(3) (She also wonders whether the strange dearth of Japanese fiction taking up the nuclear aspect of the “Triple Disaster,” as opposed to the earthquake and tsunami, is a result of a similar self-censorship.

In this vein, scholar Saeko Kimura points out that The Emissary’s ambiguity in relation to nuclear disaster mirrors the way its protagonist, Yoshiro, self-censors his work-ultimately suggesting that the fact of Fukushima’s nuclear contamination is the “secret” the government wishes to conceal.

Through this mode, Tawada interrogates the cultural and political forces that allowed the crisis and that have continued to follow it: the Japanese government’s neoliberal commodification of lives, its neocolonial economic aspirations, the hubristic view of nuclear energy-as-progress, and especially the 2013 enactment of the State Secrecy Law, which Japanese citizens heavily opposed due to the authoritarian threat it poses to media freedom. Instead, the crisis of radiation is central to her imaginaries of a dystopian, normalized post-radiation future, though the fallout is often referred to obliquely, just as radiation is unseen yet ongoing and ubiquitous. (2) Since then, Tawada’s lectures and writings-such as her short story “The Island of Eternal Life,” her lectures collected in Yoko Tawada: Fremde Wasser ( Yoko Tawada: Foreign Waters), her play Still Fukushima: Wenn die Abendsonne aufgeht ( Still Fukushima: When the Evening Sun Rises), her collection Neue Gedichte über Fukushima ( New Poems on Fukushima), and her novel Kentōshi (2014), released in English in 2018 as The Emissary-have frequently taken up Fukushima, drawing the attention of scholars.Īs opposed to many other Japanese authors, who have explored, in generally realistic fiction, the implications of the devastating earthquake and tsunami that took roughly 20,000 lives, Fukushima’s originary moments of “natural disaster” are present only obscurely or implicitly. At the time of the crisis, she was often contacted for comment by German newspapers, and, given that the Japanese government initially kept its own citizens ignorant of radioactive fallout, she also took it upon herself to translate information from German newspapers into Japanese. Of the authors writing in Japanese today, from the perspective of the West, no creative writer has been made more visible in relation to the Fukushima disaster than Tawada, no doubt because of her cosmopolitan positionality as a Japanese national who has lived in (West) Germany since 1982. This assessment speaks to the dystopic and frequently allegorical works of Yōko Tawada.

3 Streets by Yōko Tawada