The Last Children of Tokyo [2014] – ★★★★

The short novella is a beautiful and unsettling evocation of the future.

Yoko Tawada sets her book in near-future Japan where the elderly regain their powers and live beyond one hundred years old, while the young become weak and sickly. Everyone is worried in the story because, due to some catastrophe, “the human race may be evolving in a direction no one ever imagined” [Tawada, 2014: 14]. The central characters are an old man called Yoshiro and an orphaned boy named Mumei. While Yoshiro is the very definition of health and vigour at his age of one hundred plus, his great-grandson Mumei is feverish, vitamin-deficient, and in the course to face a slow death. Translated by Margaret Mitsutani, Tawada’s dystopian novel is a fascinating read, even though most of the time it reads like an essay on some highly imaginative dystopian future, rather than like a story with a linear plot. Continue reading “Review: The Last Children of Tokyo by Yoko Tawada” →