Reading the Body: Sakaya Murata
welcome to reading the body — a series where i read an author’s entire output, all their books, cover to cover, and review it all as one body of work instead of one book at a time. this eliminates cherry-picking, glorifying authors based on their “best novel”, and missing out on great reads just because they aren’t popular. in this series i read the hits, the misses, and the weird ones. the obsessions, tics, and questions a writer can’t stop circling no matter what book they’re in that’s what i’m after. there will be spoilers and i don’t do trigger warnings. this time: Sayaka Murata
Sayaka Murata reigns over the childhood strange, the childhood odd, and the childhood weird. The child aware if the madness of adult life. The child unimpressed. The child that takes one look, one sniff at the world and turns their head away. These are the children of Murata’s writing.
In most literature I’ve read, the odd child is the quiet intelligent child, the lost-in-their-imagination daydreaming child, or the refusing to grow up child. The odd child is the protagonist, the hero, the story’s beloved. In most books the child is held tender by the author and reader by virture of their innocence and child-like qualities. We are meant to ache for them, we want to hold them. They are charming and mis-understood in their queerness. Murata brings to the table someone different, the unencumbered disturbed child.
The unencumbered disturbed child is the child that has been hurt, and cuts out the wound themselves, amputates the arm, amptutates the memory, handles the perpetrator by any means necessary. A child performing their own surgery, awake, without anesthetic, because no one else is coming to do it and the wound cannot be left open. The child who builds a life around the damage.
CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN
Start with Keiko, because Keiko is the mild one, and convience store woman is a book you can theoretically recommend to your mom. In Convenience Store Woman, we get Kieko’s childhood in flashes, which do all the work of telling this story. There is a dead bird in the park, and while the other children cry and mourn collectively, Keiko’s first thought is dinner — her father likes grilled bird, why not just cook it, why the performance of grief over something that’s already dead. A schoolyard fight, where two boys are about to really hurt each other, and Keiko doesn’t call a teacher, doesn’t cry, doesn’t intervene the way a child in another book would. She grabs a shovel and hits one of them over the head, the problem is solved, the fight is over, and Kieko stands there confused about why everyone’s now looking at her like she’s the one disturbing the peace she just created.
The idea of the unencumbered disturbed child is laid out as follows, a kid encountering an emotional situation everyone else is supposed to have some instinctive, sentimental response to, and instead runs the numbers, relies on logic. What actually stops the fight fastest. What actually happens to a body once it’s no longer alive. Kieko is not cruel, and she isn’t even necessarily unfeeling, she just won’t perform tenderness when tenderness isn’t the useful tool for the job.
So her parents try to fix her, and they are not cruel with her because this is a good family, which almost makes it worse, because there’s no villain to blame, just years of a good family trying to sand Kieko down at her harsher edges so she doesn’t frighten other children, and the neighbors.
Keiko learns, correctly, that the fixing isn’t going to work, that whatever she is isn’t really fixable. So she does the amputation herself. She stops speaking unless spoken to. She stops having opinions. She amputates the impulse to explain her own reasoning, because every time she’s explained it, it’s made things worse. But it is important to remember that her logic is not illogical.
Then, eighteen years old, she walks into a convenience store on its opening day and something happens that never happens to her anywhere else: someone hands her a manual. Literal, written, explicit instructions for how to hold your face, how to say a greeting, how to be a person in a way that other people will recognize as correctly performed. Keiko isn’t cured by the job, she looks at the world the same way, but the job is the one place on Earth actually willing to tell her the rules out loud instead of expecting her to intuit them from the ambient social air the way everyone else apparently does.
Eighteen years later she is still there, and the world decides this is the problem now, it’s not her reasoning anymore. The problem is now that she is a thirty-six-year-old woman who is happy, unmarried in a part-time job. The happiness itself has become disturbing.
Her family, her sister, her coworkers, all take up the work of sanding her again, with the same nervous concern as before. And then Shiraha shows up, furious, entitled, certain that the world owes him a bride and a paycheck for existing, Keiko does something that looks, on the surface, like romance, and is actually just Keiko recognizing another amputee. By the end, she almost lets herself be talked into becoming a “real” woman with a “real” job, and then physically cannot go through with it. While it’s not a happy ending in the normal sense, it is a the best case scenario. Her childhood surgery worked. Her amputation held and she can continue in peace, living without endangering herself and others. A win?
EARTHLINGS
Keiko, from convience store woman, was the mild version of the unencumbered disturbed child because Keiko does become a semi-functional adult. Natsuki, from earthlings, is what happens when nobody ever hands the disturbed child a manual, and they have keep the one they write themselves.
Earthlings opens with a talking hedgehog toy named Piyyut, a magic wand, and mythology about the planet Popinpobopia, that the protagonist child, Natsuki, and her cousin are from. If you don’t know Murata, the start of this book makes you think it’s gonna be whimsy-maxxed light-sci-fi . You think it’s gonna be cute.
Be warned: You will not get whimsy and this story is not cute. Natsuki is an eleven-year-old girl who is less loved by her mother than her sister, and who is sexually abused by a teacher she trusts/can’t disobey. Natsuki falls into something the adult world will call incest with her cousin Yuu. But if you asked these children, these characters, the two of them would call this incest the only safe thing that has ever happened to either of them.
So the alien mythology isn’t a child’s charming imagination running away with her. It is her engineering her mode of survival in the world. If you are not, in fact, a human being— if you are a being from another planet who has crash-landed among “earthlings” and is only pretending to be one of them, badly, out of necessity… then none of what is happening to you is happening to you. It’s happening to a disguise, to a skin-suit (ig idk). The wound is real, but it’s the skin-suit’s wound, not yours, and you, the alien underneath it, can manage to remain intact.
Nobody catches that Natsuki is thinking like this. Nobody sits Natsuki down. The adults around her are so absorbed in their own performance of normal family life that a girl quietly amputating her own personhood in real time in front of them registers as nothing more than a phase, a strange hobby, something she’ll grow out of. She does not grow out of it. She grows around it, the way Keiko grows around the shovel, except Natsuki never gets a convenience store. She never gets a manual. She has to handle her perpertrator herself by any means necessary. She gets a factory town that wants her married and pregnant and unremarkable, and a family that has already decided, without saying it (but sometimes maybe saying it), that she was the disposable daughter from the start. So as an adult she does what the unencumbered disturbed child always does: she handles the situation by any means necessary. Her husband, Tomoya— himself another kind of amputee, child-forced-normal, someone who’s opted entirely out of sex and reproduction and the performance of desire —becomes Natsuki’s partner not in romance but in a lifestyle of refusal of societal norms, while performing them for the outside world.
When the two of them, the happy married not-couple retreat to Natsuki’s grandparents’ house in the mountains. They reconnect with cousin Yuu and live their childhood-coping-mechanism-fantasy. They abandon language, abandon the pretense of being earthlings at all, and the book tips into its final horror— cannibalism and incestuous cannibalism orgies, and the total collapse of every social rule that’s been strangling all three of them —
It does not read as madness overtaking sane people.It reads as three children finally being given enough space to stop performing and take off their trauma (which made me sick to my stomach and I showed up to movie night looking nauseous). There is this throughline in Murata’s work that the adult world calls itself sane and is not, calls itself safe and is not, and that the only sound response to being handed a madness and told it is normal is to hold it up, look at it once, carefully, really running the numbers on it, put it down, and do what you have to do.
LIFE CEREMONY
Life Ceremony takes emotional amputation and explores it across a dozen small short stories in different worlds. Here it temporarily stops being only about the unencumbered disturbed children. Murata’s “amputation” is permanent operating principle. In the title story, the dead are eaten at their own funerals, and mourners pair off afterward to CONCIEVE, a solemn civic duty, cannibalism reworked as life’s continuity. It was a lot. In “A First-Rate Material” a woman’s fiancé recoils at clothing and furniture made from human remains, appalled by an economy everyone else finds classy. In “A Clean Marriage,” a husband and wife who’ve amputated sex from their relationship entirely still want a child, and go get one clinically
None of these are children, not on the page. But every single one of them is running the same logic the disturbed child ran first: this is horrifying, therefore we will build a system around it so precise, so procedural, so normalized, that it stops being horrifying to anyone standing inside it. The whole collection is the adult world finally admitting what Murata’s children already knew— that “normal” was never a natural state, just a story enough people agreed to keep telling, and the moment you actually look at what’s inside the story, it’s exactly as strange as the child who wouldn’t participate in it always said it was. I don’t know man. It kinda broke me.
I don’t recall if I read Life Ceremony or Convenience Store Woman first, but Life Ceremony really left me with a lot to chew on. One thing I really enjoy about short stories is that they give you something to think on, and then it’s done. With Murata’s long-form work, there is so much building, so many layers, and the issues she works within intertwine in such complex ways that sometimes, instead of sitting with the moral question she was asking me, I decided to just keep pushing. Especially when she was hitting me with incestuous cannibalism orgies. Like, I don’t really have time for this right now, we gotta keep trekking, and figure out how this story actually ends.
That’s not a flaw in the novels per se. It might be the whole design. A short story hands you one clean incision and lets you sit in the room with it. You close “Life Ceremony”, the title story, and you’re just there, alone with the question of whether eating your dead friend to make a new life is grief and Murata isn’t going to interrupt that silence with another eighty pages of plot.
The novels don’t give you that room. They keep moving, keep escalating, keep asking you to hold four amputations at once while the plot drags you toward whatever the ending is going to demand of you, and so you do exactly what I did, what maybe every reader does: you stop sitting with the wound and start just trying to survive the book, the same way her children stop sitting with their wounds and start just trying to survive the childhood. The form does to the reader what the content does to the characters. You don’t get to grieve properly. You have to keep going.
I always find it hard to rate short story collections, because by nature of the genre, normally half the book isn’t going to hit. I’ve read collections I’ve loved, like Swimming Among Stars, that I loved because of one story and one story only (I only really liked the titular story in that collection and I thought everything else was ass) and I gave it five stars because that one story was fucking awesome. Flannery O’Connor, on the other hand, I find consistently mediocre but never really bad, so I give her a two for domesticated monotony: nothing spikes, but nothing drops either.
Life Ceremony is kind of a combination of both of those feelings. The title story carried the collection the way the title story carried Swimming Among Stars— it’s the peak, the one I’d point to if someone asked why this book was worth reading at all. But unlike that collection, the rest of the stories here were never bad. Every one of them, even the smaller, more conceit-driven ones, posed me a real moral question that I had to sit with for a minute, that’s a floor closer to O’Connor’s, except it’s a floor built out of “made me think” instead of just “kinda boring good prose”. So I’m giving it a three leaning toward a four. It doesn’t spike as hard a second time as that title story does, but it never once coasted either, and I do feel it was worth my time.
VANISHING WORLD
Vanishing World is actually the origin document for everything else, though it didn’t reach English readers until 2025, after everything else. Vanishing Worlds was written first, in Japanese, in 2015, a year before Convenience Store Woman, and got translated to english last, a decade after Murata wrote it.
So everything above, Keiko and Natsuki both, are technically the later case studies of the unencumbered disturbed child. And it’s important not to let the civilizational scale of this book talk you out of the fact that Amane is still, underneath it, one of Murata’s unencumbered disturbed children, performing her own surgery same as the others.
The childhood moment in Vanishing Worlds with Amane is a quiet moment. It’s really easy to miss compared to Kieko and Natsuki’s moments, which is exactly why it’s the most damning. Teenage Amane finds out that she was conceived the old way, through sex like a normal human being, not through the artificial insemination that has already, by her generation, become the default, polite, clean method. This knowledge that her parents had her through actually touching each other, wanting each other, and having sex the way people do now before the whole species agrees to stop, leaves her disgusted and feeling dirty and unclean. She has a reaction that we might have about incest. The description of the way that Amane feels about the knowledge that she is concieved via sex is not dissimilar to the description of aftermath of a sexual assault. Amane is raped by the knowledge that she was concieved normally.
But what I find interesting about this book is that you really can miss what Murata is doing really easily if you aren’t paying attention. If you read Amane as a passive product of her society already indoctrinated, the book is boring and the ending doesn’t make a lot of sense.
If you recognize that Amane doesn’t just passively inherit the numbness her culture seems to be built around, this book is a psychological thriller. Amane isn’t unfeeling. She goes and gets her own anesthetic, the same way Keiko goes and gets a shovel and Natsuki goes and gets a hedgehog. Amane falls in love with a fictional character. Two-dimensional, unchanging, incapable of surprising her, incapable of “doing to her” what her parents apparently “did to each other.” She as a child, faces desire in herself and identifies that desire as dangerous. So she reaches for the nearest available scalpel to remove desire from herself before it can attach to anyone who could actually hurt her.
So she spends the rest of the book trying to be a person inside a world with no intimacy, and it’s tempting to read this as a girl simply going along with the system she was born into. But she’s not passive here, she’s maintaining a surgical site. Marriage, for her and everyone she knows, is a domestic and financial arrangement between two people who do not touch each other, who love each other the way roommates love each other, fondly and at a permanent distance. Real desire, when it shows up at all, gets rerouted toward her fictional characters — cleaner, safer, incapable of the specific damage a real person can do to you, because a real person can leave, can want the wrong thing, can conceive you the “primitive” way and pass something feral down the line without meaning to. Amane marries, tries to want her husband properly, cannot, and eventually the two of them relocate to Experiment City, a place built entirely around erasing the last residue of the old system (desire, intimacy and all the messy parts of human existence)— where her husband becomes, in the book’s most extreme turn, one of the first men to carry a pregnancy, leaving gestation itself finally uncoupled from the body that used to be forced to do it.
This is where Vanishing World earns its place next to the others rather than trailing behind them, and where it also pushes the unencumbered disturbed child further than either Keiko or Natsuki manage to. Keiko and Natsuki are single amputees, working alone, improvising with whatever’s in reach — a shovel, a hedgehog — against a world that never asked them to cut anything out. Amane is a child who performed the identical operation on herself, unprompted, in a world that had already decided the operation was correct, was even virtuous, generations before she was born. Her family didn’t sand her down for doing it, the way Keiko’s did. Nobody sat her down. There was nothing to catch, because by the time she made her cut, an entire civilization had already agreed with her that it needed to be done. That’s the horror the book is building toward the entire time. This is not one strange child managing her damage in isolation while the world watches and worries, and not even a society performing surgery on its children from the outside, but a girl doing precisely what Keiko and Natsuki did, at precisely the same age, for precisely the same reason —and finding, when she looks up afterward, that nobody around her even noticed there’d been a wound, because they’d all done the same operation and called it growing up.
And because it came first, chronologically, everything that in this essay — Keiko’s shovel, Natsuki’s hedgehog — is really just Murata working the theory back down to the individual scale. She wrote the civilization’s amputation of human response, and creating perfection around that first, then wrote it child by child.
Vanishing World pulls the same punches as Convenience Store Woman or Earthlings, but it doesn’t announce them the way those books do. From the jump, you know something’s off with Keiko— the shovel scene is right there on page one practically, daring you to flinch. Earthlings tips its hand even faster: a talking hedgehog and a girl who thinks she’s an alien, and within a hundred pages you already know exactly how dark this is going to get, because Murata basically hands you the warning label up front and then makes good on it. Vanishing World hides its crazy. It opens looking like gentle, slightly wistful speculative fiction— a woman in a mildly futuristic Japan, artificial insemination, sexless marriage, a little depression melancholy, a little strange, a little parasocial, nothing you couldn’t recommend to your book club. It lets you get comfortable. It lets you think you know where it’s going. And then it keeps going wayyyyyyy further than the other two. and calmly. The last chapter of this book is what makes me question what the fuck is wrong with this author and if she is in fact an alien. That’s why it ended up getting my highest rating out of everything she’s written. The other books take your discomfort, they pry it from your hands. this book waits until you drop your discomfort on the foor, picks it up, and walks away. I fucking can’t with Murata, and I will be reading everything of hers forever.
Anyway I hate conclusions, Read Murata, she’s an alien.