The Emissary

Throughout quarantine, I’ve taken to picking up some of the smallest books on my bookshelf purely because I know I can finish the slim volumes in one or two sittings. Recently, that led me to Yoko Tawada’s delightful novel THE EMISSARY, published in the original Japanese in 2014 and translated into English in 2018. The novel imagines a future in which Japan (like many countries) has totally shut itself off from the rest of the world. As a result, the rest of Japanese society has begun to deteriorate: the young are incredibly feeble and sickly; very few crops can be grown; even language itself has begun to waste away, as they can no longer use any words originating from or related to the rest of the world. All this is to say, it’s quite a bleak book, but also incredibly quirky and whimsical at times, like all of Tawada’s work. Plus: only 140 pages!