Born in Tokyo in 1960, Yoko Tawada writes in both Japanese and German: she has received the Akutagawa, Kleist, Lessing, Noma, Adelbert von Chamisso, and Tanizaki prizes, as well as the Goethe Medal. Her novel The Emissary won the National Book Award. Rivka Galchen in the New York Times Magazine hailed her work as “magnificently strange.” Margaret Mitsutani is a translator of Yoko Tawada (sharing her National Book Award) and Kenzaburo Oe (Japan’s 1994 Nobel Prize laureate).
"Near-future Japan has been cut off from the outside world, leaving
108-year-old Yoshiro trapped with his great-grandson Mumei in a
spartan "temporary" house. The population is divided between those
born before the calamity—whose life spans have been mysteriously
lengthened—and those enfeebled by it: "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."
Tawada’s novel is infused with the anxieties of a 'society changing
at the speed of pebbles rolling down a steep hill,' yet she
imagines a ruined world with humor and grace."
*Publishers Weekly*
"Tawada, who writes in both Japanese and German, uses a light tone
that frequently leans into gentle abstraction and wry humor,
producing a slim novel that charms as much as it provokes
reflection."
*Kiri Falls - The Japan News*
"Recessive, lunar beauty [with] a high sheen. Her language has
never been so arresting—flickering brilliance."
*Parul Sehgal - The New York Times*
"Persistent mystery is what is so enchanting about Tawada’s
writing. Her penetrating irony and deadpan surrealism fray our
notions of home and combine to deliver another offbeat tale. An
absorbing work from a fascinating mind."
*Kirkus Reviews (starred review)*
"The Emissary carries us beyond the limits of what is it is to
be human, in order to remind us of what we must hold dearest in our
conflicted world, our humanity."
*Sjón*
"A mini-epic of eco-terror, family drama and speculative fiction.
Tawada’s interest is satirical as much as tragic, with public
holidays chosen by popular vote (Labour Day becomes Being Alive Is
Enough Day) and a privatized police force whose activities now
centre on its brass band. It’s this askew way of looking at
things amid the ostensibly grim premise, and a sprightly use of
language that makes The Emissary a book unlike any
other."
*Guardian*
""Like sashimono woodwork, Tawada needs no exposition to
nail down her dystopia. The Emissary achieves a
technically impossible balance of open-hearted fable and
cold-blooded satire.""
*Financial Times*
"An airily beautiful dystopian novella about mortality. Tawada’s
quirky style and ability to jump from realism to abstraction
manages to both chastise humanity for the path we are taking
towards destruction and look hopefully toward an unknown
future."
*Enobong Essien - Booklist*
"A phantasmagoric representation of humanity’s fraught relationship
with technology and the natural world."
*Brian Haman - Asian Review of Books*
"Charming, light, and unapologetically strange...There’s an impish
delight in [each] sentence that energizes what is otherwise a
despairing note. Tawada finds a way to make a story of old men
trapped in unending life and children fated to die before their
time joyful, comic, and—frankly—a huge comfort."
*J.W. McCormack - BOMB*
"A Hieronymus Bosch–like painting in novel form. Tawada's charming
surrealism imparts an off-kilter quality to her work that would
make it feel slight, if it weren’t for the density, precision, and
uniqueness of her mind. A slim and beguiling novel in Margaret
Mitsutani’s enchanting and flawless translation."
*Marie Mutsuki Mockett - Public Books*
""Everywhere in the Japan of Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary, strange
mutations unfold. In the years (perhaps decades, or perhaps
generations) since an environmental catastrophe, the basic tenets
of biology have broken down. Children are born weak, with birdlike
bones and soft teeth. The elderly, in turn, are youthful, athletic,
seem to have been ‘robbed of death’. Men begin to experience
menopausal symptoms as they age. Everyone’s sex changes
inexplicably and at random at least once in their lives...Tawada
has gifted us a quiet new magical realism for the
Anthropocene.""
*Rebecca Bates - The White Review*
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