Latest news with #VanishingWorld
Straits Times
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Straits Times
Book review: Sayaka Murata's builds a dystopian world of sexless marriages in Vanishing World
In Sayaka Murata's Vanishing World, marriage is reduced to a platonic contract between man and woman. PHOTOS: BUNGEISHUNJU, GRANTA BOOKS
Sydney Morning Herald
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Without pregnancy cravings, the Dubai chocolate bar wouldn't have been born
We fell in love with Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman – the story of Keiko Furukura, a woman in her late 30s who has worked at the same Tokyo store for 18 years – when it was published in English in 2018. In her new novel, Vanishing World (Granta, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori; $30), Murata continues to push boundaries – cultural, narrative and those of her readers. Set in a dystopian Japan where all children are conceived via artificial insemination and sex between married couples is taboo, the story follows Amane as she navigates a society ruled by rigid norms around reproduction and relationships. Fair warning: this novel isn't for the faint-hearted. It's strange, and not as immediately approachable as Convenience Store Woman. But the weirdness serves a purpose – forcing us to question the legitimacy of social structures, and why some vanish while others remain. Melanie Kembrey WEAR / Slide show My first thought on beholding a freshly unboxed pair of Gen-FF Buckle 2 Bar shearling leather slides ($220) was, 'Cute, but how do you wear them?' (Answer: with a wide pant, ideally, and possibly a tonal ankle sock.) My second, a few seconds after placing my tired trotters inside them, was, 'If every shoe had a shearling foot-bed, no one would ever wear anything else.' And so it has come to pass; off-duty, I'm now wearing them with everything. These newcomers feel every bit as magical as they look, and it's not just about the shearling: designed by FitFlop, in consultation with Calgary's Human Performance Lab, their raison d'être is to bestow serious comfort by way of cutting-edge biomechanics. This is probably why they have a little bit of a wedge, too, because wedges make everything comfier. All of which is to say, a slide in midwinter? Hell, yes. In Chocolate Brown or Stone Beige. Sharon Bradley LISTEN / Teen dream When she was a teenager, Shima Oliaee was a contestant in America's Junior Miss pageant. Renamed Distinguished Young Women, it's an annual competition held in Mobile, Alabama, where 50 high-school girls – the best and brightest from each US state – compete to win a $US40,000 ($62,000) scholarship. Two decades later, Oliaee, who's now a journalist, returns as a judge. Her podcast, The Competition, is both a fly-on-the-wall look at the intense pressure-cooker nature of the two-week competition – which includes scholastics, fitness, talent and public speaking – and a reflective journey for Oliaee as she looks at who she was then and who she is now. With Roe v Wade being overturned mid-competition, it also trains a spotlight on what it means to be a young woman in America today. Barry Divola SHOP / Snap chat The Polaroid Flip is a retro-cool, instant film camera packed with sharp smarts and serious style ( $399). Under the flippable lid? Four automatic lenses, sonar autofocus (yep, it uses sound waves to measure the distance between camera and subject) and Polaroid's brightest flash yet. It even lets you know when your shot's overexposed. Pair it with the app for double exposures, timers and manual controls – or just point, shoot and let the magic happen. Compatible with i-Type and 600 film and USB-C-rechargeable, the Flip is built for capturing real life in bold, beautifully imperfect prints. Frances Mocnik WATCH / Friends in high places Some watch the Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That … for the fashion, the friendship and the fellas, but what you should really be keeping an eye on is the real estate. While Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker, below with Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon) and co will always have my heart, season three promises a big change: Carrie is no longer a West Village girl. Yep, she's swapped her one-bed, brownstone apartment with its magical closet for a $US5 million ($7.7 million), four-bed townhouse in Gramercy Park in the heart of Manhattan – a 30-odd-minute walk away (longer in Louboutins). Timing is everything. New York Magazine has lamented the takeover of Carrie's old, once-Bohemian enclave by 'West Village girls', who dress the same, only drink three cocktails a night and spend their time working out. There goes the neighbourhood and there goes our girl – forever ahead of the curve. On Max from May 30. Louise Rugendyke
The Age
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Without pregnancy cravings, the Dubai chocolate bar wouldn't have been born
We fell in love with Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman – the story of Keiko Furukura, a woman in her late 30s who has worked at the same Tokyo store for 18 years – when it was published in English in 2018. In her new novel, Vanishing World (Granta, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori; $30), Murata continues to push boundaries – cultural, narrative and those of her readers. Set in a dystopian Japan where all children are conceived via artificial insemination and sex between married couples is taboo, the story follows Amane as she navigates a society ruled by rigid norms around reproduction and relationships. Fair warning: this novel isn't for the faint-hearted. It's strange, and not as immediately approachable as Convenience Store Woman. But the weirdness serves a purpose – forcing us to question the legitimacy of social structures, and why some vanish while others remain. Melanie Kembrey WEAR / Slide show My first thought on beholding a freshly unboxed pair of Gen-FF Buckle 2 Bar shearling leather slides ($220) was, 'Cute, but how do you wear them?' (Answer: with a wide pant, ideally, and possibly a tonal ankle sock.) My second, a few seconds after placing my tired trotters inside them, was, 'If every shoe had a shearling foot-bed, no one would ever wear anything else.' And so it has come to pass; off-duty, I'm now wearing them with everything. These newcomers feel every bit as magical as they look, and it's not just about the shearling: designed by FitFlop, in consultation with Calgary's Human Performance Lab, their raison d'être is to bestow serious comfort by way of cutting-edge biomechanics. This is probably why they have a little bit of a wedge, too, because wedges make everything comfier. All of which is to say, a slide in midwinter? Hell, yes. In Chocolate Brown or Stone Beige. Sharon Bradley LISTEN / Teen dream When she was a teenager, Shima Oliaee was a contestant in America's Junior Miss pageant. Renamed Distinguished Young Women, it's an annual competition held in Mobile, Alabama, where 50 high-school girls – the best and brightest from each US state – compete to win a $US40,000 ($62,000) scholarship. Two decades later, Oliaee, who's now a journalist, returns as a judge. Her podcast, The Competition, is both a fly-on-the-wall look at the intense pressure-cooker nature of the two-week competition – which includes scholastics, fitness, talent and public speaking – and a reflective journey for Oliaee as she looks at who she was then and who she is now. With Roe v Wade being overturned mid-competition, it also trains a spotlight on what it means to be a young woman in America today. Barry Divola SHOP / Snap chat The Polaroid Flip is a retro-cool, instant film camera packed with sharp smarts and serious style ( $399). Under the flippable lid? Four automatic lenses, sonar autofocus (yep, it uses sound waves to measure the distance between camera and subject) and Polaroid's brightest flash yet. It even lets you know when your shot's overexposed. Pair it with the app for double exposures, timers and manual controls – or just point, shoot and let the magic happen. Compatible with i-Type and 600 film and USB-C-rechargeable, the Flip is built for capturing real life in bold, beautifully imperfect prints. Frances Mocnik WATCH / Friends in high places Some watch the Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That … for the fashion, the friendship and the fellas, but what you should really be keeping an eye on is the real estate. While Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker, below with Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon) and co will always have my heart, season three promises a big change: Carrie is no longer a West Village girl. Yep, she's swapped her one-bed, brownstone apartment with its magical closet for a $US5 million ($7.7 million), four-bed townhouse in Gramercy Park in the heart of Manhattan – a 30-odd-minute walk away (longer in Louboutins). Timing is everything. New York Magazine has lamented the takeover of Carrie's old, once-Bohemian enclave by 'West Village girls', who dress the same, only drink three cocktails a night and spend their time working out. There goes the neighbourhood and there goes our girl – forever ahead of the curve. On Max from May 30. Louise Rugendyke
Irish Independent
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Author of Convenience Store Woman returns with a nightmare world where sex between married couples is taboo
Vanishing World is another quirky novel by Japanese writer Sayaka Murata, where 'relationships' with anime or manga characters is commonplace and children are raised without their biological family Today at 21:30 Sayaka Murata is the Japanese novelist who made her name here with Convenience Store Woman. The novel follows shop-worker Keiko, who challenges societal norms by showing no interest in having a relationship or moving to a different job. Her character was isolated by society for not wanting to have a husband or start a family. Muraka herself worked in a convenience store, and didn't start writing until she was in her forties. The short novel, her 10th book and first to be translated, was wacky, introspective and, as is Muraka's style, beautifully descriptive.
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
