Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary: An Aesthetic Leap Toward a Queer and Uncanny Ecology

To introduce this essay, I believe it would be productive to focus on Edward Gorey’s gothic artgothic art, for the delightful charm of his very-short-tales mirrors (through a western looking-glass) Yoko Tawada’s topsy-turvy portrait of what it means to be humanportrait of in an age of post-nuclear affairs. The work of the American artist always succeeds in making its spectator feel uneasy, for what the reader views is both strange and familiar, or both homehome-like and unwelcoming, obliging her to wobble within what first appears to be a scenario of nightmarish visions but which then revels itself as a curious world of fantastic possibilities.