#vanishing world

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The Main 13 Vani.

(source) i fucking love sayaka murata’s work especially earthlings and apparently she’s ficto. this is awesome

Read This Week

The Wall: What if Jon Snow went to the wall in future Dystopian England instead? Seems to be the premise of this book, but for me, it failed to have a point. 3/5

Vanishing World: This book is so subtly clever, by the end turning what I thought was a mediocre "what if?" experiment into a full blown horror. 5/5

Decomposition Book: Finding a New Best Friend in the form of a corpse in the woods is great until you remember that they were a Real Person With Feelings 4/5

Taiwan Travelogue: Colonialism told through the story of Japanese woman's desire to consume Taiwan's culture through their food, this was a slow story to get through. 3/5

This is a very interesting book. A satirical critique of purity culture, the population crisis, the idea that one owes the world a baby, or that you only get married in order to have one... in this weird alternative timeline, sex and romance have been divorced from any concept of family and are obnoxious needs filled by either casual love affairs or anime characters. Sex itself is even falling out of fashion and the main character's pursuit of it is considered strange and old fashioned. Marriage is completely chaste and it is believed that having sex with your spouse is incest. There's an experimental city where all children (named Kodomo-chan) are raised by the collective and anyone can give birth due to the invention of artificial wombs. Marriage is not allowed--everyone lives alone, and fulfills any family-based needs by doting on the Kodomo-chans.

There's also this underlying theme that comes out quite strongly at then end, of the MC being a kind of chameleon who can adapt to any normal, even the extreme circumstances of Experiment City. It baffles her, how she can so easily fit anywhere, but...the ending makes it apparent that she is not actually adapting so well.

It feels like Murata is taking this sort of modern loneliness epidemic to an extreme, where it's been so normalized for people to not be together that they don't even realize there's an issue, while also taking concepts like family duties to that same extreme. How far can you push away from the traditional concept of family and the traditional acts of sex and birth before you can't sustain life anymore?

All that said, I definitely feel like 1. as an asexual I definitely missed some of the more shocking issues due to simply not having those feelings to begin with (chaste marriage that promises a friend who will split the bills and drive you to the hospital? sign me up!) and 2. I would really love to read a Japanese person's perspective on this, because I feel like this is critiquing the specific cultural issues that created the birth crisis but I don't have enough context to fully understand. Maybe tomorrow when I get fed up with work I'll search for some translated reviews...

Overall, 4.5/5 an excellent Murata. Not quite as scarring as Earthlings, but there's still a pretty terrible scene at the end and I would recommend extreme caution if you have any triggers around SA, CSA, pregnancy, birth, or sex in general.