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Vanishing World
Paperback

Vanishing World

$29.99
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"Normality is the creepiest madness there is..."

From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.

Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of readers worldwide. Vanishing World takes Murata's universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own.

As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents "copulated" in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange "system" by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage-sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest-Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only "Kodomo-chan." Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?

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MORE INFO
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Granta Publications Ltd
Country
United Kingdom
Date
6 May 2025
Pages
240
ISBN
9781803511207

"Normality is the creepiest madness there is..."

From the author of the bestselling literary sensations Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings comes a surprising and highly imaginative story set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.

Sayaka Murata has proven herself to be one of the most exciting chroniclers of the strangeness of society, x-raying our contemporary world to bizarre and troubling effect. Her depictions of a happily unmarried retail worker in Convenience Store Woman and a young woman convinced she is an alien in Earthlings have endeared her to millions of readers worldwide. Vanishing World takes Murata's universe to a bold new level, imagining an alternative Japan where attitudes to sex and procreation are wildly different to our own.

As a girl, Amane realizes with horror that her parents "copulated" in order to bring her into the world, rather than using artificial insemination, which became the norm in the mid-twentieth century. Amane strives to get away from what she considers an indoctrination in this strange "system" by her mother, but her infatuations with both anime characters and real people have a sexual force that is undeniable. As an adult in an appropriately sexless marriage-sex between married couples is now considered as taboo as incest-Amane and her husband Saku decide to go and live in a mysterious new town called Experiment City or Paradise-Eden, where all children are raised communally, and every person is considered a Mother to all children. Men are beginning to become pregnant using artificial wombs that sit outside of their bodies like balloons, and children are nameless, called only "Kodomo-chan." Is this the new world that will purify Amane of her strangeness once and for all?

Read More
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Granta Publications Ltd
Country
United Kingdom
Date
6 May 2025
Pages
240
ISBN
9781803511207
 
Book Review

Vanishing World
by Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (trans.)

by Alison Huber, Apr 2025

If you’re tired of reading the news that seems to assure us that the future for humanity looks very bleak, you must pick up Vanishing World from the incomparable imagination of Sayaka Murata to expand your mind and find solace in the fact that there are alternative ways of living: we just need to make them so. Murata is now well-known for challenging the tropes of normativity, particularly ideologies around gender roles, and this book adds to her oeuvre as a much-needed antidote to the pervasive regressive ideals of the heteronormative family unit, straight sex, romantic love, and motherhood.

In Murata’s Vanishing World, marriage is stripped of the prerequisite of romance, and has instead become a convenient mode of companionship that enables reproduction achieved via artificial insemination. Romantic interests and (less frequently) sex are pursued exclusively outside marriage, with either real-life humans or characters from anime and other forms of popular culture. But in this regime, our narrator Amane is herself an outsider, conceived by parents who were in love and engaged in the taboo of marital sex to have a child. Have her parents’ outmoded values messed her up beyond repair? In her own marriage, she and her husband decide to move to Experiment City: Paradise-Eden, a new kind of society where reproduction has become social as eligible inhabitants are artificially inseminated annually in a mass medical event; experimental but increasingly successful technology also enables men to carry babies to term in artificial uteruses. The babies born become the children of the entire community, and motherhood, fatherhood and the nuclear family are abandoned in favour of a collective parenting model. Every adult who lives in the city is a mother, including the fathers and those who have not given birth, and the children belong to and are raised by the whole community.

This wild and imaginative version of the future might sound like paradise to you or it might resemble a hellscape you don’t wish to inhabit, and for Amane this reality provides all sorts of ethical conundrums of its own, but Murata’s radical vision is a provocation to interrogate every single thing that is ever presented to us as ‘normal’. Brilliant: an urgent project for our times.