‘Vanishing World' Review: A Dream of Fertile Sterility
In Sayaka Murata's 2018 novel, 'Earthlings,' the protagonist, Natsuki, explains to her cousin that she and her husband have adopted the 'alien eye,' which allows you to see 'the way aliens see human society.' The Japanese couple explain that they've found a way to perceive and resist the workings of what they call the Factory—their name for society and the way it seems to serve no purpose but to reproduce itself. While her husband rejoices in his alien eye and seeks to break taboos around sex and behavior so as to further distance himself from the world of normalcy, Natsuki is more conflicted. When she was a child, she liked the idea of being special; now that she's an adult, her inability to think and feel the way she's supposed to has become a problem. It would be nice, she believes, to be like everybody else.
Through her fiction, Ms. Murata has resolutely explored the strangeness of the cultural practices we otherwise consider ordinary. 'Vanishing World,' originally published in Japanese in 2015, is the writer's most recent novel to be translated into English. It chronicles the life of Amane, a narrator with an unusual degree of adaptability, as her society changes around her. No matter how intense the transformations, and no matter how much Amane thinks she will object to them in advance, she discovers she can seamlessly adjust and will nearly forget she ever lived a different way.
Amane's life begins in relative isolation. She is raised as an only child by her mother, who instructs Amane over and over in a seemingly basic fact of family life—that when a mother and a father love each other very much, they come together and make a baby. The reason for this tedious oversharing exercise becomes clear when Amane is in elementary school: We discover that this story is set in an alternative reality, in which the ravages of World War II on Japan have led to a revolution in assisted reproduction.
All Japanese children in Amane's world are conceived through artificial insemination. Sex between spouses is now regarded as a species of incest; the disgust you might feel at the thought of your own parents having sex is now generalized. When you marry somebody, you make them family—and you don't have sex with members of your own family.
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