The Emissary

The novel is set in a Japan devastated by an unspecified man-made catastrophe. Yoshiro, who is more than a hundred years old, lives with his great-grandson Mumei, a schoolboy, on the outskirts of Tokyo; the city centre has become too polluted to live in. The very old remain vigorous and seem never to die, while each generation of children is born weaker and more prone to illness than the last. First published in Japanese as Kentoshi, the book was translated by Margaret Mitsutani and has also appeared in English as The Last Children of Tokyo.