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If you wonder why there are so many Japanese novels in bookstores – In 2022, they represented 25% of all the translated fictions sold in the United Kingdom – you can blame SAYAKA MURATA. Well, up to a point.
Murata's novel Women's convenience storePublished in English in 2018, tells the story of Keiko, a young woman who does not feel that she is integrated into society until she obtained a dead end in a mini-mart with a band. He spoke particularly to young readers who are looking for their place in the world, and the three books of Murata in English have now sold half a million copies in the United Kingdom.
Picked a jostling of the Copycat edition; And therefore books on young alienated women join chat novels and coffee stories on the shelves as a narrow English -speaking representation of the extent of contemporary Japanese fiction.
Women's convenience store had a clarity under its calm and charming exterior which came out more clearly in the next novel of Murata to translate, Landing – It included cannibalism and necrophilia – and its last, Vanishing World, is firmly in this last camp. This makes the ordinary world because we see it strange again.
We are in an alternative or quasi-filure Japan, where most babies are designed by artificial insemination. It is reliable, it is “clean” (a favorite word in this world) and that does not imply transactions of complex mental bodies of sexual intercourse, which no one really understands. Families are simplified utility arrangements to raise children. “Things become more and more practical, right?” Asks a character, in an impassive tone.
Our narrator, Amane, is a stranger who tries to integrate. Like many others, she has parasocial relationships with “non -real” people – like characters in television shows – and is sexually satisfied while masturbating. But Amane has a secret shame: her parents have conceived it by having sex, not by artificial insemination, and also develops an appetite for what her society calls “copulation”.
In this world upside down, everything is reversed. A friend is worried that when she masturbates with her favorite fictitious character, she “defines the person I love the most”. Sex between couples is taboo: when Amane gets married and her husband introduces sex, she is “horrified. I would never have imagined that a member of my own family would have an erection because of me. ” However, other taboos – for us – are not informed: one of his first sexual relations is with a teacher, but she only mentions it.
In this society, the potential injury that relations can cause is too great to take their chance on the advantages. And his desire to rationalize the things that are by definition disorderly find its perfect expression in the “city of experimentation”, an initiative that brings these ideals to an extreme. There, all babies are raised collectively, and each adult is called mother – including men, who are equipped with artificial uterus (external, so that they must be covered by a long “male pregnancy sweater” as the baby grows). In addition, tests are underway to eradicate sexual excitement, treating it as a parasite on the own human soul.
However, these attempts to control what makes us human are condemned. We are “monsters”, in the words of Amane, which is always torn between social conformity – reconstituting to adopt “the form of this world” – and its natural instincts. Nevertheless, she and her second husband move to Experiment City (it is a welcome dramatic push after the story works on the water for a certain time by iterant and reiterating the configuration).
It is in Experiment City where the book reaches its greatest heights, full of feelings of rapid change – the portable cart, the alarm, the pleasure – but where the sustainable response is laughter. Vanishing World is a comedy, its almost indistinguishable darkness of horror under the limited style of Murata, which is translated in an expert manner by Ginny Tapley Takemori, his regular collaborator.
This comedy is varied. When Amane and a male friend try sex for the first time, their comment is hilarious in her flat assessment of the mysteries of sexual love. “We started looking for the vaginal opening together,” she tells us. “It looks like my body has finished the ritual,” he said solemnly after ejaculating.
Meanwhile, government information on Experiment City recall the satire of bureaucracy George Saunders: “Be present to take a condition on children and thus continue the life of humanity.” There is a satirical folding with sex taboos upside down: when Amane's husband tries to have sex with her, a friend offers insurance. “Do not worry, the perverts who wish to commit incest with their wife are very rare.”
But comedy, as well as an end in itself, is a way to reduce the readers of the reader to let other things in. “I only want to hear stories of happiness go towards a happy ending,” said a character in Amane. He may not be satisfied by the end of Vanishing WorldWho is in a happy sense but also sad, shocking, nauseating and a perfect peak of everything that has happened before. It brings out an emotional intensity that hitherto amane has done her best to hide.
The skill of Murata is to accumulate the strange, the sad and the comic strip so expert in the previous chapters that the indelible final scene can make us feel many different feelings at the same time. “It was all crazy, but it was so fair,” said Amane, and we cannot agree. The publishers will continue to seek imitations of your vision – but why bother, when the real thing is so good?
Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori Granta £ 16.99 / Grove Press $ 23, 240 pages
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