Sex is disgusting and unnecessary, men grow foetuses in a sac of artificial skin, and love between two spouses is strictly platonic and familial. These are the building blocks of the strange and deliriously fascinating alternative reality of Sayaka Murata’s newest novel, Vanishing World. Like all of Murata’s previous stories, questions around the terror of abnormal entities in polite society and atypical approaches to intimacy form the book’s core, puncturing every page with warbling instability. Vanishing World, like all of Murata’s other stories in English, has been translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Amane Sakaguchi is cursed. Born from old-time conception—a.k.a. intercourse—her mother has condemned her to a life of falling in love and having sex in a world where romantic love and sexual desire are fast diminishing. From a young age, she has known she “had to leave the walled garden my mother created” and compel her body and mind to find comfort in being ordinary in a world that was changing fast. And for a long time, she succeeds. Like her school friends, she falls in love with a fictional character from a cartoon show and develops a dizzyingly intense relationship with him. She spends her nights talking to him and carries cut-out keychains of his likeness during the day. Through Amane’s cartoon crush, she builds friendships with other students: “When you and a friend were both in love with the same character, it brought you closer together.”
Yet as Amane’s crush grows, she finds herself struggling through physical symptoms reflective of her love, wrestling with the fact that her “sexuality developed in a sterile space”:
It was a mysterious sensation, as though I’d been infected with a pleasurable pain that lived in me like a parasite. This sweet pain moved around inside my body. My chest, my back, the back of my neck, the area below my belly button… even the tips of my toes sometimes hurt.
Confused and excited by the newfound power of her body, she begins to masturbate with her fictional loves. Her desires are quickly cut down when her friends tell her that masturbation is dirty and that using her crushes to help is degrading and demeaning. Spiralling, Amane is convinced that she has raped her crushes through masturbation. With her newfound shame and the heavy burden of her mother’s curse, Amane resolves to seamlessly assimilate into the “factory to manufacture uniformly convenient people”. As Murata readers would know, almost all her stories—and all her novels—struggle through the same dilemma: to what extent must one eliminate individuality to assimilate into the norm? What is the logic used to draw the line between normal and abnormal?
For the most part, Amane succeeds; she marries a platonic husband, has a few real-life affairs, plans for a baby (artificially, of course), and carries her forty fictional lovers around in a Prada pouch. But Chiba, her hometown and now the proudly transformed “Experiment City”, looms over her married life. In Chiba, like in many other places around the world, nuclear family structures collapse in favour of a social and cultural family. Women—and some men, through a scientific breakthrough—are artificially inseminated and give birth to babies meant for the city; the “Kodomo-chans” do not have two parents, instead, everyone in Chiba, both women and men, are “Mothers”, designated with the responsibility of providing love and affection to all children. With Amane’s husband increasingly fascinated by Chiba, they pack up their lives and move.
While the Kodomo-chans enamour her husband, Amane isn’t so sure:
Adults flocked around the children as if they were feeding stray cats in the park, petting them and exclaiming how cute they were. It was as though the whole town were keeping human children as pets.
Is a communal system of love better for children? Is it better for her? Amane doesn’t know, but she vows to accept her vanishing world of lovers and family in favour of the new order.
Vanishing World‘s foray into artificial insemination isn’t Murata’s first novel concerned with questions about the process, value, and structures of childbirth. “A Clean Marriage” (available on Granta’s website), one of the stories included in the short-story collection Life Ceremony, lays a familiar foundation of asexual marriages and alternative methods of conception that is notably reminiscent of Amane’s world. Satsujin Shussan (Murder Birth), her 2014 novella that hasn’t (yet) been translated, is about a world where any person who breeds ten children is legally allowed to kill someone. Birth rates skyrocket, as do murders. Vanishing World, written right after Satsujin Shussan, keeps the core concepts of artificial insemination but removes the murder. For Murata, the line between childbirth and breeding seems increasingly slippery, especially as the state and society encroach deeper into individual identity. For Amane, the elimination of sex and an expansion into communal childbirth is a welcome change, if only because it serves a clear indicator of the steps she must undergo to become a properly functioning member of society. As the novel turns increasingly strange, Amane feels more comfortable with Chiba, and the Kodomo-chans that once resembled nameless, faceless pets now begin to seem cherubic.
Vanishing World coagulates all of Murata’s favourite themes—from the social pressures of Convenience Store Woman to the shifting boundaries around sex of Earthlings—to build a “Paradise-Eden System” that is delightfully strange and horrifyingly logical. It serves as both a welcome return to alien worlds that Murata fans have been craving and an exciting foray into a brave new world for those who haven’t yet acquainted themselves with this particular brand of strange. This is Sayaka Murata at her weirdest best.