MONICA TAMAȘ University of Bucharest Tales of an Improbable Reality and Its Consequences Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary 1 Despite the fact that most technological achievements of the 20 th century were received as promises for a better future, the taming of the atom – one of the most extraordinary of them all – proved to have dire consequences for a great number of people. In March 2011 Japan experienced a threefold catastrophe: the Tōhoku earthquake and following tsunami and the meltdown of three re- actors at Fukushima nuclear power plant. One month after the earthquake an unprecedented number of people took to the streets of Japan to protest against nuclear power. The writer Yoko Tawada is one of the voices that criticized Japan government’s nuclear politics that prioritized profit over the security of Japan’s people and nature. Her short novel The Emissary (translated by Margaret Mitsu- tani) imagines a worst-case scenario: after an unspecified cataclysm Japan cuts off every connection to the rest of the world, old people seem unable to die while watching the frail young children in their care suffering every minute of their short lives. It is a tale of a generation fraught with guilt over its failure to leave the planet inhabitable for the generations to come. Keywords: Yoko Tawada; The Emissary; Fukushima power plant; nuclear power in lit- erature; anti-nuclear power protests in Japan. 1. The Horrifying Prospects of Nuclear Accidents In 1953, President Eisenhower concluded his Atoms for Peace speech pledging the United States’ “determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma – to devote its entire heart and mind to finding the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life”. When Arkady and Boris Strugatsky imagined the eerie and mys- terious Zones that extraterrestrial Visitors had left behind after their short “roadside picnic”, a story later masterfully adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky into his much lauded science fiction art film Stalker (1979), little did they know that – in the not so distant future – humanity will delimit its own two “Contamination Zones”, with no help from any unknown forces outside Earth’s perimeter. It was by This article is part of my PhD dissertation, "Illusory Identities in Yoko Tawada’s German and Ja 1 - panese Novels", which I am completing at the Center for Excellence in Image Study at the Univer- sity of Bucharest, under the supervision of Professor Alexandra Vrânceanu. 1