Articles Available Online

Everywhere in the Japan of Yoko Tawada’s The Last Children of Tokyo, strange mutations unfold In the years (perhaps decades, or perhaps generations) since an environmental catastrophe, the basic tenets of biology have broken down Children are born weak, with birdlike bones and soft teeth The elderly, in turn, are youthful, athletic, seem to have been ‘robbed of death’ Men begin to experience menopausal symptoms as they age Everyone’s sex changes inexplicably and at random at least once in their lives   This is a vaguely post-Fukushima world, but dystopian or post-apocalyptic are both ill-fitting categories for The Last Children of Tokyo Instead, what Tawada has gifted us is a quiet new magical realism for the Anthropocene, which eco-philosopher Timothy Morton in Hyperobjects neatly summarises as the ‘inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale’ In a move of narrative proficiency, Tawada never discloses the full details of the environmental disaster that catalysed these shifts in the natural order We’re given only pieces of half-information A major earthquake pushed the Japanese archipelago further away from the Asian continent (but when?) Pollutants (of what kind?) in the soil have now contaminated the asphalt in the streets   Because this is not science fiction, the facts of how the world came to be this way – why Japan has isolated itself in a sort of Edo renaissance, why only some foods are available and not others, or why telephones no longer exist all – matter less than the quotidian details surrounding Yoshiro and his great-grandson, Mumei Every morning for years, Yoshiro rents a dog as a jogging companion, though the word jogging has fallen into disuse (more on this shift in language later) He tries to prepare a breakfast that Mumei can safely consume, squeezing the juice from an orange and then cutting it into tiny pieces his great-grandson can actually chew Yoshiro accompanies Mumei to and from school, which is serious labour for Mumei, as the boy struggles to walk even short distances When Mumei gets too tired to keep going, Yoshiro simply puts him in the back carrier of his bicycle and