Bought for the beautiful cover artwork, I found The Last Children of Tokyo a strange, dream-like read. Too rational to be apocalyptic and too odd to be reality.
Young Mumei stays at home while his great-grandfather Yoshiro walks along the river. Long ago this purposeless walking was called jogging, but Western words are no longer allowed. Since an unnamed event caused Japan to close its borders and became isolationist, the elderly watch over the children. Yoshiro is old-elderly at over 100; there are young-elderly, and you must be at least ninety to be called mid-elderly. They take care of all the physical labour, and seem to have a font of energy. The aged can no longer die, but along with this everlasting gift, they are burdened with the terrible task of watching their great-grandchildren die. For the children become weaker every day.
Mumei is losing his teeth, his silver hair absent of colour, with unhealthy legs unable to walk. In a few years time he may no longer be able to leave the house. Now that the adjective healthy does not fit any child, that term has become obsolete. He sees a doctor to test for cellular destruction, all data recorded by hand - the results sent the medical research team by foot messenger, with children dreaming of becoming one of these fleet footed runners one day.
Yoshiro and Mumei live a quiet existence, as Yoshiro's wife is off running a children's institute, his daughter produces fruit in a factory in Okinawa, and her son (Mumei's father) is a hopeless gambler.
The unnamed event can be deduced as fallout. Tokyo is now abandoned - and nature of a sort is taking over; dandelions with four inch petals could be called mutations but that word is no longer used. Now that the country is closed to the world anything foreign is suspect, with books and songs abolished. Telephones are a memory. The shelf-life of words is getting shorter as some words disappear with no heirs to take their place.
This may sound bleak, and there is not much plot, but there is a great tenderness between the team of Yoshiro and Mumei, moving into each new day with optimism and curiosity. Yoshiro remembers before the Earth was irreversibly contaminated, before the banks failed, when owning land had meaning, when people had something to cling to. There is a chance Mumei will be chosen to become an emissary to another country through Marika's institute. It would mean finding out the condition of other countries, if they were unchanged.
For the children of Japan continue to change. Nature - enraged at the disruption - plays her tricks and genders begin to blur.
Yoshiro keeps his eyes open, taking each day as it comes, with the optimism created for a child, hoping the present won't crumble under his feet.
This is a sad, engaging, strange, fantastical novel. It did leave me with questions.
Also know under the title The Emissary, this won the first National Book Award for translated literature.
2014 / Tradeback / 139 pages
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