The emissary review by Josh

The Emissary is high among the best novels I've read in many years.

It takes place in a future Japan that has cut itself off from the rest of the world. The story centers on Yoshiro (107 years old) and his great-grandson Mumei (7 years old).

The government of Japan has passed a variety of laws to cut the country off from the rest of the world. Not only can Japanese no longer travel to other countries, but they're not allowed to use foreign words. These laws aren't actually enforced and are widely violated, but everyone worries that they'll be the first to be prosecuted, so they're wary about what they say.

Yoshiro is a writer, and in the middle of the book we learn of a children's story he submitted to a magazine:

he promptly sent to a publisher he’d worked with. It was about a little girl in the sixth grade. In the country where she lived, it was decreed that all children must bring a lunch of white rice with a red pickled plum in the middle to school. So every morning, the girl’s mother pressed a pickled plum into the middle of the white rice in bento boxes for the girl and her little brother, with a dark sheet of dry nori seaweed hidden under the surface. In a separate container, she packed things to go with the rice, like cold omelettes or spinach. One day, the girl’s mother was injured in a car accident and had to spend the night in the hospital. Her father, away on a business trip, couldn’t make it home right away. The little brother cried himself to sleep that night, so the next morning, to cheer him up, the girl cut the paperlike nori into the shapes of a panda’s eyes and ears to put on his rice. Extremely pleased with his panda lunch, the boy proudly showed it to his classmates. The following morning, his older sister was sent to a youth detention center, and her mother, now out of the hospital, was arrested.

Unfortunately, Yoshiro’s children’s story has yet to be published. The letter from the publisher said, “The content is incomprehensible to children.”

Of course, children would be perfectly capable of understanding the story. Indeed they might understand it better than adults. Children almost all live in a Kafkaesque world of arbitrary rules and limitations. Adults have far fewer limitations - if I want to eat Ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner no one can stop me.

A recurring theme in the book is the disconnect between the perception of children and adults, and how their perceptions of themselves and others are culturally mediated. Everyone in the story knows that the elderly are strong and full of energy while the young are weak, fragile, and sickly. The elderly pity the young, but kids don't actually seem be bothered by their weakness. They're exhausted by both the environment and by how worried their elders are about everything.

The novel is a essentially a series of micro-stories or vignettes, like this one, that in aggregate point a picture of society. It seems like there are some magical realist elements in some of these stories, but they often reach us via unreliable narrators so it's hard to tell what's magic, what's governmental misdirection, and what's rumor or confusion. This uncertainty - the difficulty of knowing precisely what's happening - is presumably one reason the people seem so incapable of responding adequately to the problems Japan faces.

Anyways, the Emissary is delightful and should be read by all people like to be delighted.