Strained encounters of the anthropogene: preservation and extinction in Tatsuaki Ishiguro’s ‘It is with the Deepest Sincerity that I Offer Prayers’

TL;DR

This paper explores how a short story by Tatsuaki Ishiguro critiques modern conservation and biotechnology through the lens of strained human-animal interactions in a species preservation center.

Contribution

The paper introduces a literary analysis of conservation ethics through Ishiguro’s fiction, linking it to anthropogenic biology and reproductive justice.

Findings

Ishiguro’s story challenges human-centered values in conservation, such as well-being and sexual reproduction.

The narrative highlights the limitations of genetic preservation models in addressing broader environmental and social injustices.

The paper connects the story to the concept of 'life as aftermath,' emphasizing ecological flourishing tied to specific historical and geographical contexts.

Abstract

Calculating biovalue in an age of planetary emergency involves fraught decisions over what and whom should be saved, over the science used to make these decisions, and the biotechnologies used for this partial salvation. Tatsuaki Ishiguro’s short story, ‘It is with the Deepest Sincerity that I Offer Prayers’, dramatises these decisions through a series of strained encounters in a remote species preservation centre between two molecular biologists and the last two remaining members of a rare species of mouse. Set on Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost island, largely inhabited by Indigenous Ainu communities until the island’s colonisation in the late 19th century, Ishiguro’s story subverts the teleology of species-life on which conservation models depend. Unsettling what Krithika Srinivasan identifies as human-centred values of well-being (and sexual reproduction) in wildlife conservation, these strained encounters between scientists and test subjects, selectionist methods and theories of life are a genre of what Hannah Landecker has recently called ‘anthropogenic biology’: relations of organic matter shaped by biological control, both affected by and exceeding calculations of scientific efficacy. The article tackles questions of reproductive justice for communities who fall outside core sites of climate mitigation, building on research that shows how conservation projects obscure the realities of environmental pressures caused by industrialisation while upholding a species-centred, genetic ark model of survival. The molecular biologists of Ishiguro’s story encounter something akin to what Landecker calls life as aftermath: ecological flourishing that is historically bound to particular times and places, and which cannot be reproduced indefinitely.