' but some phrases about business, for example: Corruption is an irreducible line item in the budget of large companies, and it goes by several names: lobbying fees, gifts, political contributions.. Or perhaps the hints that the contemporary global situation is growing more and more like Chamberlain's dinner party with Ribbentrop, where the PM, a model of upper-middle class politeness, continued to listen to the German ambassador's small-talk without confrontation, although he'd been handed news of the Anschluss.
For me personally, the most interesting and confrontational point was part of a sentence from Lord Halifax: "'And I daresay if we were in their [the Nazis'] position we might feel the same.’ Such were the foundations of what, still today, we call the Policy of Appeasement."
For those of us who grew up with the ideal of listening to, understanding and empathising with all sides - and that it was more laudable to strive to understand those on the other side than to be partisan (a product of the tail end of the post-war consensus and the dawn of third-way politics) the recent shift towards polarised extremes and no-platform/don't debate fascists is disorientating. It is hard to find your footing when some of the ideas you learnt as the polestar of everyday morality don't always correlate with magnetic north any more, but sometimes they still do. Now the rules have different patterns, but only in some places, and the pin of the compass won't quite settle.
Otherwise, for me the most interesting parts of The Order of the Day were not about political leaders. They were about the lesser-known famous people mentioned in passing, like the artist Louis Soutter (whose drawings, made in an asylum, Vuillard sees as an unwitting allegory for the looming war); the tennis player Bill Tilden, about who Ribbentrop bores on; and the brief list of ordinary Austrian men and women who killed themselves as the Germans were, to all intents and purposes, invading, and the life stories Vuillard imagines for them.
I am not sure to whom I'd recommend this book - it seems like something you'd read because you think you should, or because it won't take long - but if you want to know more about the Anschluss beyond its definition, whilst recognising that this is slightly embellished fiction, this novella is less dry than a textbook, and short enough not to overstay its welcome.
(read & reviewed Feb 2019)
19 February 2019
12 February 2019
The Last Children of Tokyo aka The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, tr. Margaret Mitsutani
Winner of the 2018 US National Book Award for Translated Fiction, under its American title, The Emissary.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
A curious blend of dystopia and utopia, with themes extrapolating from recent events and trends. It is set in a contaminated future Japan where the elderly are super-fit and support everyone, and children are plagued by severe health problems. In this world, most countries are isolationist. For its subject, it has an unusually peaceful and quirky tone and atmosphere, one which may be familiar from light Japanese literary fiction.
Many details of its world-building do not fit together logically, and are far from hard SF - but it makes a refreshing change from the standard projections of future technology and society in scenarios of environmental degeneration, which become hackneyed once you have read enough of them, and which are often American, or American-influenced. I was especially alert to the material and world-building aspects of Tawada's novel because recently, I attempted to plan a story starting in 2095; I had wanted to push past the sometimes lazy received wisdom of the usual American collapsitarian guys, and I ideally wanted to be able to have a logical story behind every object around my characters and everything they knew and thought. Where and when was this made, with materials from where and how did it reach them, or how has it survived? Where did they learn what they know? What influences their words and accents? What communications or media reach them and by what logistical and material means? How would social relations develop with and without various items, taking into account that this is also development from the present, not just a reversion to the past? It was overwhelming to try and work out such stuff along with questioning a lot of material I'd previously read, and I felt a surprising sense of relief at some of the cop-outs involved in Tawada's strangely cosy dystopia, in which it's not terribly clear how the economy works, and in where a Japan that apparently does not import anything from abroad nevertheless has solar powered items (although not in vast numbers), and advanced medical care. There's also what seems to be an entirely new type of trade, in which some countries (including South Africa and India - two of the BRICS group, you may notice) export language, but it's never explained what this entails.
The novel's world attains a combination of technology usages which would be particularly desirable to left-leaning environmentalists, via a sleight of hand combining the isolationist policy and a fantastical shift in public opinion and science in which "Electrical appliances had met with disapproval ever since electric current was discovered to cause nervous disorders, numbness in the extremities, and insomnia — a condition generally known as bzzt-bzzt syndrome." (The author evidently recognises how central public demand is for consumer electricals, and that trying to get rid of them with legislation would be incredibly unpopular.) It would have seemed more plausible if this condition only affected the children, who are all very delicate and afflicted with multiple novel medical problems. Or perhaps it's connected to nuclear radiation, which is hinted as the cause of the major disaster in the recent past. But the revolt against electrical machinery seems to be universal, and as a result, the only household appliances are now solar-powered refrigerators (I wonder if Tawada also loves those moments when every machine in the home is switched off apart from the fridge freezer). Almost everything else - other than high-tech disability aids and the remaining, shambolic, public transport - has seen a return to pre-industrial manual technology such as cloth, wood and horse-drawn carts, and it's very common to employ cleaners. (There are many parallels to the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s, which has been having a small revival in recent years.) Manual labour is highly respected, and people such as academics also take turns doing work like cleaning school toilets. Resources such as paper have to be treated carefully and there is no unnecessary consumerist tat, the product of the old "global rat race in which huge corporations turned underground resources into anything they could sell at inhuman speeds while ruthlessly competing to keep the lowest production costs".
It is not only different forms of work that are equally respected: the society has abolished the "distinction between useful and useless people" and children are discouraged from using expressions that might even tangentially support it, such as "putting people to a lot of trouble". All the children seem to be treasured by society at large, and by the grandparents and great-grandparents who look after them, and unlike in the real world for all but the very rich with complex medical issues and disabilities, they never have to contend with anyone misunderstanding or disbelieving their problems, or with delays or blocks to accessing any treatments available in their country. The children tend to be calm and good-natured, but rather than this being some sort of stereotype of disabled people as patient martyrs, I see this as relating to the huge difference in stress levels I've seen between disabled people who have to manage on UK and US benefits and other insecure resources, versus those who have comfortable private income or come from countries with the best welfare states, such as an old online friend from Norway.
This level of respect and provision on an apparently national scale is a relatively recent phenomenon in recorded human history, but as far as other aspects of the book's society are concerned - the isolationism, the pre-industrial technology and the frugal use of resources - it was no surprise when references to the Edo Period (1603-1868) began to appear more and more frequently. From the first few pages onwards, it had already looked as if the novel was alluding to the Edo, and probably to modern usages of the period, where the Edo is held up as a real-life model of a sustainable society: see for example here, here, here, or here, and more informally in the environmental blogosphere. This page mentions in addition that "Today, the Japanese have an insatiable appetite for all things Edo. This goes deeper than the daily long lines outside the Edo-Tokyo Museum or the very popular historical dramas on TV every Sunday evening." Tawada refers to historically inaccurate usages of the Edo for political ends, when the wise great-grandfather protagonist tries to contradict them: " When Yoshiro submitted an essay entitled “Japan Was Not Isolated” to the newspaper, they refused to publish it. He wrote it to show how strong Japan’s connections to the outside world had been during the Edo period, through the channels of Holland and China, but the newspaper’s official scholar refused to give it his stamp of approval. He decided to hang onto the manuscript until the next time a magazine asked him for a contribution, yet strangely enough, all those requests from magazines dried up completely after that."
The allusions to the Edo may be clear, and the contaminated land and health effects strongly suggest radiation (not to mention the blurb's mention of Fukushima) but exactly how and why things became this way is never really explained, and the government is shadowy and faceless - no one is quite sure where it is based any more, and no politicians are ever named, although there are allusions to capricious changes, and policies restricting freedom of speech on certain topics, or the ability to settle outside your home region. This vagueness often reminded me of another odd and not altogether logical literary dystopia, J by Howard Jacobson. However the repressions and changes rarely seem as frightening as in J. Other than people being anxious not to mention a few topics, chiefly to do with abroad, society remains mysteriously ordered, peaceful and in a way friendly, for a country which has gone through major upheaval and has next to no visible police - there isn't the suspicion that anyone may denounce you, which stalks fully totalitarian dystopias. (The police are privatised and now mostly concern themselves with their brass bands.) Foreign words are strictly to be avoided (though writing should be in Chinese characters), likewise mannerisms (waving is now up and down, like a maneki neko, not side-to-side), and travel abroad is forbidden. However, a mixed-race school teacher, Mr Yonatani, does not appear to face discrimination. "Though his mother was so attached to the name Yonatan that she wanted to keep it as her own, at a time when having non-Japanese relatives was enough to bring you under suspicion, such a foreign-sounding surname was sure to be a strike against her. She did, in fact, often feel she was being watched. She would come home to find signs of a break-in; even when nothing had been taken, the police would come round to investigate."
It's hard to tell what is intentional and what is accidental in the generally cosy and sometimes whimsical style of this book. Sometimes we are told that aspects of Yoshiro's life are unpleasant or sad - and it might sound boring to a reader in their twenties - but his life of enduring good physical healthy, jogging with dogs (rented), trying to get decent fruit from the market, having someone to look after for whom state services provide well, and apparently not having to worry about money sounds pretty pleasant compared with a lot of people's lives now, even if there are a few things he needs to be careful not to say. His great-grandson Mumei has a lot of medical problems, but until late in the book, physical pain and discomfort is only rarely mentioned. Before that they seem like logistical matters, described in such a way that the reader doesn't feel them (nor the physical aspects of helping) - and because most kids have similar problems, and schools always have doctors on hand, he doesn't feel unusual or left out. The way the characters are narrated is strangely unembodied. (After mention of Mumei's digestive problems, I thought another oblique Edo reference might appear - the He-gassen or fart scrolls [N.B. link includes thumbnails of pics which in close up are NSFW], but there was nothing like that whatsoever. Ribaldry isn't a big part of this book) As I found the beginning of Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear *too* embodied, uncomfortably so, it was surprising to find the opposite here.
I wasn't sure what the reader was supposed to make of the Emissary scheme. I found myself worrying that the children might not be treated well at the other end - but I'm not sure where that came from. Perhaps because the attitudes and services for them seemed so positive in Japan, and it was easy to imagine things being worse elsewhere, because almost anywhere in the real world, they are.
It would be interesting to hear what Japanese readers think of this book, as it is easy to see it as the novel of a writer living abroad. There are passing references to international concerns such as climate change, or pollution leading to spontaneous sex changes in wildlife, and the book presages a shift away from globalisation and towards nationalism (it was first published in 2014). But in terms of Japanese issues, it appears to be referring to those that are well-known internationally, such as Fukushima, the ageing population, young people refusing to carry on traditions, and restrictions on inward immigration - even the early 2010s youth fashion for grey hair - and Yoshiro's descriptions of central Tokyo and come from the memory of a character who has not been there for years.
This is a strange little book, and its light approaches to (or outright elision of) a number of serious issues have put off some readers. However, if you are getting bored with the typical cli-fi and environmental decline dystopias, while remaining interested in the general idea - and you aren't too irritated by illogical worldbuilding - this may be an interesting change.
----
My response to this book is quite different from that of a lot of Goodreads posters and bloggers.
A lot of people find its scenario wholly negative.
- The kind and generous way disability and chronic illness is treated in the book's society won't be so noticeable to people who haven't had to deal with what the equivalent would be like IRL, service provision problems and so on. The heavy presence of disability and illness in the narrative may be more frightening to those who are not used to disability as a routine part of everyday life. They may focus more on the fact that there is so very much disability about in the book's society - i.e. an entire generation.
-It depends on readers' quality of life and/or what they have witnessed first hand. Aspects of some dystopias (ones that do not have totalitarianism or total societal breakdown) featuring middle-class characters from countries with very high quality of life in the present (Scandinavia is usually the case in point) can seem quite okay compared with difficult real lives. I didn't even get much sense of a class system in this book. It seems rather egalitarian.
- Quite a lot of people will think the return to earlier technologies in many spheres merely sounds frightening. But not only does it work here on a day to day basis and the people are apparently happy with it - it conveniently sidesteps the most common dispute when people advocate such stuff "what about healthcare?', by having advanced tech still around for that. (Even if some characters do think that there might be better advances abroad or possible to create by international collaborative working.)
- In the last few months I have been reading a lot about Stalinism and the Eastern Bloc: the political repression in this novel is not on that level, nor is it presented in as scary a tone.
- A lot of the other reviews focus strongly on the words / language / things characters can't say. If that is the aspect people care and think about most, or personally feel to be most different from now, the scenario in the book will feel worse.
(Read & reviewed Feb 2019. See the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
⭐⭐⭐⭐
A curious blend of dystopia and utopia, with themes extrapolating from recent events and trends. It is set in a contaminated future Japan where the elderly are super-fit and support everyone, and children are plagued by severe health problems. In this world, most countries are isolationist. For its subject, it has an unusually peaceful and quirky tone and atmosphere, one which may be familiar from light Japanese literary fiction.
Many details of its world-building do not fit together logically, and are far from hard SF - but it makes a refreshing change from the standard projections of future technology and society in scenarios of environmental degeneration, which become hackneyed once you have read enough of them, and which are often American, or American-influenced. I was especially alert to the material and world-building aspects of Tawada's novel because recently, I attempted to plan a story starting in 2095; I had wanted to push past the sometimes lazy received wisdom of the usual American collapsitarian guys, and I ideally wanted to be able to have a logical story behind every object around my characters and everything they knew and thought. Where and when was this made, with materials from where and how did it reach them, or how has it survived? Where did they learn what they know? What influences their words and accents? What communications or media reach them and by what logistical and material means? How would social relations develop with and without various items, taking into account that this is also development from the present, not just a reversion to the past? It was overwhelming to try and work out such stuff along with questioning a lot of material I'd previously read, and I felt a surprising sense of relief at some of the cop-outs involved in Tawada's strangely cosy dystopia, in which it's not terribly clear how the economy works, and in where a Japan that apparently does not import anything from abroad nevertheless has solar powered items (although not in vast numbers), and advanced medical care. There's also what seems to be an entirely new type of trade, in which some countries (including South Africa and India - two of the BRICS group, you may notice) export language, but it's never explained what this entails.
The novel's world attains a combination of technology usages which would be particularly desirable to left-leaning environmentalists, via a sleight of hand combining the isolationist policy and a fantastical shift in public opinion and science in which "Electrical appliances had met with disapproval ever since electric current was discovered to cause nervous disorders, numbness in the extremities, and insomnia — a condition generally known as bzzt-bzzt syndrome." (The author evidently recognises how central public demand is for consumer electricals, and that trying to get rid of them with legislation would be incredibly unpopular.) It would have seemed more plausible if this condition only affected the children, who are all very delicate and afflicted with multiple novel medical problems. Or perhaps it's connected to nuclear radiation, which is hinted as the cause of the major disaster in the recent past. But the revolt against electrical machinery seems to be universal, and as a result, the only household appliances are now solar-powered refrigerators (I wonder if Tawada also loves those moments when every machine in the home is switched off apart from the fridge freezer). Almost everything else - other than high-tech disability aids and the remaining, shambolic, public transport - has seen a return to pre-industrial manual technology such as cloth, wood and horse-drawn carts, and it's very common to employ cleaners. (There are many parallels to the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s, which has been having a small revival in recent years.) Manual labour is highly respected, and people such as academics also take turns doing work like cleaning school toilets. Resources such as paper have to be treated carefully and there is no unnecessary consumerist tat, the product of the old "global rat race in which huge corporations turned underground resources into anything they could sell at inhuman speeds while ruthlessly competing to keep the lowest production costs".
It is not only different forms of work that are equally respected: the society has abolished the "distinction between useful and useless people" and children are discouraged from using expressions that might even tangentially support it, such as "putting people to a lot of trouble". All the children seem to be treasured by society at large, and by the grandparents and great-grandparents who look after them, and unlike in the real world for all but the very rich with complex medical issues and disabilities, they never have to contend with anyone misunderstanding or disbelieving their problems, or with delays or blocks to accessing any treatments available in their country. The children tend to be calm and good-natured, but rather than this being some sort of stereotype of disabled people as patient martyrs, I see this as relating to the huge difference in stress levels I've seen between disabled people who have to manage on UK and US benefits and other insecure resources, versus those who have comfortable private income or come from countries with the best welfare states, such as an old online friend from Norway.
This level of respect and provision on an apparently national scale is a relatively recent phenomenon in recorded human history, but as far as other aspects of the book's society are concerned - the isolationism, the pre-industrial technology and the frugal use of resources - it was no surprise when references to the Edo Period (1603-1868) began to appear more and more frequently. From the first few pages onwards, it had already looked as if the novel was alluding to the Edo, and probably to modern usages of the period, where the Edo is held up as a real-life model of a sustainable society: see for example here, here, here, or here, and more informally in the environmental blogosphere. This page mentions in addition that "Today, the Japanese have an insatiable appetite for all things Edo. This goes deeper than the daily long lines outside the Edo-Tokyo Museum or the very popular historical dramas on TV every Sunday evening." Tawada refers to historically inaccurate usages of the Edo for political ends, when the wise great-grandfather protagonist tries to contradict them: " When Yoshiro submitted an essay entitled “Japan Was Not Isolated” to the newspaper, they refused to publish it. He wrote it to show how strong Japan’s connections to the outside world had been during the Edo period, through the channels of Holland and China, but the newspaper’s official scholar refused to give it his stamp of approval. He decided to hang onto the manuscript until the next time a magazine asked him for a contribution, yet strangely enough, all those requests from magazines dried up completely after that."
The allusions to the Edo may be clear, and the contaminated land and health effects strongly suggest radiation (not to mention the blurb's mention of Fukushima) but exactly how and why things became this way is never really explained, and the government is shadowy and faceless - no one is quite sure where it is based any more, and no politicians are ever named, although there are allusions to capricious changes, and policies restricting freedom of speech on certain topics, or the ability to settle outside your home region. This vagueness often reminded me of another odd and not altogether logical literary dystopia, J by Howard Jacobson. However the repressions and changes rarely seem as frightening as in J. Other than people being anxious not to mention a few topics, chiefly to do with abroad, society remains mysteriously ordered, peaceful and in a way friendly, for a country which has gone through major upheaval and has next to no visible police - there isn't the suspicion that anyone may denounce you, which stalks fully totalitarian dystopias. (The police are privatised and now mostly concern themselves with their brass bands.) Foreign words are strictly to be avoided (though writing should be in Chinese characters), likewise mannerisms (waving is now up and down, like a maneki neko, not side-to-side), and travel abroad is forbidden. However, a mixed-race school teacher, Mr Yonatani, does not appear to face discrimination. "Though his mother was so attached to the name Yonatan that she wanted to keep it as her own, at a time when having non-Japanese relatives was enough to bring you under suspicion, such a foreign-sounding surname was sure to be a strike against her. She did, in fact, often feel she was being watched. She would come home to find signs of a break-in; even when nothing had been taken, the police would come round to investigate."
It's hard to tell what is intentional and what is accidental in the generally cosy and sometimes whimsical style of this book. Sometimes we are told that aspects of Yoshiro's life are unpleasant or sad - and it might sound boring to a reader in their twenties - but his life of enduring good physical healthy, jogging with dogs (rented), trying to get decent fruit from the market, having someone to look after for whom state services provide well, and apparently not having to worry about money sounds pretty pleasant compared with a lot of people's lives now, even if there are a few things he needs to be careful not to say. His great-grandson Mumei has a lot of medical problems, but until late in the book, physical pain and discomfort is only rarely mentioned. Before that they seem like logistical matters, described in such a way that the reader doesn't feel them (nor the physical aspects of helping) - and because most kids have similar problems, and schools always have doctors on hand, he doesn't feel unusual or left out. The way the characters are narrated is strangely unembodied. (After mention of Mumei's digestive problems, I thought another oblique Edo reference might appear - the He-gassen or fart scrolls [N.B. link includes thumbnails of pics which in close up are NSFW], but there was nothing like that whatsoever. Ribaldry isn't a big part of this book) As I found the beginning of Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear *too* embodied, uncomfortably so, it was surprising to find the opposite here.
I wasn't sure what the reader was supposed to make of the Emissary scheme. I found myself worrying that the children might not be treated well at the other end - but I'm not sure where that came from. Perhaps because the attitudes and services for them seemed so positive in Japan, and it was easy to imagine things being worse elsewhere, because almost anywhere in the real world, they are.
It would be interesting to hear what Japanese readers think of this book, as it is easy to see it as the novel of a writer living abroad. There are passing references to international concerns such as climate change, or pollution leading to spontaneous sex changes in wildlife, and the book presages a shift away from globalisation and towards nationalism (it was first published in 2014). But in terms of Japanese issues, it appears to be referring to those that are well-known internationally, such as Fukushima, the ageing population, young people refusing to carry on traditions, and restrictions on inward immigration - even the early 2010s youth fashion for grey hair - and Yoshiro's descriptions of central Tokyo and come from the memory of a character who has not been there for years.
This is a strange little book, and its light approaches to (or outright elision of) a number of serious issues have put off some readers. However, if you are getting bored with the typical cli-fi and environmental decline dystopias, while remaining interested in the general idea - and you aren't too irritated by illogical worldbuilding - this may be an interesting change.
----
My response to this book is quite different from that of a lot of Goodreads posters and bloggers.
A lot of people find its scenario wholly negative.
- The kind and generous way disability and chronic illness is treated in the book's society won't be so noticeable to people who haven't had to deal with what the equivalent would be like IRL, service provision problems and so on. The heavy presence of disability and illness in the narrative may be more frightening to those who are not used to disability as a routine part of everyday life. They may focus more on the fact that there is so very much disability about in the book's society - i.e. an entire generation.
-It depends on readers' quality of life and/or what they have witnessed first hand. Aspects of some dystopias (ones that do not have totalitarianism or total societal breakdown) featuring middle-class characters from countries with very high quality of life in the present (Scandinavia is usually the case in point) can seem quite okay compared with difficult real lives. I didn't even get much sense of a class system in this book. It seems rather egalitarian.
- Quite a lot of people will think the return to earlier technologies in many spheres merely sounds frightening. But not only does it work here on a day to day basis and the people are apparently happy with it - it conveniently sidesteps the most common dispute when people advocate such stuff "what about healthcare?', by having advanced tech still around for that. (Even if some characters do think that there might be better advances abroad or possible to create by international collaborative working.)
- In the last few months I have been reading a lot about Stalinism and the Eastern Bloc: the political repression in this novel is not on that level, nor is it presented in as scary a tone.
- A lot of the other reviews focus strongly on the words / language / things characters can't say. If that is the aspect people care and think about most, or personally feel to be most different from now, the scenario in the book will feel worse.
(Read & reviewed Feb 2019. See the review and comment thread on Goodreads.)
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