An Absurd Dystopia Asks, What Happens to Families When Sex Is Taboo?

VANISHING WORLD, by Sayaka Murata; translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

In the imagination of Sayaka Murata, nothing seems to be off limits. The Japanese author of the international best seller “Convenience Store Woman” writes disorienting fiction that inhabits the lives of misfits and challenges social norms by inverting them. From a neurodivergent salesclerk to a traumatized child who forms an asexual partnership with her cousin, Murata’s narrators recall baffled aliens trying to decode everyday life on Earth and pass as “normal.”

“Vanishing World,” her fourth book to be crisply translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is like “The Handmaid’s Tale” on acid — and it is also quintessentially Murata. The author puts her abiding preoccupations — with conformity, sexuality and family — in a petri dish and incubates a disquieting dystopia in which artificial insemination has become the global norm.

In this alternate reality, scientific leaps were made to counter the population crisis after World War II, and now almost all human reproduction takes place via artificial insemination, rather than sex. Though desire lives on, many people choose to relieve their urges through crushes on characters in anime and manga. For romantic thrills, people openly pursue extramarital affairs, though these aren’t necessarily consummated. Meanwhile, erotic love has been expunged from marriage, which is now a chaste union for companionship and child-rearing.

Except for the marriage that birthed Amane. Murata’s narrator grows up cocooned in the “walled garden” of her divorced mother’s nostalgic fantasy world, where she’s fed a diet of fairy-tale endings: “Amane, you too will one day fall in love, get married and have children, just like Mummy and Daddy.” The novel begins with an almost biblical loss of innocence: “I was in a sex education class in the fourth year of elementary school when I discovered that I had been conceived by an abnormal method.” That method, “primitive copulation,” is long outdated; modern kids prefer “clean love” with fictional characters to falling in love with a real person, and girls are fitted with contraceptive devices when they start menstruating.

Amane conforms to society better than Murata’s previous narrators, except when it comes to her libido. As she comes of age, she becomes addicted to love in a way that most of her generation — 80 percent of whom are predicted to remain virgins into adulthood — are not. She worries that her mother has “cursed” her with the now-taboo desire “to get pregnant by committing incest with my husband — someone in my own family.”

Murata deploys both visceral language and body horror to convey Amane’s lust: She orgasms “as if spewing heat”; her attraction to a TV character feels like “being bitten inside,” and as if “I’d been infected with a pleasurable pain that lived in me like a parasite.” Determined to reject her mother’s influence, she pursues sex for pleasure rather than procreation, with Scout-like naïveté: “I guess we should start by looking for this vaginal opening,” she tells a junior high classmate before they both lose their virginity. Pornhub this is not.

We follow Amane into adulthood, through two marriages and a return to her home city of Chiba, which is now a cultish center of innovation renamed Experiment City. Every year a group of men and women are algorithmically selected for artificial insemination, and men are fitted with artificial wombs. The family unit has dissolved altogether in this “Paradise-Eden System,” where all adults are designated “Mother” and raise the children communally.

Gradually, Amane succumbs to this hygienic world where no one has to bear the disappointment of infertility, the heartache of love or the revulsion of a partner’s eating habits. This may sound idyllic, but every Eden is a fall waiting to happen.

Murata’s trick is to build a vividly detailed world around a topsy-turvy premise, and trace its contradictory effects with deadpan conviction. In Experiment City, scientific progress and a collective ethos have had counterintuitive social consequences: Citizens occupy uniform studio apartments, becoming increasingly insular and fastidious about the cleanness of their bodies.

Amane’s childhood frankness evolves into a forthright curiosity in adulthood, her blunt narration — sometimes comic, sometimes cruel, laced throughout with piercing imagery — whisking you along an eye-popping plot that ranges from her early sexual exploits to her surreal platonic marriage; to “Kodomo-chans,” the creepily identikit children of Experiment City. It all builds to a finale more luridly transgressive than feels necessary — but Murata is not in the business of either realism or restraint.

Reproductive equality promises to be the great leveler, until pregnant men start getting special treatment and — hilariously, inevitably — acting both smug and patronizing about their new “male Mother” status. Murata uses absurdity to raise profound questions about family structures and gender roles, to which she offers no easy answers, but rather an outrageous and disturbing ending in which “animal” instincts resurface, cracking through the veneer of social conditioning. Conformity, in Murata’s world, breeds madness.

Blending speculative fiction, horror and black comedy, “Vanishing World” removes some Jenga blocks to watch social structures come crashing down, in a radical look at the way the imperative to procreate has shaped civilization. At a time when many countries face falling birthrates and declining sexual activity, Murata’s thought experiment is arguably an extension of our current plight. Although too extreme to be wholly persuasive, it invites us to consider how reproductive gender equality could transform society, with chilling ramifications.

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