‘Vanishing World': Sayaka Murata's new novel warns readers of a world bereft of love and belonging

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2 days ago

Sayaka Murata is well-known for writing stories that move away from the conventional modes of inhabiting time and space. From her best-selling 2018 novel Convenience Store Woman to Vanishing World, her new novel, she straddles themes that inconvenience the readers' schematic expectations and offer a different way to imagine the world. Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, it is a scathing, uncomfortable but strangely beautiful novel that will have Murata's readers ensorceled yet again.
An upside-down world
We meet Amane when she's ten. She is taken to an anime character called Lapis, like all the other girls and boys at her school. But Amane's obsession is different. She begins to realise that her adulation for Lapis is sexual too. In her mother's world, this is the most normal thing – to be sexually excited and look forward to love. But the world which Amane inhabits has changed drastically. Sex as a concept and practice is disappearing. Children are born through artificial insemination. Having sex in marriage is taboo and husband and wife are meant to be together only for the purpose of maintaining a family without love or sex being a part of the equation. As Amane grows into an adult in this seemingly vanishing world, she decides to love, seek pleasure but also faces doom when she enters the Experimental City, where the world itself is upside down. Magical, thorough, and taut, Vanishing World is a novel that haunts its readers and warns them of a world bereft of love and belonging.
We see the world through the eyes of a young girl entering adolescence and is confronting the physiological changes of her age. Murata is concise but rich in the way she explores both the emotional, mental and physical changes of the body. Amane narrates her and her friends' changes thus: 'Our sexuality developed in a sterile space.' Murata's achievement lies in not being deliberate in her stances but leaving segments open to the reader to work themselves through. At many places – in trying to build the world – she gets repetitive but a critical reader realises that it is done to keep them abreast with this peculiar world.
The boundaries between the world the reader inhabits and the world of Amane are blurry and can sometimes get stiflingly similar. The novel was originally published as Shōmetsu sekai in Japanese almost ten years ago, in 2015. It could be said that it imagines a dystopic world where sex, love, childbirth, and family are withering to make bodies less vulnerable to nature and more in control of the individual. But the fascinating quality of the book is that it does not make the reader believe so.
A different 'motherhood'
Throughout the novel, Murata has handled these nuances in such a manner that a reader wonders if this vanishing world is dystopian or utopian. It is dystopian in the sense that the old world of desire, the idea of naturalness, and the organic quality of love and family are dismantled. But what Murata also presents is the utopia of socialist feminist agenda: sex is not the fundamental unit to bind people, the naturalness of childbirth is scrapped away making women less vulnerable to patriarchal controls, the assumption of child-rearing as the department of women are taken away, motherhood as a concept is disembodied, the scarping up of private ownership of things and even a child are done away with, and the idea of bringing a child in a community where every person capable of giving care and love is a 'Mother'.
The plot of artificial insemination has been debated by scholars of Kinship Studies and Feminism to acquire a complex place. There is one branch to rejects it because it still puts men in control of the process. And the other branch accepts it as an aid for women who may be single, infertile, or in a same-sex relationship to experience parenthood. Murata offers an ambiguous stance on assisted reproductive technologies. She mourns its impact on the way it fractures the kinship network but through the stories in the novel, she notes its importance in helping a world still sustain itself without sex. When Amane goes through insemination and is anxious about pain, the doctor says, 'Feeling pain is something you'll only hear about during times of war now.' Then Amane thinks, 'Back when people had still been animals, what sort of sounds had there been during copulation and childbirth? However had I tried to imagine it, all I could bring to mind was the sight of a clean hospital.'
The portions when Amane falls in love with men in life and tries to have sex with them are some of the most memorable scenes of the novel. Murata writes about Amane's vulnerability and her need for physical desire with earnestness. What was striking in these scenes is how Murata overturns the man-woman dynamic. The woman is no longer the subservient one under the control of the man. In fact, Amane is entirely in control of the desires her body and she pursues them without inhibition. For instance, when she is with a man named Mizuto in her 30s, he has to plead with her to stop demanding so much of him. In a world where men do not know what to do with the woman's body, Amane guides his organ into her and instructs him to experience desire. Eventually, Mizuto says, 'I find sex really difficult…' Amane is shocked by this, so she demands to have his semen as the last offering and he concurs and says with relief, 'Amane, thank you for eating me.'
The novel can be slow in parts. However, it never comes in the way of seeing the novel for what it is – a portrait of a world where memories of a world vanish with other bodily capacities of the human. It is a searing world where the body may change, but institutions like class and gender still manage to sustain themselves.
Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata as a Senior Research Fellow.