Tag: vanishing world

Vanishing World is the new novel by Sayaka Murata, exploring a world in which family, love, sex, and parenting have changed. Amane grows up feeling like an outsider because her parents actually fell in love and conceived her, rather than everyone else who were conceived by artificial insemination and brought up by parents in “clean” marriages that made them a family. Romantic love is for outside of the family, either with real life people or fictional characters, and sex becomes less and less common. Amane grows up, has both real life and character lovers, and finds a husband in the societally acceptable way, but then her husband wants to move to Experiment City, where they are trialling a new utopian idea where all children are raised equally and people are inseminated simultaneously, so that he might carry a child using a new artificial womb.

After Earthlings, it isn’t surprising that this book is weird, pushing different ideas about love, sex, and family to various limits to explore convention and how easily things can change. The story itself is simple, following Amane as she grows up, tests what love and sex mean to her, and then ultimately ends up in Experiment City seeing a very different version of society. There’s a lot of interesting things about the world Murata has created (indeed, both worlds), from the obsession with the heterosexual nuclear family and the “uncleanliness” of sex going hand in hand in the ordinary world to the extreme off getting rid of family as well, but still revering the idea of bearing children. Fears about birth rates mix with conservative ideas around sex, showing how these things come into conflict even in a space in which people want to believe both, and generally this book feels like it might read quite different in and outside of Japan.

I’d say the start and the end are perhaps most impactful, and also the parts most likely to put people off, with the middle being slower and more conventional. Like with Earthlings, the ending ramps up the weirdness, pushing some its ideas to the limits whilst not coming to any kinds of conclusions. Vanishing World is the sort of book that throws a lot of ideas at you, and I think for some people those ideas might unsettle, for others they won’t really go far enough to say anything, and then there’s people who already live outside of some of the conventions explored through these ideas, for whom it can feel like a quaint novelty (such as queer people, who are explicitly not part of the world of the novel in which marriage still must be between a man and a woman even when artificial insemination is the norm). The novel itself was a gripping read, but I think ideas-wise it sometimes gets lost, almost encouraging people to have the kinds of disgust that also seem to be satirised through the characters.