Book Review: ‘Vanishing World’ by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
A new Sayaka Murata release is always a reason to celebrate, and even more so when she takes on topics like sex, sexuality and gender expectations which is a topic that always fascinates me. Couple this with Murata’s sharp, weird and uncomfortable criticisms of society and it’s usually a winner, in a very hands-over-the-eyes kind of way.
Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But Amane's parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can't help questioning what sex and marriage are for.
But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?
From the very beginning, ‘Vanishing World’ completely turns societal norms and expectations on their head: sex in a marriage is taboo, sex itself is rapidly dying out, and all children are conceived by artificial insemination. Amane is different to her peers as she still experiences sexual desire and craves intimacy with other people, while also still buying into the social norms around marriage and family, and projects a lot of her desires onto carefully crafted anime characters that are created as an outlet for desire. This society is also completely void of gender and sexual diversity and everything other that cis heterosexual relationships appear to be forbidden and are barely touched upon, with the exception of Amane mentioning that it’s wild that same sex marriage still not being allowed, which also reflects the current position of LGBT+ people in Japan.
It’s an absolutely fascinating perspective and it sets up the opportunity for what feels like a very personal attack on the institution of marriage. Marriage is a transaction in Amane’s world, and even then, as she ages and society ‘progresses’ even that use of marriage begins to taper off and a single life becomes the norm. There was of course a significant critique of life in contemporary Japan in ‘Vanishing World’ but it also very much felt like a personal vendetta against marriage as an institution and that made it even more fascinating and enjoyable to read. After a little research, it turns out that my hunch was correct and that Murata views marriage as “a hostage situation”* and Amane’s society of projecting intimate and romantic desires onto fictional characters is also something that Murata has experienced herself: “I have had relationships with humans, but I’ve also loved a lot of people in stories”*.
It’s a really unusual point of view in Western society, and I believe in the very traditionally patriarchal Japanese society, and it’s such a wonderfully novel perspective that I’m very much hoping is present in Murata’s backlist that will hopefully continue to be translated into English. These feelings are the antithesis of what a woman ‘should’ want, what she should aspire and work towards: love, marriage, and children, and Murata openly and bolding challenges this outlook. I hope she continues challenge societal norms in the most unsettling way possible.
‘Vanishing World’ is an incredibly readable and thought provoking look at love, sex and marriage with the kind of incredibly shocking and uncomfortable ending that I’ve come to expect from Sayaka Murata.
Thank you to Granta Book and NetGalley for the review copy.
Written by Sophie
