I believe that The Emissary is a tale about nature, moreover, about the ways in which humans map the intricate and everchanging narratives of nature —especially when those changes are the perilous consequences of “scientific progress”. The universe built by Yoko Tawada conjures up a psychological ecosystem weaved through biological structures, i.e. the way her characters (human and non-human) inhabit and comprehend both their inner and outer world is deeply determined by an altered-state-of-nature, possibly unchained by a nuclear disaster. Fauna and Flora are depicted under a strange but aesthetically enchanting light; they seem to thrive and grow in absurd and unpredictable patterns, creating new forms of life which, in turn, need new forms of comprehensive cataloguing for humans to digest them —both literally and metaphorically. Thus, new and strange ecological ponderings take place in this fictional universe, such as “are oversized dandelions chrysanthemums?”, as well as new political movements, such as “The [oversized] Dandelion support association”.

This new mutated neon-ecology[1] also carries with it a new mutated ecology of the mind which, unknowingly, strives to deconstruct, blend, and organize old and novel epistemologies, for how can we word-the-world when familiarity has vanish from daily experiences? Gregory Bateson, in his book Mind and Nature (1979), describes sixteen presuppositions that aim to guide both our understanding of science and of everyday life, and, interestingly, the second presupposition is called “the map is not the territory, or the name is not the thing named”, which mainly suggests that “when we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain” (30), or, in other words, that “in all thought or perception or communication about perception, there is a transformation, a coding, between the report and the thing reported” (31).

In this sense, our understanding and interaction with reality is never instant or direct, on the contrary, it’s always mediated by maps and names that determine our ways of knowing and, therefore, are subject to constant change. Now, in a very fascinating manner, Yoko Tawada’s novel does precisely this: it abruptly shifts the maps that govern both our abstract and concrete methods for navigating reality. A fictional urgency, one might say, that comes from an environment that has been violently transformed by technology and progress —defiled by a foolish desire for a fast-paced narrative and for easily-obtainable stuff. Yoshiro’s grandson, Tomo, is the best reflection of this modern form of “progress”: “Any machine that made big things happen with just the push of a button or two he loved, while he showed no interest in building blocks, Legos, or swings, either, which generally he gave up on after two or three bends of the knee” (76)[2]. Hence, The Emissary presents a postapocalyptic neon-world which seems to be the product of a thoughtless and greedy “push of a button”.

However, what has been transfigured through Yoko’s fictional lens? I would argue that almost all that guides our naturalized narratives of progress, linearity, and binarity, i.e.:

– Language
– Time
– Space
– Sex/Gender

All of these categories become fluid and uncertain after The Emissary’s unnamed (nuclear?) disaster. In the very beginning of the book, Yoshiro thinks that time didn’t “spread gradually, ring after ring, nor was it lined up neatly in a row; could it just be a disorderly pile, like the inside of a drawer no one ever bothers to straighten?” (6). Well, yes. The passing of time is a disorderly pile; however, it looked organized due to the fictional maps we created in order to feel safe-and-warm. After the disaster the neatly organized maps break: old people become energetic and immortal while the children get feeble and sick; men go through menopause and sometimes their reproductive organs swing from male to female; language slowly vanishes as it loses its foreign and oldest words; technology is set aside and thus tranquility and slowness become ubiquitous; and, in terms of space, Japan turns into a flat-land isolated from the globe.

Contamination, at last, pervades every form of familiar life where not even the permanence of species remains untouched —Mumei, for example, is basically a human-bird that deeply desires to be an octopus. Yet, the most fascinating detail of the novel (I believe) lies in the topsy-turvy understanding of lineage and family, for there are no more mom-dad-offspring assemblages/hierarchies. Yoko’s world deconstructs this tidy map, granting to the timeless great-grandfathers the power to skip generations (i.e. time) and become the spinsters of a new neon-ecology. In her essay Spinster Ecology, Sarah Ensor writes that “the spinster, not saving the planet for her own children, engages in a more impersonal mode of stewardship —one whose investment is neither linear nor directly object-based but instead, as Sedgwick suggests, somehow more ‘varied, contingent, recalcitrant [and] reforming’” (416).

And, indeed, the relationship that we see portrayed in the novel by Yoshiro and Mumei is determined by queerness (a queerness that travels through air, worms, and psychic states), and thus openly questions the epistemologies and cultural constructs of the present. It offers, at last, an alternative form of understanding futurity, where Tokyo can be revitalized, as Donna Haraway would say, by “making kin, not babies” (103). Even Yoshiro’s wife has stopped being a mother to a single child; she has become a sort of spinster-octopus with many arms that tend many children: “My real family, she thought, are those people I just happened to meet in that coffee shop. My descendants are the independent children in my institution” (88). Thereby, all the characters in Yoko’s novel reach a point of utter fluidity, challenging the norms that a fictional-Japan tries to impose with a desperate aim of normalization —an effort to make invisible the aftereffects of a (nuclear)disaster.

Finally, and because nature mutates and rebels in such a grandiose way (mostly by feminizing itself), The Emissary creates a tangential (i.e. a spinster) epistemology that gets weaved through a new form of narrative, or, as Bateson would argue, through new names and new maps. When Mumei says “the map is my portrait” (70), or when he thinks “if you cut the globe in a different way, when you open it up, you’ll get a different map of the world” (24), he seems to be acknowledging the purpose of the novel, which is to create through strange words, neologisms, and literary arrangements, a different map of the earth, where the future and its unfolding is understood non-linearly, that is, more like a disorderly (but interconnected) pile of stuff. As John Treat states about the “most creatively ambitious hibakusha writers”, Yoko Tawada also insists in filling the “unspeakable spaces with new words or even new language… We read, in other words, at the edge of our epistemological, aesthetic, and even emotional borders, always ready for the unfamiliar as well as the familiar” (30).

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[1] I somehow picture every-thing to be of neon-colors when it comes to a postnuclear disaster universe.
[2] This lack of thoughtfulness and pleasurable curiosity are traits that are also present in novels such as Christa Wolf’s Accident.
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Works Cited:

__Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. E. P. Dutton, 1979.
__Ensor, Sarah. “Spinster Ecology”. Duke University Press, 2012.
__Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
__Treat, John Whittier. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
__Yoko Tawada. The Emissary. New Directions Paperbook, 2018.

Illustration by Edward Gorey.