DOUBLE FEATURE: Exit Zero and The Emissary

Exit Zero by Marie-Hélène Bertino and The Emissary by Yoko Tawada.

Exit Zero by Marie-Hélène Bertino
Fiction. 208 pages. Paperback. 2025.
Kepler's.
A collection of twelve haunting, whimsical short stories exploring grief, magic, and human connection.
“Dazzling … blurs the line between writer and magician” — NYT Book Review.
“Charming and strange” — Chicago Review of Books.
From the publisher: In Exit Zero, Marie-Hélène Bertino returns to the short story form with a luminous and unsettling collection that moves fluidly between the everyday and the uncanny. Across twelve stories, characters grapple with loss, longing, and moments of transformation, encountering magic in unexpected places—sometimes gentle, sometimes disquieting. Bertino’s prose blends emotional precision with imaginative daring, creating worlds where grief takes on physical form, chance encounters carry cosmic weight, and human connection flickers amid uncertainty. By turns playful, melancholic, and profound, Exit Zero showcases Bertino’s signature ability to illuminate the strange beauty of being alive.

The Emissary by Yoko Tawada
Fiction. 128 pages. Paperback. 2018. National Book Award Winner for Translated Literature.
Kepler's
In a dystopian, isolated future Japan where the elderly thrive and children are born frail, a great-grandfather lovingly protects his great-grandson.
“Recessive, lunar beauty [with] a high sheen.” — NYT.
“An airily beautiful dystopian novella” — Booklist.
From the publisher: In a future Japan cut off from the rest of the world, the laws of nature seem to have reversed themselves: the old grow ever stronger and more vigorous, while children are born weak and fragile. Yoshiro, a gentle great-grandfather, devotes himself to caring for his frail great-grandson Mumei, whose curiosity and intelligence far exceed his physical strength. As Yoshiro navigates the absurdities and quiet cruelties of this transformed society—where language shifts, technology decays, and memory itself feels unstable—he clings to small rituals of love and care. Written with delicacy, humor, and quiet urgency, The Emissary is a haunting meditation on time, responsibility, and the fragile bonds that sustain humanity in the face of environmental and moral collapse.

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