Vanishing World - Sayaka Murata [Review]

Sayaka Murata’s newest book to reach the West, Vanishing World, takes place in a future Japan where conceiving through sex is taboo and artificial reproduction is the norm. The story follows Amane, a woman who was conceived “the old way,” now living in a society that considers her origin a kind of contamination.

On paper, Vanishing World has all the ingredients of a Murata classic. It asks what “normal” really means, in sex, in family, in relationships, and how easily those definitions can be rewritten. The backdrop is recognisably contemporary Japan; a country anxious about its falling birth rate and evolving social codes. But where Convenience Store Woman made the everyday feel alien, this book makes the alien feel ordinary, and not always in an interesting way. I could see what it was trying to say, but I rarely felt it.

The premise starts sharp but flattens quickly. Murata imagines a society where reproduction has been industrialised, intimacy sanitised, and even love is rerouted into digital or fictional attachments. But once the concept is established, it never really deepens. The people who fall in love with anime characters are presented as cultural curiosities, not emotional ones.

That’s not to say it’s bad, just oddly hollow. I guess I thought Murata’s gift was her ability to make you complicit in the weirdness. Here, the weirdness just exists. There’s a distance between the book’s ideas and the reader’s experience of them.

I’m always reluctant to judge translated fiction too harshly. The translator’s hand is invisible until it isn’t, and Japanese social satire won’t always land the same way in English. Still, even accounting for that, this feels thin. The themes are there but there’s no pulse.

If I’m being honest, I’ve been chasing the feeling I had when I first read Convenience Store Woman. It was precise and unsettling in a way that felt instinctive, which is probably why it worked. But at some point you have to admit that maybe that was the exception, and not the string of disappointing novels that came after.

I admire Murata for committing so completely to her strange little universes, that will always make her more interesting than most novelists. But after three books in a row that left me cold, I think it’s time to accept that, for me, Convenience Store Woman was the exception, not the rule.