Title: Vanishing World
Author: Sayaka Murata
Publisher: Grove Press
Publication date: April 15, 2025
Length: 240 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction / science fiction
Source: Library
Rating:
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.
“Sensei, have you ever imagined a world that is parallel to this one? Everyone would still be copulating if there hadn’t been so much progress in artificial insemination, wouldn’t they?”
“Hmm, probably only reluctantly, though. After all, if that was the only way to procreate, then people would have no choice but to resort to primitive copulation. But still, there’s no point imagining that. The human race has advanced.”
His parents gave him a good grilling as he sat hanging his head. “That’s the sort of thing people only do outside the home. I can’t believe you tried to have sex with your wife!”
Still holding hands, we went downstairs to Mizuto’s apartment and sat on the sofa bed in the living room. “Do we have to make any preparations, like with some tools or something?” “No, it’s okay. All we need are our sexual organs.”
I hoped my husband’s love affair would go well too. He was like a little sister I had to keep an eye on.
Recent research has shown that children raised to feel loved by the whole world are more intelligent and more emotionally stable than those brought up under the former family system. Please be present to shower affection on children and thus continue the life of humankind. Please make sure to love all of the children as their Mother. Please make sure to shower affection continually!
Normality is the creepiest madness there is. This was all insane, yet it was so right.
Fortunately, this book was on the shorter side, so even when I felt that the story wasn’t what I’d signed up for, it was a quick enough read that I decided to see it through to the end.
Oh, and that ending! It’s icky. A quick scan of Goodreads and Storygraph reviews shows that even for people who appreciated this book a lot more than I did, the ending freaked them out. (I’ll admit that by the time I got there, I was so ready to be done that I just read it, thought “ewwwwww”, and then closed the book.)
Vanishing World was originally published in Japan in 2015, and has just been released in English translation this month. I previously read Convenience Store Woman by the same author, and I’m pretty sure I liked it, although I couldn’t tell you a thing about it at this point.
As I said as the start of this rambling post, if there was a deeper meaning to Vanishing World… well, I missed it. This was a truly bizarre reading experience that just got odder and odder as it went along. I don’t know what the overall message was supposed to be, and I’m sorry to say that I was mainly left wondering why I stuck with it.
Bookshelf Fantasies 