Maxwell's Reviews > The Emissary

What a strange little book. It revolves around a man and his great-grandson. Presumably some sort of cataclysmic event has occurred that has caused Japan to shut itself away from the outside world. Now the elderly are living for longer—upwards of 100 years—while youth are dying at a young age and becoming quite frail. Basically this just chronicles a little bit of the two main characters' lives amidst these new circumstances. It was intriguing and quite easy to read, but didn't really leave me with much.

As a reviewer in the New York Times said: "Tawada seems content to evoke mood, to polish her sentences to a high sheen. Her language has never been so arresting. But as Virginia Woolf wrote, novels are composed of paragraphs, not sentences. “The Emissary” is stalled there, at the level of a flickering brilliance that never kindles into more. From a writer with Tawada’s gifts, mere beauty can be a disappointment."

I'd have to agree; but maybe this just isn't the place to start in Tawada's oeurve. I'm willing to give her a second go nonetheless.