The Emissary

The setting of The Emissary is superb: a post-apocalyptic Japan where an unspecified environmental catastrophe has caused extensive pollution and severe birth defects in newborn children. The social and political consequences are plausible and realistic: global isolationism, an uninhabited Tokyo (the epicenter of the disaster), social disorder, and atrophied language skills. Unfortunately, the book's plot is poorly structured and Tawada's prose (in English, anyway) is halting and fractured.