Murata, Sayaka. Vanishing World. Granta Books, 2025.

Dr Thomas Caffrey
Dublin City University
Dublin, Ireland
thomas.caffrey@dcu.ie

Sayaka Murata has long been a writer of the unexpected. Her debut novel, Convenience Store Woman is a tender and personal portrait of a woman burdened by Japanese cultural norms. Her second novel, Earthlings, is a rumination on the same theme, but it exchanges the plaintive considerations of Convenience Store Woman for a grisly and often shocking literary assault. Earthlings is closer to a horror novel, threading the absurd and the mundane together into a gory, salient, and scathing critique on conformity. It is a sublime novel. Her short story collection, Life Ceremony, continues Earthlings’ fascination with body horror and extreme (nearly parodic) depictions of social alienation. It is not an entirely successful collection, but some stories – such as ‘Lover on the Breeze’, told from the perspective of a lovelorn bedroom curtain – capture the same electric genius evidenced by Earthlings. More than anything, Life Ceremony displays Murata’s talent for depicting the absurdity of mundanity through unexpected lenses.

Murata’s latest novel in translation, Vanishing World (Granta Press, 2025), is her most paradoxically surprising work so far, perhaps because it is in many ways a predictable novel. Themes established in her earlier work reappear, while Murata’s portrayal of the trap of social normality is at its most overt and obvious in this latest work of hers: “Normality is the creepiest madness there is. This was all insane, yet it was so right.” (211) The novel, originally published in Japanese in 2015, has been translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and retains the clipped, detached style found in her other works. Vanishing World follows a woman named Amane, who lives in a world similar to ours. However, in the world Murata sketches, every child is produced via artificial insemination and marriage is a sexless bond, closer to a sort of found-sibling co-parenting relationship. Sex between husband and wife is the ultimate taboo, defined in Murata’s imagined society as “incest”. Characters still fall in love fleetingly, but sex is rare, and by the end of the novel seems to be approaching extinction. Physical relationships between real people and parasocial relationships with imagined people (anime characters or pop stars) are viewed as being on an equal basis. The effect generated is that of a middling dystopia, a contented state of somatic bliss that is undisturbed by the heights of anger, joy, and passion that a truer romance might conjure. Call it a bland new world.

In its structure and thematic insistence, the novel recalls Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest film, the poorly conceived Kinds of Kindness (2024). That film likewise represented a sustained repetition of its auteur’s central fascinations and did little to forward Lanthimos as an artist. This commonality isn’t entirely unique: every new Haruki Murakami novel, for instance, is accused of doing the same. More strikingly, however, Kinds of Kindness and Vanishing World are united by their shared detached gross-out factor. There comes a point, in escalatingly uncomfortable sequences, wherein tension becomes tedium. In Kinds of Kindness, this tedium arrives by the second part of the film’s triptych. The same point arrives toward the very end of Vanishing World, whereby the male pregnancies of the novel bore, rather than transgress, in the mind of the reader. Yet, Vanishing World, which resembles a mantra-like meditation on themes Murata clearly holds close, is more enervating than Kinds of Kindness. This is largely because the discomfort evoked by Murata is more real than Lanthimos’: despite the issues present in her imagined society, fathers and mothers are seen to take an equal share of childcare. Amane casually shares this in conversation with her co-workers: in Vanishing World there is no stigma to the idea of a stay-at-home dad. Compare this to the real Japan, which recently placed 118th out of 146 countries in terms of gender equality (Asahi Shimbun). Among the reasons cited is childcare: in part of the study period, running October 1st 2021 to September 30th 2022, approximately 141,000 Japanese women left their previous jobs due to childcare or childbirth. During the same period, only 7000 Japanese men left theirs for the same reason (statistics via National Women’s Education Center Gender Statistics of Japan at a Glance 2024). However, the solutions Murata offers here are distorted – not so much solving real world issues as distending them. Further, to its credit, the world of the novel is deadened and repetitious, which excuses (or even invites) a sense of boredom that resonates thematically. 

The novel successfully innovates in its portrayal of education as a tool of social cementing or isolation. The novel is divided into three main parts: Part One tells the story of the child Amane, depicting her struggles as she discovers that, due to the nature of her birth, she is an outcast. Amane’s parents conceived her without the intervention of artificial insemination. In the world of the novel, sexual reproduction is now classified as “an abnormal method” (10), which leads to Amane being bullied and ostracized by both classmates and teachers alike. Knowledge of differentiation and othering haunt early classroom sequences, which in turn cast a long shadow over the remaining two sections of the novel. The otherness in this novel reads as a mirroring of the otherness found in Earthlings: where Earthlings depicts a familiar world’s rejection of an outsider, Vanishing World depicts an unfamiliar world’s rejection of a recognizably ‘normal’ character.

Part Two tracks Amane’s romances with peoples both real and imagined. No ‘real’ texts are mentioned here – Amane is not falling in love with Satoru Gojo or any other recognizable popular anime character – Murata instead alludes to nonexistent texts. The vaporware Murata conjures here imparts a convincing sense of verisimilitude to the novel, while casting it further from a recognizable present. The novel is at its most engaging in these passages, one of which features a character categorizing love and sex as semi-diseased states created by popular culture: “I sometimes think that the seeds for sexual desire and romantic love are planted in us by TV and manga … We’re being spurred on to spend lots of money by the romantic desire and sexual desire growing in our bodies” (120-121). The detachment of the conversation encapsulates the deadness and lack of passion at the heart of the novel, serving nearly as a thesis statement for the society Murata creates.

Vanishing World is overshadowed by a nearly Catholic sense of guilt at the ‘original sin’ of Amane’s conception and birth. Catholicism recurs as a motif throughout the novel; the front cover of my copy depicts a hand outstretched toward a fruit hanging from a tree. Lines indicate motion, while leaves trail across the front of the book and down its spine. Thisallusion to Adam and Eve’s Old Testament transgression recurs throughout the novel, with its frequent reference to a return to “Eden” (230). A pivotal artificial insemination occurs on Christmas Eve. However, while these allusions pile up, they fail to amount to anything substantial. The novel sets up religion as a theme intertwined with cleanliness/uncleanliness , but none of this really coalesces. Murata seems poised to meld the religious elements with the metatextual vaporware, but this never happens. 

The novel’s final stretch takes place in Experiment City, a place where cutting edge artificial reproduction techniques and tools are trialled. This section is the most disappointing: it fails to bring together the disparate threads and ideas that have been sketched up to that point. This is where the Lanthimos feeling takes over, and the climax of the novel feels like nothing so much as a waste of potential. Instead of completing a coherent whole, the final section leaves the novel feeling like a baggy series of anecdotes. However, Vanishing World retains to the end a confident and persuasive narrative voice. It is an exceedingly well-written novel that can only disappoint in relation to Earthlings, which remains one of the great modern Japanese novels. A brave, if flawed, portrayal of a bland new world.

Works Cited

Lanthimos, Yorgos. Kinds of Kindness. Searchlight Pictures, 2024.

Murata, Sayaka. Vanishing World. Granta Books, 2025.

National Women’s Education Center. National Women’s Education Center Gender Statistics of Japan at a Glance 2024. 2024. https://www.nwec.go.jp/en/research/index.html 

So, Kosuke. “Japan moves up to 118th in the world for gender equality”. Asahi Shimbun. June 12th 2024. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15302289#:~:text=Japan%20placed%20118th%20among%20146,among%20Group%20of%20Seven%20nations

Author Bio

Dr Thomas Caffrey is a recent PhD graduate from the School of English, Dublin City University. His doctoral research examined the reception of Haruki Murakami’s fictions in the anglophone world. Thomas now tutors at DCU and is particularly interested in transmedia projects. He is currently working on depictions of monsters across genre and art forms.