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.)

Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, tr. Ottilie Mulzet

This is an old review from 2014 (pasted to this blog in Feb 2019) and as with a lot of my old writing, there are bits of it that make me cringe now. But as I've posted my three other Krasznahorkai reviews on here (all from 2018), I thought I may as well add this one too. At the time, I'd been active on the old-format, now-defunct Mookse and the Gripes forum for about a year and a half. Seiobo There Below had won the 2014 BTBA and was talked about, there and elsewhere, as a particularly difficult yet rewarding book. I hadn't felt up to reading something like this at the time of the prize, but decided to have a go that December.

----

A tad overhyped, this (in some quarters). It's an interesting and unusual book, of interlocking short stories about art, beauty and the sacred. I'm not saying emperor's new clothes - but some of the superlatives...

- Unique, like nothing else. [Collective gist.]
A non-exhaustive list of things I was reminded of whilst reading Seiobo There Below: documentaries about art & building restoration; documentaries about and visits to buddhist monasteries; meditation and writing and talks on; How to Be Both by Ali Smith; Revenge by Yoko Ogawa; history lessons; the puzzles in Georges Perec books; the number/chapter games in The Luminaries; experiences of arriving somewhere ill-prepared, or feeling irritable whilst in queues; other long-sentence writers, especially in the German tradition. (All those 'as it were's were very familiar.)

- an impossibly wide range of knowledge
Seiobo is undoubtedly a knowledge and terminology-heavy book. However, nearly all of that knowledge is from two domains.
a) Mainstream European [art] history of the medieval & early modern period: a repetitive surfeit of Ital Ren; the Alhambra; Andrei Rublev. (Also, a reasonable knowledge of the bible is necessary for studying that period. Anyway, I wonder if this stuff seems more exotic to Americans, for whom it isn't so standard in curricula and holiday destinations.)
b) Traditional Japanese culture. Not a few enthusiasts of that around, and not an unusual overlapping interest with art history.
This is depth more than breadth: it's possible to see one person checking all this from a handful textbooks if he didn't know it already off the top of his head - it's not the vastly disparate facts that Pynchon employs researchers to verify; different from the scale of Perec who mentions stuff from many domains, giving a sense of how much general knowledge there is in a whole other culture; having been the sort of kid who read encyclopaedias for fun in Britain did little more than scratch the surface.
Part of the point is, of course, comparison with the likes of Perec - not with most other literary fiction published in 2014.


For a book I'd heard spoken of for the fascinating, intoxicating properties hidden beneath this plain cover*, it got a touch monotonous at times. Did we really need that many C15th-C16th artists' workshops? And such a lot of obvious destinations in the European sections, Italy, Spain, Greece: bloody Cook's Tour. (The Romanian lake and the land sculpture of the horse, though, was exactly the kind of strange and wonder I'd come here for.) Most main characters are men who are in late middle age and/or Hungarian. Surely the fabled Krasznahorkai does better than writing self-inserts? Among the most memorable lead characters were those who differed noticeably from the template, especially the Dostoevskyan working class Hungarian (still a Hungarian) stranded in Barcelona by an employment scam, and the embarrassed young Japanese chap trying to cope with his Euro friend's frequent faux pas at 'The Rebuilding of the Ise Shrine'.

Seiobo There Below had become a barometer or test to me since I first looked at it in March. I had a specific block on, or a very high threshold for, processing the run-on sentences of the first chapter. A couple of pages and my mind felt like a failing printer with 30 items backing up in the queue; soon jammed, it ground to a halt completely. And this wasn’t just at the worst times when I might expect that: even whilst I was up to enjoying Blinding: The Left Wing by Mircea Cărtărescu or The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth – books of comparable difficulty in the eyes of many - I couldn’t properly process this. But I kept looking at the sample (I must have read chapter 1 about ten times by now). On a couple of occasions, the text started to flow and so I got a copy, having become determined to conquer this thing at some hoped-for suitable time.

I’d now say that the first chapter, along with the first page each of chapters 377 (13) and 2584 (17 - they have Fibonacci numbers), is considerably more dense structurally than the rest of the book. (My head finds abstract sentences more challenging to deal with than specialist terminology.) Through the early chapters, I was aware of a slight physical tension produced by the multi-page sentences. Sometimes it suited the content very well (e.g. the harried, overheated tourist ‘Up on the Acropolis’). At others, whilst I understood their use as creating a sense of long-term unity for scenes that develop slowly, such as during ‘The Preservation of a Buddha’, this tension didn’t always seem appropriate to the subject, and I thought Krasznahorkai could perhaps have written some scenes in shorter sentences and others long to fit rhythm and mood of actions taking place**. Throughout the book, sentences, though extremely long, almost never had the sort of complexity I’d been apprehensive about. They don’t go back to an earlier point after a three page anecdote , rarely even a three-line one. It all flows along like a stream. (And sometimes the camera pans to a scene of another stream that’s a tributary of the same river.) Simply there are, for page after page, commas and conjunctions where full stop, space, capital letter would normally be found. A portion of the tension came from chopping up these sentences and editing in the conventional punctuation in my head – making a conscious decision about the ‘pause to take breath’ that Gertrude Stein acknowledged was part of the purpose of the punctuation she rejected on paper. Regardless, it was always hypnotic: more than with most books, it was easy to fall into it for pages and pages and not look up - I even remained engrossed at times when I had to use a book stand, not something I like. At some point, into the second day of reading, I stopped noticing: it wasn’t a problem any more, I wasn’t tense and I didn’t need to repunctuate consciously. I was just reading. It’s not Finnegan’s Wake.

A lot of this post so far has been about blowing raspberries at Krasznahorkai, or rather his reputation - but there are many, many wonderful things in Seiobo There Below. This is a work which, unusually, understands deeply meditative and reverent states, and great darkness and black comedy. Several chapters end with a sudden sting in the tail - most of these made me laugh; and I loved the way that they could turn a scene on its head without diminishing its earlier meaning. And whilst he does deal with some hackneyed subjects (who needs another postcard from the Alhambra or Florence for instance?... Especially at this distance, in a book, not in the place, I was sometimes like Brancoveanu, the sceptical colleague of the Venus de Milo worshipping Louvre security guard character, the one who feels the sculpture is trite) Krasznahorkai does bring a sprinkling of extra magic to these locations, conjured from detailed information that's less often heard, and from the meditation-like state of the prose which is intended to mirror both the transcendent experience of viewing great art on one hand, and the taut rope of sustained concentration, and the near-impossible perfectionism (which would be denigrated in many other scenarios) needed to produce it.

I wrote detailed summaries of all chapters(in the status updates below). But personal favourite pieces were:
- 'Kamo-Hunter' - a heron hunting, a beautiful creature yet predatory, nature and its cycles living alongside the bustle and buses of Kyoto, a city where the book returns several times. (Seiobo appears to follow the same classical Japanese tradition as Ogawa's Revenge, stories which are in some respects separate but which contain motifs and themes shared, though not according to a mechanical sequence.)
- 'Up On the Acropolis' - Just simple identification, this kind of journey, the eager adventure, the draining effort, having forgotten something vital. How often have I had this? (Though not, of course, the last few lines.)
- 'Something is Burning Outside' - at an artists' workshop in the Romanian countryside, no-one seems very productive. An impoverished-looking old man arrives, who turns out to be nationally famous artist Ion Grigorescu. Early one morning two other artists go out for a walk and find him and his project. [Grigorescu is real and I found this page for a Tate exhibition that included him. Watching its video led me to another artist's photographs of Armenia juxtaposing beautiful snow scenes and decaying concrete tower blocks of stunning yet brutal design.]
- 'Private Passion'. A scene which would have been quite different, laughable probably, in the medium of film or radio. An old architect, of repulsive appearance and grating voice, delivers an adult education lecture to a few bored, numbed Swiss villagers. He is, at best, a buffoon - worse, experienced by his audience as a Job-like test. His crazy passion for the music of the Baroque has a Byronic intensity which comes through on the page, making it possible to hear how differently it might have been received from a person who was attractive and charismatic, and to consider the idea of a personality trapped inside an exterior shell that doesn't match. (Or did Krasznahorkai just write this text too well for this character?)
- 'Screaming Beneath the Earth' - I don't really agree with the extent of darkness which things, life and death are viewed in this final chapter (c.f. some people find looking at the stars and thinking how insignficant we are to be depressing, I find it comforting). But the archaeological vision in this piece was exhilarating, of all these past creatures under the ground.
- In general, I've become more interested in Shinto, and the unique way in which an ancient animist / pagan religion remains part of every day life in a highly developed country. (Amazing to imagine if we still had continuous traditions like this.) It's thanks, I'm guessing, to Japan's long isolation from monotheisms, and the economic strength and stability that allowed it to forge ahead for itself without subjection to significant outside influences.

There is great stuff in Seiobo There Below, but it doesn't have the magic for me that it does for many other readers; it wasn't a transcendent experience, though it was meditative. I daresay a few others in time will find the characters a little samey. Nonetheless, there's be an ineffable something I just don't get, as with my similar underwhelmed-but-not-disliking reaction to another of the Best Translated Book Longlist, Stig Saetterbakken's Through the Night. I'd still rate a few of those longlisted books higher than this one, and, contrary to almost every opinion I've read, think the Cărtărescu better for its unusual fusion of biological science and surrealism and narrative - art in literature has been done often enough (and there's been a lot of it about in 2014 publications). I wasn't quite in the mood for these topics and places right now - the Mediterranean, Japan - they feel more summery: I wanted the dark and brooding of central European traditon, which likely would have been better served by Satantango rather than Krasznahorkai's sunlight-dappled, meditation-infused, voyage away from home.


* The chest on the cover, as well as being an obvious metaphor for looking into, opening up etc, refers to a trousseau-chest from the school of Botticelli that features in chapter 2. Its outline and the title lettering are made of a rainbow-shimmery stuff most familiar from kids' stationery. So up close, not entirely as plain as it looks.

** There's a pretty good discussion about Krasznahorkai's sentences in this interview and the comments. Shame that, despite the mention of his 'broken English', that people sharp enough to kno)w better then take his phrase 'loss of a culture of poverty' at face value rather than considering consumerism and folk culture.


(read and reviewed December 2014; the review - and dozens of quotes and status updates - on Goodreads