Latest news with #Amane
The Guardian
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata review – a future without sex
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 of Convenience 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. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is published by Granta (£16.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Wall Street Journal
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘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.
Time Out
23-04-2025
- Business
- Time Out
A Japanese minimarket in Greenpoint is opening three new stores
Fifty Norman, the mini Japanese marketplace that opened in Greenpoint in 2022 to massive success, is physically expanding its store and adding a few new businesses and brands under its roof. Starting this week, you'll find three additional shops on site. A French/Japanese inspired cafe-slash-bar is also scheduled to debut in June. Currently at 50 Norman, you'll find Cibone, a Japanese home design store selling ceramics, kitchenware, zen meditation items and art pieces; Dashi Okume, where you can custom order your own blends of dashi packs; and House Brooklyn, a Japanese-French restaurant with a nine-course omakase tasting menu. The new stores include Balmuda, a Japanese home appliance store; Kama-Asa, a kitchenware purveyor from Tokyo's kitchen-street Kappabashi that will sell a range of Amane knives; and Cibone O'Te, an artisanal design retailer focusing on homeware and furnishings. The cozy café-resto-bar opening in June is Cafe O'te, which mixes the ambiance of a French wine bar with Japanese flavors. a new food market curated by Muji that opened in Chelsea Market earlier this year to the new Bandai Namco store in Industry City and the resurgence of Japan-inspired claw machine arcades, we are squarely in the midst of a full-blown Japanese cultural renaissance in the city.
Telegraph
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
This book is Japan's answer to Brave New World
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.'
New York Times
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Absurd Dystopia Asks, What Happens to Families When Sex Is Taboo?
In the imagination of Sayaka Murata, nothing seems to be off limits. The Japanese author of the international best seller 'Convenience Store Woman' writes disorienting fiction that inhabits the lives of misfits and challenges social norms by inverting them. From a neurodivergent salesclerk to a traumatized child who forms an asexual partnership with her cousin, Murata's narrators recall baffled aliens trying to decode everyday life on Earth and pass as 'normal.' 'Vanishing World,' her fourth book to be crisply translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is like 'The Handmaid's Tale' on acid — and it is also quintessentially Murata. The author puts her abiding preoccupations — with conformity, sexuality and family — in a petri dish and incubates a disquieting dystopia in which artificial insemination has become the global norm. In this alternate reality, scientific leaps were made to counter the population crisis after World War II, and now almost all human reproduction takes place via artificial insemination, rather than sex. Though desire lives on, many people choose to relieve their urges through crushes on characters in anime and manga. For romantic thrills, people openly pursue extramarital affairs, though these aren't necessarily consummated. Meanwhile, erotic love has been expunged from marriage, which is now a chaste union for companionship and child-rearing. Except for the marriage that birthed Amane. Murata's narrator grows up cocooned in the 'walled garden' of her divorced mother's nostalgic fantasy world, where she's fed a diet of fairy-tale endings: 'Amane, you too will one day fall in love, get married and have children, just like Mummy and Daddy.' The novel begins with an almost biblical loss of innocence: 'I was in a sex education class in the fourth year of elementary school when I discovered that I had been conceived by an abnormal method.' That method, 'primitive copulation,' is long outdated; modern kids prefer 'clean love' with fictional characters to falling in love with a real person, and girls are fitted with contraceptive devices when they start menstruating. Amane conforms to society better than Murata's previous narrators, except when it comes to her libido. As she comes of age, she becomes addicted to love in a way that most of her generation — 80 percent of whom are predicted to remain virgins into adulthood — are not. She worries that her mother has 'cursed' her with the now-taboo desire 'to get pregnant by committing incest with my husband — someone in my own family.' Murata deploys both visceral language and body horror to convey Amane's lust: She orgasms 'as if spewing heat'; her attraction to a TV character feels like 'being bitten inside,' and as if 'I'd been infected with a pleasurable pain that lived in me like a parasite.' Determined to reject her mother's influence, she pursues sex for pleasure rather than procreation, with Scout-like naïveté: 'I guess we should start by looking for this vaginal opening,' she tells a junior high classmate before they both lose their virginity. Pornhub this is not. We follow Amane into adulthood, through two marriages and a return to her home city of Chiba, which is now a cultish center of innovation renamed Experiment City. Every year a group of men and women are algorithmically selected for artificial insemination, and men are fitted with artificial wombs. The family unit has dissolved altogether in this 'Paradise-Eden System,' where all adults are designated 'Mother' and raise the children communally. Gradually, Amane succumbs to this hygienic world where no one has to bear the disappointment of infertility, the heartache of love or the revulsion of a partner's eating habits. This may sound idyllic, but every Eden is a fall waiting to happen. Murata's trick is to build a vividly detailed world around a topsy-turvy premise, and trace its contradictory effects with deadpan conviction. In Experiment City, scientific progress and a collective ethos have had counterintuitive social consequences: Citizens occupy uniform studio apartments, becoming increasingly insular and fastidious about the cleanness of their bodies. Amane's childhood frankness evolves into a forthright curiosity in adulthood, her blunt narration — sometimes comic, sometimes cruel, laced throughout with piercing imagery — whisking you along an eye-popping plot that ranges from her early sexual exploits to her surreal platonic marriage; to 'Kodomo-chans,' the creepily identikit children of Experiment City. It all builds to a finale more luridly transgressive than feels necessary — but Murata is not in the business of either realism or restraint. Reproductive equality promises to be the great leveler, until pregnant men start getting special treatment and — hilariously, inevitably — acting both smug and patronizing about their new 'male Mother' status. Murata uses absurdity to raise profound questions about family structures and gender roles, to which she offers no easy answers, but rather an outrageous and disturbing ending in which 'animal' instincts resurface, cracking through the veneer of social conditioning. Conformity, in Murata's world, breeds madness. Blending speculative fiction, horror and black comedy, 'Vanishing World' removes some Jenga blocks to watch social structures come crashing down, in a radical look at the way the imperative to procreate has shaped civilization. At a time when many countries face falling birthrates and declining sexual activity, Murata's thought experiment is arguably an extension of our current plight. Although too extreme to be wholly persuasive, it invites us to consider how reproductive gender equality could transform society, with chilling ramifications.
