new writing: sayaka murata

at wsj

Sayaka Murata is a very strange writer who is obsessed with normality.¹ I was so pleased to be able to review her new book Vanishing World for the Wall Street Journal:

Through her fiction, Ms. Murata has resolutely explored the strangeness of the cultural practices we otherwise consider ordinary. “Vanishing World,” originally published in Japanese in 2015, is the writer’s most recent novel to be translated into English. It chronicles the life of Amane, a narrator with an unusual degree of adaptability, as her society changes around her. No matter how intense the transformations, and no matter how much Amane thinks she will object to them in advance, she discovers she can seamlessly adjust and will nearly forget she ever lived a different way.

To expand slightly: what draws Murata to the “normal” is its essential arbitrary quality. What is “normal” can change dramatically over the course of a lifetime, yet what is normal, while it’s normal, seems not only as if it were always there but as if it will always be that way.² In her short story “Life Ceremony,” for instance, Murata imagines a world that has come to embrace eating the dead. Its heroine can still remember a time when eating human flesh was an unspeakable taboo. She has no objection to cannibalism but remains loathe to partake herself, because it’s the change in values that truly bothers her. In another short story, fine furniture and clothing are made from human skin, bones, nails, and hair. The one character who finds this practice disgusting is regarded as a crank, and by the end, confronted by a veil made from his father’s skin, he’s come around. How can something be so unquestionable and yet so arbitrary and changeable? That’s the trouble.…

One day I will finish my long-threatened post on here about Murata’s novel Earthlings, a great book I finally got myself to reread but which I will never actually recommend to anybody because it’s so messed up. But here are some broader thoughts about the category of “books that have kind of evil vibes”:

When it comes to literature that’s supposed to be upsetting, disturbing, etc., I find that my experience of reading these books falls into two main categories. Some books I find gross… but not disturbing. This is how I feel about Gabrielle Wittkop’s The Necrophiliac or J.G. Ballard’s Crash. While these books are dark and have gruesome passages, somebody like Wittkop’s narrator (for instance) is a recognizably drawn aesthete. The book works (to me) by translating a necrophiliac impulse into a clear artistic idiom. Thus: gross, but not disturbing. Crash meanwhile is so clinical, even medical, in its language that you’re distanced from the events of the book.

Murata, meanwhile, is not always gross—Vanishing World is not, I would say, gross, except for the very end, which is horrifying—but she is always disturbing.³ My best point of comparison to what I find reading her to be like is when you get a pair of glasses and there’s something off about the lenses, like where they’ve put the center of your eyes is wrong. It’s not that you literally can’t see but that it feels weird and bad to see this way.

Even Convenience Store Woman, which I think is her most accessible and least “weird” book, is disturbing; when a disruptive customer is removed the narrator reflects to herself that “a convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated”; in another moment, she’s visiting her sister, who has just had a baby, and:

The baby started to cry. My sister hurriedly picked him up and tried to soothe him. What a lot of hassle I thought. I looked at the small knife we’d used to cut the cake still lying there on the table: if it was just a matter of making him quiet, it would be easy enough.

But this isn’t (crucially) a malicious thought. She really is wondering why you wouldn’t take the fastest route to make the baby quiet. She’s just learned not to ask.

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Further reading:

If you want to try Murata’s work but aren’t sure where to start, I suggest Convenience Store Woman or Life Ceremony. The content in these books is not as extreme as Earthlings and I think she’s doing a more interesting stuff with the ideas she explores in Vanishing World.

If you like Murata already and just want something as messed up as possible, I would recommend reading Toddler-Hunting and Other Stories (Taeko Kono). The title story of this collection earns ten out of ten big NOs from me. I wish there were more Taeko Kono in English. But I’m not joking about the content!

If you like Murata but want something a little bit more funny and less alien, Bora Chung’s two translated story collections, Cursed Bunny and Your Utopia, are worth a look. (I wrote up Cursed Bunny briefly here.) Chung has two novels coming out this year. Claire-Louise Bennett’s books, Pond and Checkout-19, might also be worth a look. (I reviewed Checkout-19 here.) Claire-Louise Bennett also has a novel coming out this year.… Banner year for weirdos!

Finally, if you just want something weird and unsettling, you should try Robert Aickman if you haven’t. The NYRB collection is a fine place to start. (I’ve got some notes on Aickman here.)

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1. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this joke tweet about Taylor Swift, but—

—it is almost literally true of Sayaka Murata (though I’m not diagnosing her with anything). Yes, Taylor’s here. Even here.

2. Also in the world of Murata studies: I was quite hyped to see that Elif Batuman profiled Sayaka Murata for the New Yorker and am now allowing myself to read it, as a treat.

3. On a thematic actually I find Vanishing World much more upsetting than Earthlings.