In Japanese writer Sayaka Murata’s fiction, characters do perverse things in order to “play the part of the fictitious creature called ‘an ordinary person’”. This description comes from Keiko, the 36-year-old narrator ofConvenience Store Woman. Keiko’s conformist family and friends can’t believe she can be happy being single and working a dead-end job at a convenience store. Keiko finds an unexpected way to make it look as though she is normal: she keeps a man in her bathtub, hoping that everyone will simply assume they are a couple. A similar idea appears in Murata’s short story Poochie, from the collection Life Ceremony. A young girl takes a friend to a shed in the mountains to meet her pet; the friend is surprised to discover that the pet is a middle-aged man. Murata is interested in the lengths humans will go to in order to domesticate one another. Something in that has touched a nerve – Convenience Store Woman became a surprise bestseller.
Vanishing World, Murata’s latest novel to be translated into English, is set in a speculative Tokyo where artificial insemination is ubiquitous and sex is considered “unhygienic”. The narrator, Amane, grows up with a mother who is still attached to the vanishing world of sex within marriage. Although Amane considers it a shameful secret that she was conceived via intercourse, as an adolescent she experiments beyond the passionately imagined relationships with anime characters that are more typical among her friends. Her first experience is disappointing: her friend Mizuuchi has trouble finding “the mysterious cavity” where he can insert his penis. By the time she gets married, Amane has come round to the view that marital sex is “incest”. When her husband initiates a kiss, she vomits into his mouth and reports him to the police.
Amane marries a second time to a more suitable man. She compares him to “a beloved pet”, and they both like stews. They would have a comfortable domestic life together, if it weren’t the norm to have chaste romantic relationships outside marriage. Amane, still holding on to her mother’s way of doing things, tries once again to teach one of her lovers how to have physical sex. “By trial and error,” she says, “we stimulated our sexual organs, and eventually some liquid came out of Mizuto.” Mizuto tries his best, but never finds pleasure in the “ritual”.
In Murata’s fiction, ordinary activities – drinking tea, wearing clothes, making love – seem very strange. Reading Vanishing World, I felt the profound oddness of the heterosexual family unit, with its legal, sexual and child-rearing rituals. Dissatisfied with their domestic arrangement, Amane and her husband are seduced by the promise of the “Paradise-Eden System” set up in a place called “Experiment City”, where sex does not exist, both men and women are artificially inseminated, and parenthood is a collective responsibility. But the reality of Paradise-Eden freaks Amane out. She is unsettled by the identical outfits, haircuts and smiles of the children raised in the Centre, doted on “as though they were pets”.
Murata dispenses with conventional world-building and incidental detail, focusing on the points where character and society come into conflict. Her writing is compulsive, and she has an uncanny gift for intimate observations that get under the skin. It doesn’t matter that I can’t tell you how Experiment City looks and feels; I won’t forget the description of Amane’s husband’s pregnant belly as a distended “testicle” with the outline of a baby inside. At the same time, there is something strangely reassuring about the way this fiction boils down the bewilderingly complex prohibitions and obligations of ordinary social life to clear choices between resistance and assimilation.
Vanishing World narrates the creep of a new worldview – that all sex is wrong, unclean, and masturbation the only appropriate way of relieving unwanted urges – radiating out from the scientific and social experiments of Experiment City. As its grip on Amane tightens, her relationship with her stubbornly old-fashioned mother deteriorates. The final stages of the plot rehearse a scenario familiar from Murata’s previous books, in which one character takes the urge to control the behaviour of others to its logical extreme. This recycling is evidence, I think, of the strength and singularity of the author’s vision. It’s also a reminder of how quickly even the strangest ideas can become convention.
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Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply