Cover for ‘The Last Children of Tokyo’ by Yoko Tawada, published by Portobello Books
The novel is set in a Japan that has been devastated by an unspecified man-made global catastrophe. Tokyo is too heavily polluted to be habitable. The city’s population live in the suburbs. Over the last century, successive generations of children have been born increasingly feeble and prone to illness, while the aged-elderly continue to live with undiminished vitality.