The Emissary

by Yoko Tawada

  In a fair, democratic fight, he was sure to lose. The purpose of authoritarianism, it seemed to him, was to protect these foolish, vulnerable creatures called parents.

  There was no limit to his daughter’s desires. She would keep eating sweets until she made herself sick, or refuse to budge from a toy store until he bought her what she wanted. When she resorted to grabbing sweets or toys away from other children, Yoshiro had to step in. The child’s role was to unleash desire, the parent’s to stop her. As a little girl, she had put up with these parental restrictions. But as her voice grew louder, her vocabulary increased daily, along with her skill at making excuses for herself. For every harsh word he spoke she would lob back ten at him, sharp as arrows. Their tips hurt, sometimes even drawing blood, making Yoshiro hope she would gorge herself on ice cream until her belly ached, but all the same he never lost his conviction that he had worthwhile lessons to teach her. With Mumei, things were completely different: the boy never ate too much, or put anything in his mouth that didn’t belong there, yet Yoshiro had not a single thing to teach him about life. This made him feel so pathetic that he could only close his eyes and press clenched fists into them in a gesture of utter despair.

  From the time his grandson Tomo was still small enough to lift up, Yoshiro had looked forward to the day when he would teach him how to be a safe driver. Though writers are generally considered to be imaginative, Yoshiro had never imagined that cars would one day disappear. As the boy hadn’t cared much for studying, Yoshiro had given him a bankbook for an account with enough money to pay for three years’ tuition at an occupational training school, but his grandson had secretly closed the account, stuffed all the money into a sports bag, and stole away with it like a thief in the night. When documents came from the bank showing that the account had been dissolved, Yoshiro’s gut seethed, steam rising from it until a month later when all the major banks started failing one after another, causing customers to lose all their savings, leaving them with nothing to cling to but rumors about how they would get their money back someday. People stormed the banks, nostrils flared, faces red with anger, to be met by men in suits lined up in front of each branch, sweat pouring off their foreheads as they earnestly spewed out apology after apology. Cursed and screamed at, the men bore up under scorching heat during the day, followed by evening showers that drenched them and swarms of mosquitos that bit them as they continued to bow and apologize until finally the customers folded up their anger for the time being and went home. Then a newspaper article revealed that the men in suits were actually “Sorry-men,” hired for an hourly wage to stand in front of branch offices to bow and scrape. Which meant that Tomo, who had never trusted institutions like banks, turned out to have a more practical grasp of economics than Yoshiro, who believed that a savings account could provide security for life. And the same was true of occupational training schools. Several years after that, Yoshiro saw an article in the newspaper by a scholar of contemporary culture who wrote:

  “Schools claiming to prepare students to pass certification exams take in a steady income from monthly tuition despite the fact that their graduates, even if they pass the exams, often can’t find jobs, or at best, end up settling for very low wages. New occupations with fancy-sounding names must be viewed with particular suspicion. Believing that acceptance at a training school means that their child’s special talent has been recognized, parents are glad to pay the tuition. The more expensive the happier they are to pay, for paying more seems to increase their own value. Both parents and child want to show off, afraid of what their neighbors will think if it looks like they aren’t doing anything. Recently, more and more dishonest occupational training schools are using this sort of psychology to their own advantage. Have we all forgotten that occupational training was meant to be free and open to everyone?” Long before this highly respected scholar gave the problem his serious attention, a certain juvenile delinquent who trusted neither bank accounts nor occupational training schools had made his escape.

  Yoshiro had to admit it: what he had taught his grandson had been all wrong. He remembered telling the boy, “You can’t go wrong with real estate. Get yourself some land in a prime location in the middle of Tokyo and you’re fixed for life — its value will never go down,” but now that all of Tokyo’s twenty-three wards, including prime locations, were designated an “exposure to multiple health hazards from prolonged habitation” area, neither its houses nor its land had any monetary value. This designation was supposed to mean that although when measured separately, neither drinking water, air, light, nor food was over the danger line, there was a high probability of multiple pernicious influences from lengthy exposure to the environment as a whole. Whereas individual factors can be measured specifically, human beings live in the general. Even though the twenty-three wards had never actually been classified as dangerous, more and more people wanted to leave, and since they didn’t want to go too far, and because living near the sea was particularly dangerous, they began migrating toward the mountainous region from Okutama to Nagano Prefecture. Yoshiro’s wife Marika wasn’t the only one to abandon the house and land she had inherited in central Tokyo because she couldn’t find a buyer.

  Assuming he had knowledge and wealth to leave to his descendants was mere arrogance, Yoshiro now realized. This life with his great-grandson was about all he could manage. And for that he needed to be flexible, in mind and body, with the courage to doubt what he had believed for over a century. Sloughing off his pride like an old jacket, he’d have to go around in his shirtsleeves. If he was cold, rather than buying a new jacket it would be better to think of ways to grow a thick coat of fur like a bear’s. He was not really an “old man,” but a man who, after living for a century, had become a new species of human being, he thought, clenching his fists again and again.

  With a thud the newspaper hit the doorstep. As he did every morning Yoshiro ran outside, but no matter how fast he was the woman who delivered his paper would already be so far away that her back was no bigger than his middle finger. It was a thin back, with sloping shoulders and a long slender neck topped with hair in a bun as round as a ball. As Yoshiro watched her firm, round hips and muscular calves recede into the distance, he called loudly after her, “Thanks for the paper!” As she never reacted, he didn’t know whether she heard him or not.

  On his front doorstep, Yoshiro unrolled the paper. He hadn’t paid much attention to the newspaper as a young man, but ever since this media had been revived after its disappearance, reading it carefully all the way through had become a daily ritual. As he let his eyes fly low over the Politics section, words such as regulation, standard, adaptation, policy, investigation, and caution stuck out like stalks in a flattened field. Actually reading this section was like slogging through a swamp. He mustn’t spend his mornings this way; first, he had to get Mumei off to school. The word school still carried a faint whiff of hope.

  Leaving the newspaper in the foyer he went back to the kitchen, where he handed Mumei his orange juice in a bamboo cup with a narrow drinking spout.

  After taking a swallow, Mumei asked, “We get oranges from Okinawa, don’t we?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do oranges grow further south than Okinawa?”

  Yoshiro swallowed hard. “You know, I’m not really sure.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Japan is closed to the outside world.”

  “Why is it closed?”

  “Every country has serious problems, so to keep those problems from spreading all around the world, they decided that each country should solve its own problems by itself. Remember when I took you to the Showa-Heisei Museum? All the rooms were separated by steel doors, so if a fire starts in one room it can’t spread to the next one.”

  “It is better that way?”

  “I don’t know if it’s better or not. But at least this way there’s less danger of Japanese companies making mone
y off the poor people living in other countries. And there are probably fewer chances for foreign companies to make money from the crisis we’re having here in Japan, too.”

  Mumei looked puzzled, as if maybe he sort of understood, but not quite. Yoshiro was always careful not to tell him that he didn’t really support Japan’s isolation policy.

  Although no one openly discussed the isolation policy, there was lots of griping about fruit. Ever since Japan had stopped importing food from abroad, all the oranges, pineapples and bananas came from Okinawa. Lots of mandarin oranges were apparently being harvested on the island of Shikoku, but they hardly ever made it to Tokyo. Shikoku had adopted a policy of keeping its fruit for its own people, generating income from its patents on recipes for Sanuki noodles and German bread instead.

  One day when Yoshiro saw mandarin oranges on sale at the bakery, he immediately bought two. Both were labeled “Made in Shikoku.” The baker definitely had deep island connections. Yoshiro had planned to keep the oranges for Saturday, when he and Mumei would be able to take their time eating them, but before Saturday came there was a new holiday he’d forgotten all about. Nowadays there were so many holidays that Yoshiro couldn’t keep track of them all. He was always checking the calendar, trying to remember, but they never seemed to take root in his brain.

  Unlike the old holiday to commemorate the Emperor’s birthday, the new ones were perfectly democratic, their names and dates decided by popular elections. First, ideas were solicited from the public. Various suggestions were offered. “Ocean Day” provides ample opportunities to think about pollution of the seas, one group said, but after decades of pouring the filthy runoff from factories into the rivers, shouldn’t we also honor them with a “River Day”? Or, since we have a “Green Day,” why not a “Red Day” to go with it? As “Culture Day” was too abstract to have much meaning, the people overwhelmingly voted to make it more specific by adding “Book Day,” “Song Day,” “Musical Instrument Day,” “Picture Day” and “Architecture Day.” The names of some of the older holidays were changed: “Respect for the Aged Day” became “Encouragement for the Aged Day,” while “Children’s Day” was now “Apologize to the Children Day”; “Sports Day” was changed to “Body Day” to avoid upsetting children who were not growing up big and strong; so as not to hurt the feelings of young people who wanted to work but simply weren’t strong enough, “Labor Day” became “Being Alive Is Enough Day.” Increasing the number of public holidays wasn’t the only thing on people’s minds. The stream of voices calling for the abolition of “National Founding Day” grew into a deluge, washing this holiday away so completely it was never heard from again. The main objection was that a splendid country like Japan could not possibly have been founded in a single day. Other new holidays included “Pillow Day,” to encourage couples to have sex, which was almost unheard of these days; “Extinct Species Day,” when people lit sticks of incense in memory of birds and animals that had vanished from the earth; “Off-line Day,” to commemorate the day the Internet had died (“off-line” being written with Chinese characters meaning ‘Honorable-Woman-Naked-Obscenity’); and “Bone Day,” for seriously considering the importance of calcium.

  The mandarin orange put Mumei in such a good mood that he immediately started playing with it, poking a section with his finger, which was about as soft as the orange. On the verge of scolding, “Don’t play with your food,” Yoshiro stuffed some orange into his mouth to stop himself. Playing with food was fine. He might even discover a new way of eating it. Play, play, play with your food! If Mumei were to ask him, “How do you eat a mandarin orange?” he would tell him to figure it out for himself. Any way would be fine with Great-grandpa. Think of a way as you play. But in the end, Mumei never asked. Yoshiro’s generation were brought up believing that there was a proper way to eat fruit: this was the way you peeled an orange; you used this sort of spoon to scoop out grapefruit sections. They believed that by standardizing the eating process into a ritual, they could soothe their cells into ignoring the sourness of the fruit, which actually warned of danger. Mumei’s generation could never be deceived by such a silly trick, originally meant to fool children. No matter how they ate fruit, alarms went off throughout their bodies. When Mumei ate kiwi fruit he had trouble breathing; lemon juice paralyzed his tongue. And it wasn’t just fruit. Spinach gave him heartburn, while shiitake mushrooms made him dizzy. Mumei never forgot for an instant that food was dangerous.

  “Lemon is so sour it makes you see blue.”

  This is what Mumei said the first time he ate a lemon snow cone. Ever since, whenever Yoshiro saw a lemon, it seemed to him that blue was mixed in with the yellow — and that made him feel that for just a moment he had touched the raw, spinning earth.

  Searching with bloodshot eyes for fruit for their great-grandchildren, old people wandered like ghosts from market to market. Long ago, only the prices of books and magazines had been fixed, but now the cost of fruit and some vegetables was the same all over Japan; regardless of whether there was a surplus or a shortage of oranges, the price of one was set at 10,000 yen. Without inflation, there probably wouldn’t have been so many zeros attached to the price of a single piece of fruit.

  Due to the violent, capricious personality the climate had developed on the main island of Honshu, farming was becoming more and more difficult. The northern Tohoku region was better off, taking in a good income from a nutritious new strain they called “New Species Multigrain,” in addition to more traditional crops like rice and wheat, which they also exported, although in somewhat small amounts. On Honshu, the area from Ibaraki Prefecture to Kyoto was most seriously affected by climate change. In some years fine snow fell in August, while in February, hot dry winds dumped mounds of sand. Eyes red despite the eyewash they’d used, men would creep sideways along the edge of the sidewalk like crabs, trying to stay out of the harsh, desert winds sweeping down the middle of the street. Women in sunglasses with their hair hidden beneath scarves — pacing back and forth as if they were on a movie set where the shoot was going badly — were actually fighting their anxiety about the weather. During the summer, when it didn’t rain for three months, all the vegetation would turn dusty yellow until suddenly tropical low pressure would bring on a squall that flooded the subway stations.

  Driven by the cycles of droughts following tropical storms, many people moved from Honshu to Okinawa. There were other areas where agriculture was booming — Hokkaido came to mind, but unlike Okinawa, it had adopted an anti-immigration policy so as not to upset the balance between people and nature. Although the population of Hokkaido had long been considered too small for such a large expanse of land, when an expert in population issues from Asahikawa concluded that the current population was actually ideally suited to the land area, the local government decided not to increase the population. No one from another area or prefecture could take up residence without permission, which was never granted without a very special reason.

  Although Okinawa basically placed no restrictions on immigration from Honshu, they were afraid of an explosion in the population of single male laborers. To prevent this, it was decided that people who wanted to work on farms in Okinawa had to apply as married couples. Single women could apply as well as same-sex couples, both male and female, but applications from single men were not accepted. Exceptions were made for single women who had a sex change operation after they became residents; they were allowed to stay as single men. Only prospective immigrants with jobs lined up were allowed to apply, and since there were very few jobs outside of agriculture, it was safe to say that without a farm to employ them, people from Honshu wouldn’t receive permission to immigrate.

  Due to a shortage of day care centers and after-school programs, couples with children under the age of twelve were not accepted, although exceptions were made for couples who left their children with relatives or foster families and came by themselves. Because the local government didn’t want
immigrants to have children once they’d moved to Okinawa, women over the age of fifty-five and men who had had vasectomies were preferred. There was an article in the newspaper about a woman who drew wrinkles on her face and dyed her hair white in an attempt to hide her youth, but acting older than your real age is actually quite difficult. Suspicion fell on her when people realized she couldn’t tell the ON and OFF switches on old farm machinery apart, which meant she must have been younger than she looked. The ability to understand even a little English was evidence of old age. As studying English was now prohibited, young people didn’t know even simple words like on and off. It was okay to study other languages such as Tagalog, German, Swahili, or Czechoslovakian, though it was so hard to find teachers, textbooks, or even people who had studied these languages that not many people even wanted to try. Singing songs in foreign languages in public places for over forty seconds was strictly prohibited. Nor could novels translated from foreign languages be published.

  Yoshiro’s only daughter Amana had eagerly immigrated to Okinawa with her husband, their youthful sixtyish muscles clad in blue cotton work clothes they’d had made by special order. Believing that work clothes should match the wearer’s personality, they never even considered buying ready-made outfits. Amana’s hair, luxuriant enough to cover the whole bed when she was lying down, was bundled up under a straw hat while she was working; the hat, too, she’d had made specially, according to her own design.

  Yoshiro hadn’t seen his daughter in a long time. He sometimes read in the newspaper about how life in Okinawa was more prosperous than anyone in Tokyo could imagine. Fruits and vegetables were practically free. Yet because individuals were prohibited from shipping agricultural products to places outside of Okinawa, immigrants couldn’t send food to their families in Tokyo.