Sometimes the thrill of a strange novel comes in fits and starts. It’s less thrilling in its explosive consistency than it is in its ability to sustain a mood, to build and maintain a premise. Sayaka Murata’s new novel Vanishing World succeeds in more ways than it probably knows. It’s a novel of suppositions. It’s a speculative dystopian story in which society reproduces solely by artificial insemination. Traditional reproduction between a husband and wife is considered incest. As we come to understand late in the novel, “Men and women are now all the same, all wombs in service of the human race.”
Call it speculative fiction, alternate reality, or science fiction, Vanishing World succeeds in every way as it lulls the reader into a disturbing complacency. Amane is a young woman raised by parents who brought her into the world the old fashioned way. It’s a fact that repulses everybody else in society but intrigues Amane. The act of “loving” and the concept of “love” is manifested through anime characters or random partners, from childhood through adulthood. Matrimonial partners are found but they function as siblings. Of all her anime fixations, Amane is adamant:
“None of them are at all disposable! All my lovers are important to me…they’re all my heroes. Falling in love with them made me who I am…”
It’s this idea of love and a woman’s purpose in society that speaks through every element of Murata’s literary sensibility and overall perspective. She reflected on this during a 2020 interview after the release of her breakthrough novel Convenience Store Woman.
“I was shocked when I was in university and people told me I had to search for a rich marriage partner and think about having children. If that’s all university was for, what was the point of getting qualifications?”
The power of The Vanishing World rests in much more than just its strange premise. The 47 year old Murata spent nearly twenty years as a convenience store employee, in a relationship with a much older manager, pretending to “…act the way I thought a cute woman should act with an excess of femininity…” Her homeland of Japan had changed since she was a child. More than three million women had entered the workforce in the second decade of the 21st century. 68% of both sexes felt no need to marry. Women made up only 1% of senior managers, 4% of boardroom directors, and 10% of politicians in the nation’s lower house.
It’s within this socio-political context that The Vanishing World is propelled. Amane is a young woman who craves carnality in a society where physical intimacy is not prioritized. “Sex and love will soon disappear altogether,” we learn. “Now that babies are all made by artificial insemination, there’s no need to go to all that trouble.”
Murata understands that Amane’s is the best voice through which to tell this story, and that’s what makes it so jarring. The routine, mundane way she relates the act of physical intimacy makes the reader see it as purely an obligatory function. Amane gets set up by a matchmaker at twenty-five and quickly runs away after he tries to consummate the marriage. Once divorced, Amane continues to experiment and explore. She’d been repulsed by the traditional manner in which she’s been born, but carnal desire and a sense of adventure gets the best of her.
Eventually, with a new partner by her side, she starts the process of going to Experiment City (Paradise-Eden). Once there, a series of randomly selected men will be picked to receive an artificial womb and carry a fetus to term. Amane is deeply connected with her partner Mizuto. They share love in traditional and numerous ways. “I’ve cursed you with love and sex, remember it!” she yells at him during a down period in their relationship. Mizuto soon tells Amane the truth. He finds intimacy difficult. They remain together, but solely as husband and wife in this society in which intimacy is considered incest.
Once we get to Experiment City, (Part Three), Vanishing World evokes Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and Kazuro Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Like those novelists, Murata knows how to create a sterilized and antiseptic world of fluorescent lights and pure, wrinkle-free fabric. In Experiment City, all the children born of artificial insemination and from a man’s artificial womb are perfect. These kodomo-chans are all “…dressed in white smocks…hair cut in identical bobs reaching just below their ears.” Their gender identity was difficult to distinguish, but their warm disposition and beatific grins were in keeping with how they addressed the adults. In Experiment City, everybody was addressed as “Mother.” The ideal of “equality,” it seems, had been reached.
There’s nothing sentimental about Vanishing World. For Amane, “…the system we called ‘family’ was just one of many systems we had for breeding…” She fears she is fitting into the world of Experiment City far too well. If there’s any line that best encompasses this novel, it’s this: “Normality is the creepiest madness there is.” In the story’s prologue Amane and her partner considered themselves the opposite of Adam and Eve, but by the end they had returned to paradise. The only problem is the finality. Their fates had been sealed:
“Men and women were now all the same, all wombs in service to the human race.
The inaudible music of rightness played over our heads, controlling us.”
Who are the monsters in this novel? Who are the humans? Amane’s mother reminds her daughter that you can’t run away from your instincts to love, to procreate in the most natural way. If we are all monsters, then we still live under the dictates of normalcy.
As with all novels dependent on mood and tone and an effective English translation, the translator needs to be a sympathetic and reliable partner in the process, Ginny Taply Takemori understands that the most effective translation is equal parts interpretation. “By trying to be too faithful to the original,” she reflects, “you can actually betray it…You make way in English for a voice that’s doing something that hasn’t been done before, even in Japanese.” Takemori is a sympathetic partner in the process of bringing Vanishing World to the English-speaking world. This is a chilling, difficult novel to absorb, not in the words used or the worlds explored, but rather the stability of its routine plot. In a world where Vice President J.D. Vance tells a crowd of March for Life supporters at a January 2025 rally “I want more babies in America,” the darkness of Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World seems closer to reality in 2025.
