Published in 2022, this is a collection of short stories by Sayaka Murata, author of Convenience Store Person. I read it in English, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

I can't say I enjoyed this book, although it is undoubtedly very clever.

In story after story, we're asked to confront our assumptions, our habits, our preconceived ideas. We're asked to question what we "know" -- what we and most of those around us see as "common sense" -- and imagine the world differently. One of the characters, in a statement that is illustrated throughout the book, says: "Normal is a type of madness, isn't it? I think it's just that the only madness society allows is called normal."

This is all good. This is what authors should be requiring of us. The problem was that I found many of the stories a little too uncomfortable, nauseating even.


Culture is always a construct...

Recurring topics, because they're the ones surrounded by the most taboos, are food, sex, and death.

In A Magnificent Spread, for example, one of the characters says: "When you eat the food someone makes for you, it means you believe in the world they live in, right?" Eating is so much more than just fuelling the body, and becomes an expression of our identity and our connection with others. The narrator's husband is obsessed with Happy Future Foods -- reminiscent of "space food", with everything frozen or freeze-dried -- because he thinks this is the kind of food successful people eat: "He was ingesting a fragment of a wonderful lifestyle... I myself wouldn't eat these products if my husband didn't buy them... But I like the way my husband feels about eating them, so I end up just going along with him."

Food is again at the forefront in Eating the City. Rina, dissatisfied with the vegetables on offer in the city shops, has started foraging for wild foodstuffs, arguing that "eating vegetables direct from the earth, taking only enough to eat today, this was a healthy way to live".

But Rina, we come to realize, is also trying to get a bandwagon going... We see her start to feed her colleague Yuki with nostalgic memories of her childhood in the mountains: "My plan was to draw her into my new vision of nature here in the city while taking care not to provoke a negative response. I had to avoid prematurely shocking her, paying deliberate respect to her perception based on her current understanding of common sense... I had already managed to infiltrate her mind with some feral sensations. Now I would steep her in that world more and more until she was almost drowning in it. I now felt as though I was beginning to eat the city in a different sense than before. Once I had finished marinating Yuki, how would I get started on the next person?"

Larissa Barth astutely observes: "The concept of 'common sense' -- just like morals, values, and norms -- here takes on Murata’s flavor of arbitrariness and relativity, posing the question: How many people have to believe in something to render it 'common sense'?... Even a nonconformist like Rina longs for others to accept and join her alternate society. Rather than portraying this as a solution to the central dilemma of this collection, Rina’s cold and calculating manipulation adds another problematic dimension, a circular and ironic anti-solution."

(Rina also tells us: "I realized how much I had been viewing the city as a collection of symbols... When I ran my gaze over the world with an empty stomach, the surroundings shed the armor of these symbols and revealed their true nature." This very different view of the urban environment recurs in Puzzle, which explores the idea of the dissolution of boundaries. Murata says of her protagonist: "What she'd thought of as a city until not long ago was also one large creature.")



Sex is the second taboo subject that runs through these pages; recurring themes are insemination (artificial and otherwise), sexless marriages, and the separation of marriage and sex. The story that reflects the book's title, Life Ceremony, makes clear that a declining population and fears of human extinction have changed attitudes: "Nowadays, few people ever talked about sex, referring to it rather as insemination with the specific aim of creating new life... I'd heard that in the old days, sex was considered dirty, and it was normal to do it out of sight... Insemination after a life ceremony was generally considered sacred and could be carried out anywhere." The children thus conceived might be raised in their family, but might also be placed in a "children's centre". These are still slightly controversial, as people fear the breakdown of the family system: "We may be headed in a dangerous direction, but the vague conclusion seemed to be that we wouldn't know unless we tried." But people are grateful to those who have "given birth for the benefit of the human race".

And what, then, is a "life ceremony"? Well, it's the thing that has replaced the old idea of the funeral... When someone dies, guests come together to eat the person's body, after which they attempt to pair off for "insemination". Yes, you read that right. Eat the person's body. "When I was little," our narrator tells us, "it was forbidden to eat human flesh. I'm certain it was. Now, however the custom of eating flesh has become so deeply ingrained in our society that little by little, I'm becoming less confident about what things were like before."

The characters in this story make a couple of statements that really illuminate the whole book. One says: "Instinct doesn't exist. Morals don't exist. They were just fake sensibilities that came from a world that was constantly transforming." Another agrees: "Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone. But that's not true -- actually, they're always changing... It's always been that way. Things keep transforming."

Which is a good point, of course. But I have to confess I found this story pretty gross. It is beyond macabre to see the characters "opening the lids of the hotpots to reveal Mr Nakao, boiled together with Chinese cabbage, enoki mushrooms, and other vegetables", and hear them say: "Delicious! Mrs Nakao, your husband is really tasty." After another death, we're told: "Together we put Yamamoto into bowls, added some starch, onions, sake, and so forth, and then kneaded him before making him into a heap of meatballs." This makes me feel genuinely queasy, but there's also a terrible humour in it. Yamamoto has left behind recipes detailing how he should be prepared: "Cashew Nut and Me Stir-Fry", "Meatballs of Me in Grated Daikon Hotpot", and so on. And one guest observes: "He goes well with cashew nuts, doesn't he? I never realized it when he was still alive."

A First-Rate Material was another story about death that I struggled to stomach. In the course of a perfectly "normal" situation, in a perfectly "normal" setting, we learn that we're now in a world where the dead bodies of humans are made into useful things. We hear of wedding rings made from front teeth, sweaters from human hair, chandeliers from human nails, dishes from skulls, and a wedding veil from human skin.... To be honest, I find this even more pukeworthy than the cannibalism story... But Murata would respond: Why? We use animals' dead bodies to make things. Why are we grossed out by the thought of using our own? One character says: "What could be more normal than making people into clothes or furniture after they die?... It's not like using human material is uncivilized. It's far more heartless to just burn it all!" Towards the end of the story, she muses: "A hundred years later, what would our bodies be used for? Would we be chair legs or sweaters or clock hands? Would we be used for a longer time after our deaths than the time we'd been alive?"



I'll just mention two more of the stories that stood out. Again, both are heavily ironic, and challenge us to re-evaluate the way we see things.

The ickier of the two is entitled Poochie. It's about two schoolgirls who keep a middle-aged man as a pet in a small hut on the mountainside, and call him Poochie... One of them found him in Otemachi, the business district near Tokyo Station, "wandering around, lost". She took him home, and fed him, and he became attached to her in a pet-dog kind of way. The girls surmise that there's probably someone in Otemachi looking for this man. But he seems content, happier with his life on the mountain behind the school than with his life in Otemachi. Eventually someone does come looking for him, but he hides, escaping his "pursuer from Otemachi", and coming out again only when the little girls are there: "Yuki hugged him, stroking his head and back... 'Finishitbytwo!' Poochie cried quietly, closing his eyes in Yuki's arms." Better, then, to be demeaned as a pet than demeaned as a salaryman...

The other, and possibly one of the most accessible stories in the collection, is called Hatchling. It's about Haruka, a young woman who comes to the conclusion that she actually has no personality of her own... Instead, she develops a personality in response to whatever environment she finds herself in for any length of time. To date, in reaction to different situations, she's developed no fewer than five distinctive personae, and her problem is that she's about to get married, and can't work out how to cope with guests who know her as radically different people... Her friend Aki sees the problem: "Will you be changing character at each table? It's like a horror movie!" Fiance Masashi flips out, understandably, when he hears about the five characters that have evolved in the life of his intended. He shuts himself in the bedroom: "All the characters tried talking to him through the door, but he showed no sign of coming out." Resolution to the immediate problem is achieved with yet more invention, which doesn't, we feel, bode that well for the future...

Barth sums up this whole reading experience really accurately: "Life Ceremony is a weirdly entertaining blend of horror, comedy, and dystopian fiction as well as social criticism bordering on philosophical inquiry. Murata understands that questions are more important -- and more feasible -- than answers. Her taste for tongue-in-cheek ambiguity and contradiction and her refusal of make-believe solutions are precisely why she can speak to the complexities of human existence, particularly those of our time."

Insightful, then. And necessary. But as you read it, you find yourself metaphorically peering out from behind the sofa. I will definitely NOT be going on to read Earthlings...