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4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Vanishing World': Sayaka Murata's new novel warns readers of a world bereft of love and belonging
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.
Sydney Morning Herald
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Without pregnancy cravings, the Dubai chocolate bar wouldn't have been born
We fell in love with Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman – the story of Keiko Furukura, a woman in her late 30s who has worked at the same Tokyo store for 18 years – when it was published in English in 2018. In her new novel, Vanishing World (Granta, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori; $30), Murata continues to push boundaries – cultural, narrative and those of her readers. Set in a dystopian Japan where all children are conceived via artificial insemination and sex between married couples is taboo, the story follows Amane as she navigates a society ruled by rigid norms around reproduction and relationships. Fair warning: this novel isn't for the faint-hearted. It's strange, and not as immediately approachable as Convenience Store Woman. But the weirdness serves a purpose – forcing us to question the legitimacy of social structures, and why some vanish while others remain. Melanie Kembrey WEAR / Slide show My first thought on beholding a freshly unboxed pair of Gen-FF Buckle 2 Bar shearling leather slides ($220) was, 'Cute, but how do you wear them?' (Answer: with a wide pant, ideally, and possibly a tonal ankle sock.) My second, a few seconds after placing my tired trotters inside them, was, 'If every shoe had a shearling foot-bed, no one would ever wear anything else.' And so it has come to pass; off-duty, I'm now wearing them with everything. These newcomers feel every bit as magical as they look, and it's not just about the shearling: designed by FitFlop, in consultation with Calgary's Human Performance Lab, their raison d'être is to bestow serious comfort by way of cutting-edge biomechanics. This is probably why they have a little bit of a wedge, too, because wedges make everything comfier. All of which is to say, a slide in midwinter? Hell, yes. In Chocolate Brown or Stone Beige. Sharon Bradley LISTEN / Teen dream When she was a teenager, Shima Oliaee was a contestant in America's Junior Miss pageant. Renamed Distinguished Young Women, it's an annual competition held in Mobile, Alabama, where 50 high-school girls – the best and brightest from each US state – compete to win a $US40,000 ($62,000) scholarship. Two decades later, Oliaee, who's now a journalist, returns as a judge. Her podcast, The Competition, is both a fly-on-the-wall look at the intense pressure-cooker nature of the two-week competition – which includes scholastics, fitness, talent and public speaking – and a reflective journey for Oliaee as she looks at who she was then and who she is now. With Roe v Wade being overturned mid-competition, it also trains a spotlight on what it means to be a young woman in America today. Barry Divola SHOP / Snap chat The Polaroid Flip is a retro-cool, instant film camera packed with sharp smarts and serious style ( $399). Under the flippable lid? Four automatic lenses, sonar autofocus (yep, it uses sound waves to measure the distance between camera and subject) and Polaroid's brightest flash yet. It even lets you know when your shot's overexposed. Pair it with the app for double exposures, timers and manual controls – or just point, shoot and let the magic happen. Compatible with i-Type and 600 film and USB-C-rechargeable, the Flip is built for capturing real life in bold, beautifully imperfect prints. Frances Mocnik WATCH / Friends in high places Some watch the Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That … for the fashion, the friendship and the fellas, but what you should really be keeping an eye on is the real estate. While Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker, below with Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon) and co will always have my heart, season three promises a big change: Carrie is no longer a West Village girl. Yep, she's swapped her one-bed, brownstone apartment with its magical closet for a $US5 million ($7.7 million), four-bed townhouse in Gramercy Park in the heart of Manhattan – a 30-odd-minute walk away (longer in Louboutins). Timing is everything. New York Magazine has lamented the takeover of Carrie's old, once-Bohemian enclave by 'West Village girls', who dress the same, only drink three cocktails a night and spend their time working out. There goes the neighbourhood and there goes our girl – forever ahead of the curve. On Max from May 30. Louise Rugendyke
The Age
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Without pregnancy cravings, the Dubai chocolate bar wouldn't have been born
We fell in love with Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman – the story of Keiko Furukura, a woman in her late 30s who has worked at the same Tokyo store for 18 years – when it was published in English in 2018. In her new novel, Vanishing World (Granta, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori; $30), Murata continues to push boundaries – cultural, narrative and those of her readers. Set in a dystopian Japan where all children are conceived via artificial insemination and sex between married couples is taboo, the story follows Amane as she navigates a society ruled by rigid norms around reproduction and relationships. Fair warning: this novel isn't for the faint-hearted. It's strange, and not as immediately approachable as Convenience Store Woman. But the weirdness serves a purpose – forcing us to question the legitimacy of social structures, and why some vanish while others remain. Melanie Kembrey WEAR / Slide show My first thought on beholding a freshly unboxed pair of Gen-FF Buckle 2 Bar shearling leather slides ($220) was, 'Cute, but how do you wear them?' (Answer: with a wide pant, ideally, and possibly a tonal ankle sock.) My second, a few seconds after placing my tired trotters inside them, was, 'If every shoe had a shearling foot-bed, no one would ever wear anything else.' And so it has come to pass; off-duty, I'm now wearing them with everything. These newcomers feel every bit as magical as they look, and it's not just about the shearling: designed by FitFlop, in consultation with Calgary's Human Performance Lab, their raison d'être is to bestow serious comfort by way of cutting-edge biomechanics. This is probably why they have a little bit of a wedge, too, because wedges make everything comfier. All of which is to say, a slide in midwinter? Hell, yes. In Chocolate Brown or Stone Beige. Sharon Bradley LISTEN / Teen dream When she was a teenager, Shima Oliaee was a contestant in America's Junior Miss pageant. Renamed Distinguished Young Women, it's an annual competition held in Mobile, Alabama, where 50 high-school girls – the best and brightest from each US state – compete to win a $US40,000 ($62,000) scholarship. Two decades later, Oliaee, who's now a journalist, returns as a judge. Her podcast, The Competition, is both a fly-on-the-wall look at the intense pressure-cooker nature of the two-week competition – which includes scholastics, fitness, talent and public speaking – and a reflective journey for Oliaee as she looks at who she was then and who she is now. With Roe v Wade being overturned mid-competition, it also trains a spotlight on what it means to be a young woman in America today. Barry Divola SHOP / Snap chat The Polaroid Flip is a retro-cool, instant film camera packed with sharp smarts and serious style ( $399). Under the flippable lid? Four automatic lenses, sonar autofocus (yep, it uses sound waves to measure the distance between camera and subject) and Polaroid's brightest flash yet. It even lets you know when your shot's overexposed. Pair it with the app for double exposures, timers and manual controls – or just point, shoot and let the magic happen. Compatible with i-Type and 600 film and USB-C-rechargeable, the Flip is built for capturing real life in bold, beautifully imperfect prints. Frances Mocnik WATCH / Friends in high places Some watch the Sex and the City sequel And Just Like That … for the fashion, the friendship and the fellas, but what you should really be keeping an eye on is the real estate. While Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker, below with Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon) and co will always have my heart, season three promises a big change: Carrie is no longer a West Village girl. Yep, she's swapped her one-bed, brownstone apartment with its magical closet for a $US5 million ($7.7 million), four-bed townhouse in Gramercy Park in the heart of Manhattan – a 30-odd-minute walk away (longer in Louboutins). Timing is everything. New York Magazine has lamented the takeover of Carrie's old, once-Bohemian enclave by 'West Village girls', who dress the same, only drink three cocktails a night and spend their time working out. There goes the neighbourhood and there goes our girl – forever ahead of the curve. On Max from May 30. Louise Rugendyke
Daily Mail
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
The best short books to take on your summer holiday, all less than 200 pages long
Daily Mail journalists select and curate the products that feature on our site. If you make a purchase via links on this page we will earn commission - By You know the feeling: your suitcase is packed, your out-of-office is on and you're ready for a week of baking sun. Then comes the all-important question: which book should you take? Ideally, you want something short enough to finish before you land by the pool, but gripping enough to cast aside any haziness from last night's cocktails. Enter the under-200-page wonder: books that are slim in size but pack a punch. Whether you're after sharp satire, lyrical love stories, or gothic gore, these small-but-mighty reads will slip right into your beach bag. Even better? They'll mean no excess baggage charges, even if you're flying budget. The best short books to take on holiday Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata This quirky, wry story follows Keiko, a Japanese convenience store worker who's never fit in anywhere before. But despite her contentment in the role, Keiko's social circle can't understand why an unmarried woman is spending her time stacking shelves. As pressure mounts for her to find a new job, or worse, a husband, she's forced to take drastic action… 178 pages £9.99 Shop McGlue by Ottessa Moshfegh She may be most famous for her shocking and hilarious book My Year of Rest and Relaxation, but Moshfegh's first release, the novella McGlue, is every bit as strange and gripping. Set in 1851 Salem, McGlue is in custody after allegedly killing his best friend in a drunken rage. He's remorseless, however, despite the foggy recollections of the incident in question. 128 pages £8.99 Shop West by Carys Davies When Cy Bellman, American settler and widowed father of Bess, reads in the newspaper that huge ancient bones have been discovered in a Kentucky swamp, he leaves his small Pennsylvania farm and young daughter to find out if the rumours are true: that the giant monsters are still alive, and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. This novella is crisp, poignant and atmospheric, perfect for those who loved Where the Crawdads Sing. 160 pages £9.99 Shop The Passion by Jeanette Winterson Henri has a passion for Napoleon – but Napoleon has a passion for chicken. As the soldier and emperor butcher their way across Europe, glory falls to ruin and love to hate. But, when Henri encounters the red-haired, web-footed Villanelle, he discovers in her an equal. Together, they abandon their pasts and flee to the Venetian canals to meet their singular destiny... 176 pages £9.99 Shop Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote Immortalised by Audrey Hepburn's iconic performance in the 1961 film, Breakfast at Tiffany's is a dazzling portrait of 1940s New York. It follows socialite Holly Golightly, a social climber and stunning heartbreaker, her questionable relationships and her search for a place she belongs. 160 pages £8.99 Shop Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain This stunning novella tells the piercing love story between 15-year-old Marianne Clifford and 18-year-old Simon Hurst, destined to go far as a clever, beautiful and privileged teen. But fate intervenes. Simon's plans are blown off course, and Marianne is forced to bury her dreams of a future together. 192 pages £8.99 Shop Foster by Claire Keegan Booker-shortlisted author Claire Keegan's novella tells the story of a girl sent to live with a foster family on a sweltering Irish farm. There, she finds affection she's not known before and begins to blossom – until a secret threatens her fragile new happiness. 96 pages £9.99 Shop So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell This evocative masterpiece by one of America's greatest novelists tells the story of two Illinois farmers who share too much until finally, jealousy leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parents' misery - is shattered. The boys never speak again, and only fifty years on can the narrator attempt a reconstruction of those devastating events. 176 pages £9.99 Shop This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill This nuanced take on #MeToo, power and consent is told from two perspectives. The first is Quin, a male publisher undone by allegations of sexual impropriety; the second his loyal friend Margot, trying to understand and explain his actions. It's an unflinching look at the moral complexities of the 21st-century world, and perfect for anyone after a thought-provoking read. 96 pages £6.99 Shop We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson This cult favourite gothic novella follows Merricat and her sister Constance, who live in isolation after most of their family died of arsenic poisoning. When cousin Charles arrives, armed with overtures of friendship and a desperate need to get into the safe, Merricat must do everything in her power to protect her remaining family. 176 pages £9.99 Shop
Irish Independent
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Independent
Author of Convenience Store Woman returns with a nightmare world where sex between married couples is taboo
Vanishing World is another quirky novel by Japanese writer Sayaka Murata, where 'relationships' with anime or manga characters is commonplace and children are raised without their biological family Today at 21:30 Sayaka Murata is the Japanese novelist who made her name here with Convenience Store Woman. The novel follows shop-worker Keiko, who challenges societal norms by showing no interest in having a relationship or moving to a different job. Her character was isolated by society for not wanting to have a husband or start a family. Muraka herself worked in a convenience store, and didn't start writing until she was in her forties. The short novel, her 10th book and first to be translated, was wacky, introspective and, as is Muraka's style, beautifully descriptive.
