![]() ![]() I didn’t feel the two central characters were not as well-developed as they could have been, but the world-building really shines. Mumei goes to school but for the most part the two live in relative isolation and Yoshiro devotes himself to keeping Mumei alive.Įven though the blurb on the back of The Emissary makes it sounds pretty light-hearted, in reality it’s downbeat and even a little bit creepy. Yoshiro loves his great-grandson, Mumei, dearly and Mumei seems surprisingly at peace with his heinous circumstances. Since there is no longer any thriving industry for food shipped from other countries, everybody’s hungry and the kids are in such bad shape they can hardly eat anything without becoming violently ill. As far as anyone knows this crisis isn’t going on anywhere else except for in Japan because the country has cut itself off from all the other parts of the world. ![]() The two carve out a meager existence in a world where the elderly remain in good health and live indefinitely while children are weak, disabled, and often disfigured. ![]() The Emissary is filled with a variety of characters, but the only ones who play more than a fleeting role in the story are a little boy and his great-grandfather Yoshiro. Just when I thought there was nothing original left for writers to do with the dystopian genre, my assumptions were challenged by this odd little book from Japan. ![]()
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