![]() ![]() ![]() The country has suffered an unspecified disaster, or series of disasters, and consequently adopted a closed-door policy, sealing itself off from the outside world. With the ghosts of Fukushima never far from the novel’s margins, the Japan of The Emissary is hallucinatory, contaminated, and distinctly foreign in a familiar way. Originally published in Japanese in 2014, The Emissary marks Tawada’s most recent book to appear in English translation on the subject. Twenty-one years later, the imagined world of nuclear disaster became reality when the March 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami resulted in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear incident. The only other living organisms are immense mutant dandelions, whose weighty yellow flower heads tower over the human figures. With the breach of six nuclear reactors, Japan’s residents flee to the sea, where most of them eventually drown, leaving a handful of humans amidst a radioactive landscape of blackened earth and sky. ![]() In one nightmarish vignette from his 1990 film Dreams the legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa imagines how life might look and feel following a nuclear meltdown in Japan. ![]()
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