Publishers Weekly
★ 02/24/2025
Murata (Convenience Store Woman) delivers an intimate and disturbing speculative tale in which social isolation and population control are taken to extremes. Amane Sakaguchi lives in an alternate Japan where artificial insemination developed rapidly during WWII and became the de facto method of procreation. As a girl, Amane embraces this new way of life despite her mother’s resistance to it (she used the “primitive copulation” method to give birth to Amane). In adulthood, Amane struggles with sexual lust but tries to conform by attending a series of matchmaking parties. She strikes out until at age 31 she meets and marries Saku, with whom she decides to have a child via artificial insemination at 35. Her mother casts doubt on their happiness (“A marriage that goes too smoothly gives me the creeps”), however, and as Amane and Saku each date other people (sexless polyamory is another societal norm), they grapple with the limits placed on their respective desires. Saku eventually convinces her to move to Experiment City in Chiba, where children are raised communally and each citizen is called Mother. Amane senses that something is deeply wrong there, and her quest to rid herself of all her bodily urges propels the narrative to an explosive and haunting conclusion. Murata’s blunt and bizarre humor is on full display (“Amane, thanks for eating me,” a boyfriend tells her after she swallows his semen), as is her incisive commentary on contemporary Japan. This nightmarish fable is impossible to shake. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Praise for Vanishing World:
“An intimate and disturbing speculative tale in which social isolation and population control are taken to extremes . . . Murata’s blunt and bizarre humor is on full display, as is her incisive commentary on contemporary Japan. This nightmarish fable is impossible to shake.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Praise for Sayaka Murata:
“To Sayaka Murata, nonconformity is a slippery slope . . . Reminiscent of certain excellent folk tales, expressionless prose is Murata’s trademark . . . The strength of [Murata’s] voice lies in the faux-naïf lens through which she filters her dark view of humankind: We earthlings are sad, truncated bots, shuffling through the world in a dream of confusion.”—New York Times Book Review
“Murata takes a childlike idea and holds onto it with imaginative fervor, brilliantly exposing the callousness and arbitrariness of convention.”—New Yorker
“Murata manages what her characters cannot: She transcends society’s core values, to dizzying effect . . . Her matter-of-fact rendering of wild events is as disorienting as it is intriguing.”—Atlantic
“If you’re in the mood for weird, Sayaka Murata is always a reliable place to turn.”—Seattle Times
“Murata’s skill is in turning round the world so that the abnormal, uncivil or even savage paths appear—if momentarily—to make sense.”—Financial Times
“The imagination of this writer grows and grows like outer space.”—Literary Hub
“Murata celebrate[s] the quiet heroism of women who accept the cost of being themselves.”—NPR’s Fresh Air
“Murata’s sparkly writing and knack for odd, beautiful details are totally her own.”—Vogue
“Murata’s novels are a valuable, heightened exploration of the intense discomfort that people, autistic or not, who are just a little outside of society can feel when they try to force themselves to fit in. Murata’s message is: stop trying.”—i-D
“Murata’s writing remains essential and captivating, expertly capturing the fragility of social norms and calling into question what remains of human nature once they’re stripped away.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Murata’s premises are always eye-opening, and the result will intrigue and satisfy readers of literary and speculative fiction alike.”—Library Journal
Kirkus Reviews
2025-03-22
An ardent young woman navigates a world in which technology has eradicated the need for sex for all but its most devout practitioners.
Amane is still a child when she learns the disturbing truth that her mother became pregnant with her through sexual intercourse with her father. In Amane’s Japan, technological advances designed to “produce lots of children for the war effort” have replaced traditional modes of conception; sex in general is considered to be old-fashioned and sex between husband and wife is seen as incest. In fact, many of Amane’s contemporaries find the idea of partnered sexual gratification so foreign that they are increasingly asexual, forging romantic attachments solely with anime characters. Amane, a rare woman who insists on sex, creates a division between the romantic life she enjoys with both real-life boyfriends and the 40 characters she loves and the sexless family life she’s built with her husband, Saku; this works well until Amane’s mid-30s. In the throes of a difficult love affair of his own, her husband decides to move to Experiment City, a government-run enclave where the last vestiges of the “family system” are being eradicated in favor of algorithm-controlled breeding. In spite of her doubts, Amane joins him in the name of “the religion of family,” but she can’t help but bring her belief in the physical union of two bodies along with her. The novel’s frank exploration of desire from the perspective of an entire civilization of naïfs exposes some base-level assumptions about the part sexual reproduction plays in society. Unfortunately, the naïveté of the main characters seems to imprint on the novel itself, with the result that even the most potentially incendiary elements of this new world order are explored with neither nuance nor depth. The characters remain suspended in a kind of enforced adolescence—unable to either grow from worldly experience or totally abandon their society’s inherited structures and forge something new.
A great conceit filled with unrealized potential.
