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?

What did I just read?

Vanishing World falls squarely into the WTF category for me. If there was a point to this work of speculative fiction, then it sailed right over my head.

In Vanishing World, all conception is done via artifical insemination. Copulation is something from history — kind of gross, and why would anyone want to do it? Love is emotional, and can be for real people or people from the “other world” — anime or manga characters, for example, although protagonist Amane objects to calling them “characters”. They’re all her lovers, whether she interacts with them in person or through her feelings about them when she looks at their images.

When a man and woman are ready for children, they marry in order to form a family. Because a husband and wife are family members, sexual contact between them is considered incest, and is simply unimagineable.

As Amane becomes more and more convinced of the need to remove sexual urges and impurities from her life, she and her husband eventually move to Experiment City, where all adults are Mother to all children, women and men can both become pregnant thanks to external wombs, and the children are more or less indistinguishable from one another.

This has to be one of the weirdest books I’ve read in a long time. I honestly don’t know what to make of it — so rather than blather on, I’ll just share a few lines and passages to give a taste of what this book is like:

Copulation was the norm before the war, but when adult men were sent off to fight, research into artificial insemination progressed rapidly in order to produce lots of children for the war effort. People stopped going to all the bother of copulating like animals. We’re a more advanced creature now.