Yōko Tawada’s post-apocalyptic playground: memory, mutations, and multispecies futures in The Emissary

This article examines Yōko Tawada’s novel The Emissary as a response to the post-3/11 ecological and nuclear crisis in Japan. It explores how the novel reimagines the post-apocalypse landscape not as a dystopian warning but as a space for provisional and interrelational world-building. The analysis examines the novel’s narrative structure and thematic preoccupations within posthumanist and new materialist frameworks, revealing its rejection of apocalyptic temporality in favour of transcorporeal time and materiality. The study also examines water as a motif for challenging contemporary isolationist post-Fukushima discourses by contextualising the novel within an alternative planetary eco-ethics based on theories of Hydrofeminism. The article demonstrates how Tawada repurposes a genre “born out of crisis” into a speculative “playground” for reparative storytelling grounded in multispecies care and ecological negotiation.