This book is Japan's answer to Brave New World

Telegraph

17-04-2025

The Japanese author Sayaka Murata has become a pin-up novelist for Gen Z readers thanks to her consumable, droll dystopias about social misfits, the overload of reality and the consolations the digital sphere might offer. Her breakthrough novel, Convenience Store Woman, published in English in 2018, featured a loner, Keiko, who finds an eerie sort of refuge in the artificial conformity of the convenience store chain in which she works. She makes an interesting counterpart to Amane, the anti-heroine of Vanishing World, who is similarly adrift but in a very different, dystopian Japan.
This Japan has mandated artificial insemination as the exclusive means of repopulation, and as a result human interaction is emotionally passive: no-one has sex anymore and everyone seems happy to co-exist in chaste marriages, sublimating their occasional carnal urges by petting extra marital lovers; or, more often, masturbating over anime characters. Only Amane seems to crave actual intercourse, even though the unruly painful feelings it arouses disturb her. 'I've always had the image of you as the last Eve,' a lover tells her, to her discomfort. 'While everyone else is returning to Paradise, you're the last human left having sex.'
As such, Vanishing World, which was published in Japan in 2015, becomes a kind of reverse, pre-Fall allegory. Children known as Kodomo-chan are mass-produced by the experimental city Paradise-Eden, and brought up to appear as identical as possible; any woman who gives birth becomes a mother to all the children. Amane has been brought up by her mother – who unusually conceived Amane naturally – to see this world as abnormal and emotionally sanitised, but Amane is torn. She wants sex; she wants a child; she loves her husband; she likes the clean sexless nuclear family promoted by the state: what bothers her is that the new normal in Japan can't accommodate all these cravings at once, and in fact appears increasingly predicated on eliminating any sort of desire altogether.
Murata's calling card as a novelist is her cute, glassy-eyed language, which often contrasts to the lurid reality it describes. The ingenuous tone her characters tend to adopt is very funny – 'anyway I guess we should start by looking for this vaginal opening,' Amane says the first time she tries to have sex – though such rictus brightness also discomfitingly reflects her characters' compliant personalities and hygienic lives.
The men in particular now view sex with horror, as though engaged in collective denial over their true natures. When Amane teaches one how to sleep with her, he says with more than a hint of anxiety over his newfound sexual capacity: 'I'll never be free of it.' Everyone, including Amane, ends up gravitating towards a frictionless solitude, typified in Paradise-Eden's blank, white apartment blocks.
Murata has the uncanny prescience of the best sci-fi writers – I read Vanishing World the same week I heard a podcast about an American woman dating an AI chatbot, and the parallels were chilling. Yet it suffers by comparison with fellow Japanese novelist Hiromi Kawakami's Under the Eye of the Big Bird (2024), which also imagines a world hell-bent on repopulation. (Japan's declining birth rate might be disastrous, but it's at least providing manna for writers.) That novel, which has been shortlisted for this year's International Booker Prize, goes much further in its nightmarish vision – the border collapse between humans and AI infects the structure of the book itself, breaking down perspective and character unity in ways that challenge the very integrity of the form.
But Murata by comparison pursues a rigidly conventional formula that relies too much on surface style: the messaging is heavy-handed and the peculiar, sensational ending unsubstantiated. And yet, there are still moments that jolt you. 'Normality is the creepiest madness there is,' thinks Amane at one point. 'This was all insane, yet it was so right.'