Book Review: Vanishing World by Sayaka Murata
A dystopian novel about technological disruption of human connections.
Normality is the creepiest madness there is. This was all insane, yet it was so right.
In a parallel world, the connections between love, sex, and marriage are severed. People fall in love mostly with fictional characters, sex is an ancient relic, and marriage is a means for reproduction using artificial insemination. As a child, our protagonist, Amane realizes that she is an anomaly who is born out of sexual intercourse between her parents. As an adult, she has to navigate a world that's drastically evolving into a nasty dystopia that avoids concepts like sex, love, and family to build a commune where the kids are all uniformly grown and adults, invariably of their gender, are all mothers for them.
Vanishing World is a work of speculative fiction, which also has strong elements of social satire, written by the Japanese writer Sayaka Murata. The book is an exploration of the impact of societal norms on individuals, several social anxieties related to declining family relationships, population decline, and quick technological advances that topple the balance of existing social structures. It was originally published in the Japanese language in 2015, before her well-acclaimed novels, but translated into English by Ginny Tapley Takemori and published very recently.
The book is narrated by the protagonist in the first person and mostly uses an objective and deadpan tone. But the irony is that the contents of her narration are her extremely intimate thoughts that are based on subjective opinions. It is this disparity between the content and her tone that amplifies the impact of the novel and generates maximum disturbance to the readers. It also forces the readers to embark on a quest by themselves to find the truth while reading the book instead of simply following the narrator.
It is evident that the novel is firmly rooted in the anxieties within Japanese society, which has severe existential demographic issues. The declining dependence on family, reluctance to commit, and the resulting low birth rate have caused a demography with a low birth rate and an aging population. The writer imagines a world that tries to overcome these issues using technology and eliminating the need for any emotional connection to a single partner. This creates a strange dystopia that builds eerily similar kids and a support system of adults whose only duty is to pet them and be affectionate.
Amane struggles between her past that binds her to sexual pleasures, a present that binds her to her family, and a future that allows her to mother infinite kids. It's as if she lives on all of them and simultaneously tries to disassociate from all of them. The writer exhibits a dazzling imagination in conjuring up a world that's progressing at unbelievable speeds and alienating its inhabitants. It's a world that solely populates using artificial insemination, where people fall in love with unreal manga characters and which considers any physical relationship between spouses as incest.
While many aspects of the book are brilliant and insightful, two elements of it make the reading a tedious exercise. These could be discounted as issues in its translation if they weren't so critical to plot, style, and reading pleasure. The writing and the dialogues of Vanishing World are bad. Yes, it's written with great imagination and contains many perspective-building insights. The story is narrated in a very haphazard and amateurish manner with conversations that are artificial and irritating. Sometimes I felt that the writer considered her readers as attention-deficit people who needed constant reminders about this new world that she introduced.
Out of the three parts of the book, the first two are the primary victims of these issues. Every character, every incident, and every conversation is a showcase of atrocious writing. The characters are just props, and their behavior patterns and conversations between them are repetitive. Most of the conversations are used as dumping grounds for expositions. It's only in the final part that the plot picks up. From then on, the writing and other factors steadily improve and culminate in a brilliant and shocking climax. Is it possible that the bad writing was part of a ploy by the writer to exhibit the pretentious and artificial nature of the envisaged future?
I received a review copy of the book from its publisher, Grove Atlantic, through NetGalley.