‘Vanishing World’: Sayaka Murata’s new novel warns readers of a world bereft of love and belonging

Sayaka Murata is well-known for writing stories that move away from the conventional modes of inhabiting time and space. From her best-selling 2018 novel Convenience Store Woman to Vanishing World, her new novel, she straddles themes that inconvenience the readers’ schematic expectations and offer a different way to imagine the world. Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, it is a scathing, uncomfortable but strangely beautiful novel that will have Murata’s readers ensorceled yet again.

An upside-down world

We meet Amane when she’s ten. She is taken to an anime character called Lapis, like all the other girls and boys at her school. But Amane’s obsession is different. She begins to realise that her adulation for Lapis is sexual too. In her mother’s world, this is the most normal thing – to be sexually excited and look forward to love. But the world which Amane inhabits has changed drastically. Sex as a concept and practice is disappearing. Children are born through artificial insemination. Having sex in marriage is taboo and husband and wife are meant to be together only for the purpose of maintaining a family without love or sex being a part of the equation. As Amane grows into an adult in this seemingly vanishing world,...

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