Heat-Warmed Pages: How Japan’s Novelists Are Writing the Climate Crisis

On a late Tokyo afternoon, the heat is already oppressive. The shrill sound of cicadas collides with the hum of air conditioners, while schoolchildren linger indoors instead of racing through parks. Scientists warn that by 2060, summers will be too dangerous for such play. The Japanese imagination, long haunted by natural disaster and fragile coexistence with the elements, is now turning its gaze towards an altered climate. Novelists are quietly writing the contours of a future where heat, scarcity and estrangement reorder the human condition.

Three of the country’s most compelling voices—Hiromi Kawakami, Yōko Tawada and Sayaka Murata—have each released new work in the past two years that refracts climate anxiety into narrative form. They do not write activist manifestos or scientific parables. Instead, they experiment with intimacy, estrangement and myth, allowing the warming world to surface obliquely—through distorted bodies, broken languages, and unfamiliar households.

Japanese climate fiction on the shelf. Image supplied/amc

Kawakami’s quiet apocalypse

Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird, published in English last year, imagines a world reshaped by famine and pollution. Yet the novel is not set amid collapse. It begins after the catastrophe has already been absorbed into daily life. Communities cling to survival through cloning and hybridisation, creating children who might breathe underwater or feed off sunlight. The tone is hushed, even pastoral at times, as if the monstrous had become ordinary.

Kawakami resists the usual grammar of dystopia. There are no rebels storming citadels, no great speeches about lost civilisation. Instead, her gaze settles on small gestures of care, unease, and resignation. The reader is invited to contemplate whether emotion itself—love, grief, longing—has become an evolutionary flaw, or the last ember of what we call human. The apocalypse, in Kawakami’s hands, is not explosive but muted: a long diminuendo in which people adapt until the line between survival and extinction blurs.

 Tawada’s language of displacement

If Kawakami dwells on bodies transformed, Yōko Tawada takes language itself as her raw material. Suggested in the Stars, the middle volume of her recent trilogy, unfolds in a Europe where Japan has vanished from the map. Its protagonist, Hiruko, wanders across borders in search of a community who can still speak her tongue. Along the way, she invents new dialects, mixes idioms, and trades phrases like gifts.

Tawada’s fiction is playful yet unsettling: climate change erases not only land, but also the linguistic anchors by which we navigate belonging. What does it mean to be Japanese when the nation itself has slipped beneath the waves? Her prose answers by breaking words apart and recombining them, suggesting that identity may survive through improvisation rather than inheritance. Where Kawakami’s world is biologically hybrid, Tawada’s is linguistically so. Both point towards futures in which adaptation is not a choice but a condition.

Yoko Tawada in London. Photo by Japan Foundation UK. image supplied/amc

Murata’s estranged intimacies

Sayaka Murata, perhaps best known for Convenience Store Woman, pursues another axis of estrangement in Vanishing World. Here, Japan’s demographic collapse has produced a society where natural childbirth is taboo, reproduction is managed by laboratories, and intimacy is rerouted into attachments with fictional avatars. Couples marry but avoid sex. Families raise children communally in “experimental” zones. To be born in the old way, as Murata’s protagonist Amane is, becomes an anomaly bordering on indecency.

Where Tawada questions the fate of language, Murata interrogates the fate of desire. The novel’s world is not overtly apocalyptic. Streets still function, institutions still stand. But beneath the surface, the logic of intimacy has been rewritten, reflecting anxieties about shrinking populations and technologised futures. Murata’s gift lies in presenting this estrangement without moralising: the bizarre is narrated as if it were ordinary, forcing the reader to examine their own assumptions about family, body and care.

A novel of disappearing certainties and altered worlds. image supplied/amc

Mapping the climate unconscious

Taken together, these three novels form a kind of shadow map of Japan’s climate crisis. None of them preach about carbon emissions or rising seas. Instead, they imagine how the crisis might seep into the structures that make us human: the body, the tongue, the household.

Kawakami offers a vision of survival through mutation, stripped of triumphalism. Tawada insists that language itself may be forced to evolve as nations dissolve. Murata sketches a society where even love is re-engineered to fit the constraints of survival. Their concerns are different, yet they converge on the same horizon: a world in which the familiar scaffolding of human life begins to loosen under environmental pressure.

This is literature not of catastrophe but of estrangement. The novels do not document floods or fires; they explore the quieter aftermaths—the way intimacy, identity and emotion are unsettled by a warming planet. In this sense, they may speak more persuasively than statistics or policy papers. Fiction translates technical forecasts into intimate fears, making the climate crisis legible not only as data but as lived imagination.

A warming canon

Japan has long cultivated an aesthetic of impermanence, from haiku that linger on falling blossoms to tales shaped by earthquakes and tsunamis. The new climate fiction extends this lineage, but with a sharper edge. The impermanence is no longer seasonal or cyclical; it is structural, planetary.

Reading Kawakami, Tawada and Murata, one is struck by the absence of nostalgia. These are not elegies for a lost world. They are thought experiments about how we might continue, distorted and unsettled, when the old co-ordinates have vanished. They capture the peculiar mixture of resignation and resilience that defines climate consciousness today: a recognition that the world is changing irreversibly, coupled with the question of what forms of life might still persist.

In the end, their novels do not offer solutions. What they provide is a language—sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical—for inhabiting the uncertainty. They remind us that the climate crisis will not arrive solely as rising temperatures or collapsing harvests. It will arrive as shifts in how we imagine bodies, how we inherit tongues, how we construct families. Literature, in this sense, is not peripheral to the crisis. It is one of its most sensitive registers.

Back in Tokyo, as another heatwave presses against the windows, parents call their children back indoors. The streets are quiet. Inside, books wait on shelves—strange maps of a future already seeping into the present.

Asia Media Centre