The Last Children of Tokyo by Yoko Tawada

Recently published from Portobello Books in the U.K and New Directions in the U.S, (under the title The Emissary), The Last Children of Tokyo is translated by Margaret Mitsutani and first appeared in Japan in 2014 as Kentoshi. Although quite short, the prose feels quite dense, and as other readers have noted it's quite a paced read, mainly related in third person, the dialogue is sparse. Reading a few reviews of The Last Children of Tokyo the description of it as being dystopian crops up repeatedly, in a number of places it resembles Orwell's 1984, as the narrative unfolds relating the relationship between Yoshiro, a novelist over a hundred years old, and his great-grand son Mumei, Tawada weaves in a number of contemporary concerns and advances them into a projected future. Japan has become more isolationist, environmental abuse is prominent, Mumei is a member of an atrophied generation caught in this great flux, weakened, the elder generation displays more youthfulness than the youth. The age difference between the two characters becomes further apparent when the lives of the intermediate family members are related and of how Yoshiro has come to be Mumei's guardian, definitions are needed to be extended and added upon to cope with this expansion of time.

Maybe in comparison to Tawada's other novels it feels that the prose to The Last Children of Tokyo is a little less experimental, although some familiar themes appear, Tawada's at times humorous observations of literal translations between the languages crops up, and this is set against the concept of a sort of 'official speak' and the obsolete and dysfunction of words and phrases, and through these concerns there's obviously the projected broadening crisis of an ageing population, the novel in places carries an unnerving accurateness with it's projections, this shift in societal behaviour is depicted in a number of places, another example is that gender change is an accepted norm, sometimes occurring a number of times for each person. Through these big themes Yoshiro looks after Mumei and the characters progress, with a slight distraction in the form of neighbour Suiren, both in wheelchairs the novel ends in an enigmatic note. But before that Mumei's schooling leads him to meet Mr Yonatani, a teacher whose background has also been meddled by malign forces, who is searching for an emissary to leave Japan in a bid to find salvation with the outside through clandestine means, and towards the end of the novel the exterior world begins to resemble something in the form of a myth. Mumei's departure from the story appears riddled with uncertainty. The Last Children of Tokyo although short in pages is a penetrating observation tower into both present and future, full of acute ideas and predictions.


The Last Children of Tokyo at Portobello Books  


   

The Naked Eye by Yoko Tawada

The most recent translation of Tawada Yoko, (The Naked Eye, New Directions 2009, translated from the German Das Nackte Aug, Konkursbuch Verlag, 2004 by Susan Bernofsky), again witnesses her narrative traversing across many borders, the protagonist, a young Vietnamese student who has travelled from Vietnam to Berlin to speak at an international  conference is kidnapped the evening before she is due to present her lecture. The novel opens with a swirling description of a room, the scene as if seen by a digital camera whose operator is unaware of the fact that it's actually recording, presents a sequence of unrelated objects, the narrator concludes; It isn't possible to reconstruct a story from this landscape of ruins.

 

The young woman's geographical knowledge of Europe is slight, it being the first time she has travelled, although fluent in Russian her kidnapper is a German student who smuggles her back to his apartment in his car. At an attempt at entrapping her to stay with him permanently  her kidnapper, Jorg, tries to convince her that she is pregnant, as time passes she begins to take walks and she learns the location of the town's train station. Through a series of events she manages to board the train which she assumes will take her to Moscow, but it is in fact making it's way to Paris, on board she is fortunate in finding a Vietnamese woman who gives her the address of her sister in Paris who'll be able to help her. Through the  novel's narrator, (who later gives the false name of Anh), we too become spectators to a familiar world where meanings and interpretations have become slightly adrift from positions and relationships that are taken for granted, in a sense that they revert back to presenting themselves as existing only partially comprehended, we begin to reinterpret and re-associate images and behaviours of people and events, being viewed without being bound to their original language or culture leaves them prone to being interpreted with a sense of slight surreality and ambiguity, they shift between context and contextlessness, or in as much they form a new context, the form of Tawada's prose often transforms from prose to the poetical, passages sometimes linking thematically.

Tawada's novels truly have an international scope to them, spanning continents and countries, political and gender ideologies, through the narrator of The Naked Eye we look into the lives of the characters that she encounters, Marie, the prostitute, Ai Van and her French husband Jean, Charles who she meets at the cinema, the Vietnamese doctor, Tuong Linh. The novel has a cinematic quality to it, when she makes it to Paris the narrator finds a sanctuary in the cinema and becomes obsessed by the films of Catherine Deneuve, the chapter  titles of the book begin to take on the name of her films, Indochine, Drole d'endroit pour une rencontre, Dancer in the Dark, and many more, in each of them we are given a synopsis of scenes and scenarios, the segments of those which the narrator doesn't fully comprehend are described in a circumspect way, as the novel progresses the narrative of the synopsis and the actual narrative sometimes subtly cross paths. It could be said that suspicions are slightly roused in the plausibility to some of the connections of the segments of the novel, but they can be easily overlooked, as the novel convincingly paints a picture of the easiness for people to slip out of sight when moving between borders, the scope and inventiveness of Tawada's prose is always something to be in awe of. Tawada has been awarded nearly all of the major awards in Japan most recently the Noma Prize. 

Yoko Tawada.de

The Naked Eye at New Directions Publishing

Das Nackte Aug at Konkursbuch Verlag

                           

Where Europe Begins - Yoko Tawada

Bringing together pieces written in both German and Japanese, Where Europe Begins has two translators, Susan Bernofsky, (translating from the German), and Yumi Selden, (translating from the Japanese), the book has three parts, The Bath and The Guest being the two longest and the middle part, Where Europe Begins is composed of smaller pieces. The pieces are linked not in plot, although all the narratives are given from the perspective of someone living in a country and language not of their own, (usually here the country is Germany), or as in Where Europe Begins the narrator is travelling via the Trans-Siberian train into Europe. Tawada's writing through keeping an eye on minuscule observations, (amoebas floating on the lens of the eye), questions perceptions of identity, it's tempting to also include perceptions of nationality, but the perspectives are usually from a point of view that remains slightly indifferent to national stereotypes, the narratives are focused on language, and also by turns interpretation and meaning. Another aspect depicted in the book is that of the initial incomprehension when faced with a new language, the narrators stare at the letters and characters of the alphabet before the decoding procedure begins, Tawada's characters seem to be caught not only between nations but also languages, in a sense they sometimes appear to exist in a language-less state, caught in transition, a linguistic limbo.

In the piece The Guest another theme that lies low in the texts of the previous pieces comes more to the fore, that of the motives of authorship, something hinted to also is the motives of the reader. Here the story seems to be set on campus, or within a student community, the protagonist is a writer who hears a voice, which is interpreted as the voice of the novel the writer is writing, which at first is heard through a series of cassettes played on a tape recorder. The narrator places a classified advert in which she's searching for a book, in the advert she poses as an old woman and that this old woman was willing to pay one hundred marks for a book that had value neither for a passionate lover of literature nor a book collector might have seemed unusual. Comparing her advert with others she surmises book 'The novel didn't interest me. I wanted to own the book in order to lock the voice from the tape behind the bars of the printed letters'. She gets a reply from a man called Simon who has a copy of the book although he's not willing to sell it to her, but he's willing to stay with her as long as it takes her to read it. The prose constantly toys with the readers expectations and will sometimes revise or back pedal with what has gone before. It's difficult to conclude the story without thinking as to the identity of the guest in the story, is it Simon?, the voice?, the narrator?, the novel?, or the narrator's enigmatic neighbour Z?.

At the start of The Bath the narrator observes how much of the human body is made up of water, hence the constantly changing appearance of her face, in the mornings she checks her reflection in a mirror against a photograph of herself hanging next to it, then applies her make up ensuring her appearance is the same, treating the application of her make up to the same degree as of a painter painting a picture. This acute warping of a daily activity soon develops into more surreal-ness in this story, involving an episode where the narrator is a translator at a dinner party, her tongue is bitten off by the sole she eats, she passes out and comes around in a house of a woman who promises that if she returns she'll return her tongue. Tawada's prose is a fascinating journey into language and identity which additionally poses many questions about the author/reader relationship.

Where Europe Begins at New Directions

The Bridegroom Was a Dog

Yoko Tawada won the Akutagawa Prize with The Bridegroom Was a Dog/ Inumukoiri in 1993, this volume, published by Kodansha and translated by Margaret Mitsutani, also collects together two other novellas Missing Heels/Kakato o nakushite, (1992), which won the Gunzo Literature Prize, and the third story being The Gotthard Railway/Gotthard tetsudo, from 1996, Tawada's other writings have earned many prizes, including the Goethe Medal. Tawada's prose has a very unpredictable style, and often throws the occasional curve ball, sometimes it is fantastical and also uses magical realism, and at other times it can be very surreal, but to confine it to any one thing would be an inadequate description, the lines between metaphor, fantasy and the descriptive can sometimes be difficult to discern. In Inumukoiri, the central character, Mitsuko Kitamura runs a slightly unconventional cram school in a non eventful neighbourhood. She tells her pupils stories of humans that marry animals, from the folktale of The Crane Wife to that of a princess who promises her hand in marriage to a dog as a reward for licking her bottom clean, this is arranged through the princess's lazy nanny, this strange little story casts a shadow over the rest of the story, as one day the strange, (and dog-like), Taro appears at Mitsuko's house, the history of their relationship remains a mystery. Her house is often the object of curiosity for many of the school children who spy on her goings on through the garden fence. At a house party that Mitsuko throws, one of her neighbours thinks that Taro could be the husband of one of her friends who went missing some time ago, she phones the friend, Ryoko, to arrange a time for her to come and check to see if Taro is her husband, between them the mystery around Taro begins to be partially explained, this story has one of the longest opening sentences I've come across in a while.

The second story Missing Heels was the one I enjoyed the most and out of the three this one seemed to demonstrate the Escher like effect of Tawada's prose, that sometimes also carries a slight Kafka rationale or sensibility about it. A mail order bride arrives at a city to begin her married life with her new husband, the disorientating images of the city are presented when she watches a man tearing off different layers of posters on an advertising board revealing an array of different images. Added to this the streets appear to be sliding, which unbalances the people walking along, and cause them to cling onto their belongings. After finding her new husband's house, she heads for the ambiguously entitled 'General Training School for Beginners' where she encounters a teacher who smells of sleeping pills. She asks if she can be taught about various things like 'bathing' and later 'shopping'. After discussing marriage she tells the teacher about her decision on getting married 'I gave this decision a lot of thought,and came here of my own free will', the teacher replies adroitly,'Poor people have no will of their own'. Her husband is rarely seen, he's usual heard running away (escaping footsteps), or what we learn of him is through the woman's strange dreams of him, in the mornings she finds that he has left money for her on the side table. Her husband arranges a hospital appointment for her, the reason is not too clear, the episode is a surreal one, the doctor's diagnosis is unexpected and she observes that the nurse, 'had the vague aura of a photograph taken in the last century, sitting there frozen with a rubber stamp in her hand'. The last story being, 'The Gotthard Railway', is told by a Japanese journalist whose is sent to write a piece on the Gotthard railway, although we learn that she's only doing it by proxy as the original Japanese writer who was meant to do it is far too busy, she travels with an engineer who used to work on the line, this story also works free from it's simple plot. Tawada's prose is multi faceted and is open to many interpretations, her most recently translated book is the The Naked Eye.

Kodansha-Intl

Edit:  Here's a video from 2006 of Tawada Yoko recently found via Little Otsu Publishing blog.