From Half-Lives to Eternal Life: On Contamination and Isolation in Yōko Tawada’s Post-3.11 Eco-texts

This chapter focuses on the ecologically oriented texts of the writer, poet, and activist Yōko Tawada, who was born in Japan and has resided in Berlin for more than half of her life. In discussing Tawada’s eco-texts as “radioactive discourse,” the following examines how she strategically highlights physical, linguistic, and political forms of “contamination” in her post-Fukushima speculative fiction. In both “The Island of Eternal Life” and The Emissary, Tawada offers a subversive take on isolationist policies in order to simultaneously critique exclusionary nationalism and comment on the futility of isolation from an ecological and planetary perspective.