Yoko Tawada

In a near-future when the old live almost-forever and the young are swept away by strange new ailments, an elderly man fights to keep his beloved great-grandson alive.

The Last Children of Tokyo

Gela

“The shelf life of words was getting shorter all the time (...) And some words that had disappeared after being labeled ‘old-fashioned’ had no heirs to take their place.”

Yoshiro thinks he might never die. A hundred years old and counting, he is one of Japan's many 'old-elderly'; men and women who remember a time before the air and the sea were poisoned, before terrible catastrophe promted Japan to shut itself off from the rest of the world. He may live for decades yet, but he knows his beloved great-grandson - born frail and prone to sickness - might not survive to adulthood. Day after day, it takes all of Yoshiro's sagacity to keep Mumei alive. As hopes for Japan's youngest generation fade, a secretive organisation embarks on an audacious plan to find a cure - might Yoshiro's great-grandson be the key to saving the last children of Tokyo?

sina (she/her) 

Cait🪼

As a child he had assumed the goal of medicine was to keep bodies alive forever; he had never considered the pain of not being able to die


This felt somewhat unfinished and I absolutely loved it for that very reason. The number of questions this book stirred up in me was completely unexpected - and I thoroughly enjoyed the fact that this doesn't seem like some distant, impossible future: it's quite realistic. Not only was the writing beautiful, but the character development was so impactful for such a short novel. While we don't know what happens to Mumei or his grandfather, for once I didn't mind.

This story of a future Japan where the elderly live ridiculously long, healthy lives while the children get sick and die - thanks to a human-made disaster of some kind - is a book I’ve seen many rave reviews for. And I felt like I 

 have liked it more than I did. It’s clearly doing some interesting things with language and concepts, and it’s a strong warning parable against environmental destruction and its potential near-future impacts on us - but I wanted more of a story. Which is probably a failure on my part, not the writer’s. But still, despite the beautiful language, I didn’t enjoy this much. It felt postmodernist for the sake of it, which (to me) does not a good novel make. In the end I was only half aware of what was going on, and I ended the book with so many questions unanswered. Why was the older generation living almost forever? (It made zero sense that the environmental catastrophe, which involved some kind of ‘poison,’ had a positive effect on them while it had such a negative effect on the children.) What exactly was going on with the shadowy organisation which the boy’s great-grandmother was involved with? Was the flash-forward just the boy’s hallucination, or was it real - and if not, why all the detail, and what was the point? I’m sure a lot of people will love this book, but it was not for me.

Naomi J.

This story of a future Japan where the elderly live ridiculously long, healthy lives while the children get sick and die - thanks to a human-made disaster of some kind - is a book I’ve seen many rave reviews for. And I felt like I should have liked it more than I did. It’s clearly doing some interesting things with language and concepts, and it’s a strong warning parable against environmental destruction and its potential near-future impacts on us - but I wanted more of a story. Which is probably a failure on my part, not the writer’s. But still, despite the beautiful language, I didn’t enjoy this much. It felt postmodernist for the sake of it, which (to me) does not a good novel make. In the end I was only half aware of what was going on, and I ended the book with so many questions unanswered. Why was the older generation living almost forever? (It made zero sense that the environmental catastrophe, which involved some kind of ‘poison,’ had a positive effect on them while it had such a negative effect on the children.) What exactly was going on with the shadowy organisation which the boy’s great-grandmother was involved with? Was the flash-forward just the boy’s hallucination, or was it real - and if not, why all the detail, and what was the point? I’m sure a lot of people will love this book, but it was not for me.

Beatriz Baptista

3.0 ⭐️

75% deste livro é actually um bocado seca para mim. os temas são muito interessantes, mas não há qualquer plot, apenas descreve o dia-a-dia de uma sociedade distópica, num futuro que muito provavelmente pode ser o nosso, com vários vírus, subida do nível das águas do mar, crianças bastante debilitadas que não conseguem criar defesas porque são demasiado protegidas de um mundo demasiado tóxico, ao contrário dos adultos que praticamente descobriram a vida eterna e conseguem viver até aos 115 anos sem perderem as suas faculdades físicas ou mentais. 

os outros 25% são mais cativantes porque acompanhamos com mais detalhe a vida do Mumei e das pessoas que fazem parte do seu círculo pessoal. chegamos a ter um pouco de plot e por fim levamos com um final que são 47389 murros no estômago (num bom sentido).

não recomendo a qualquer pessoa, não achei a melhor experiência de leitura, mas sem dúvida que nos deixa a refletir no futuro da humanidade e isso para mim é um ponto muito positivo.

The Last Children of Tokyo

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