Heondeungsa Temple
Run fast and endlessly
Immortal Island
Pian
Babel of Animals

Commentary on the work
Author's chronology

It's a relief to see the end in sight.
As a child, I firmly believed that the ultimate goal of medicine was to create an immortal body, but I never thought about the pain of not being able to die.
-In the text

Mumei, whose mother passed away and whose father disappeared without a trace, was extremely pitiful, but since the death or disappearance of a human being was in fact an extremely personal matter, he was reluctant to report it to the police.
Yoshiro held the miniature baby's hand and moved it slightly, and suddenly, he felt a surge of emotion that made him want to cry out loud, and the words, "Let's do our best together, comrade," came out of his mouth without him realizing it.
Why did the word 'colleague', which I had never used before, come out at this moment?
Honestly, I wanted to call him 'comrade', but maybe I ended up saying 'colleague' because of the annoying memories attached to that word.
-In the text

“Now, look.
There is a large ocean in the middle of the world.
This is the Pacific Ocean.
To the left of this sea are the Eurasian and African continents, and to the right are the American continents.
The plates that lie on the floor of the Pacific Ocean occasionally shift significantly.
Then, a large earthquake occurs, and sometimes a tsunami comes.
That is something that cannot be done by human power.
That's what the Earth is like.
But the reason Japan was pushed out like this wasn't because of an earthquake or a tsunami.
If it were just a natural disaster, we would have overcome it already.
“It’s not because of a natural disaster, okay?” - From the text

The title piece, "Heundeungsa," depicts Japan, isolated as if adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, after a major earthquake and a fatal nuclear accident.
Nature is polluted, the government is privatized, foreign languages ​​are no longer spoken due to the isolationist policy, and the entire Japanese archipelago, including Tokyo, is devastated, making even basic living difficult.
But the most serious problem is that since the incident that day, the elderly have become healthier and healthier, having lost their ability to die, while the children have become increasingly weaker and weaker, to the point where they can no longer walk or eat properly, and even have difficulty breathing on their own.
Born in a pre-disaster era seething with human greed, Yoshiro and his great-grandson Mumei, who have been carrying death with them since birth, constantly struggle to find a new way to live in this desolate and hopeless dystopia.
"Run Fast, Endlessly" tells the story of Azumada Ichiko, who had lived a smooth life without any particular twists and turns, and the strange events she experiences with Tabata Dooko, a woman known as "Ten-chan," at a flower arrangement class she enrolls in to soothe her "loneliness as great as a mountain" after the death of her husband.
The relationship between these two women, which transcends reality and surrealism, the everyday and the extraordinary, is not only filled with Yoko Tawada's signature wordplay, but also questions the inexplicable human relationships that sprout in the extreme circumstances of disaster.
"Island of the Immortal" is a chilling work that depicts, in a dreamlike manner, the hellish situation in Japan after a nuclear accident that has twisted and destroyed all life.
Furthermore, "Pian" is a story that sharply criticizes Japan's foolish reality of lightly forgetting the precious lessons of the previous great earthquake, which has insensitively fanned the flames of disaster even after suffering a fatal nuclear accident, and Japan's political situation that completely ignores solidarity with neighboring countries without any historical reflection.
And "Animal Babel" is a witty play that satirically criticizes the past Anthropocene (us today) through the different positions of the animals that survived on Earth after the extinction caused by a great disaster (the Great Flood) that humans brought upon themselves.
These five works appear to be loosely connected at first glance, but they form a single, massive celestial body due to the gravitational force caused by the '3.11 Great East Japan Earthquake'.
We will float freely through these works and discover the enlightenment and new meaning we need now.