Vanishing World - Murata Sayaka

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Vanishing World

by
Murata Sayaka

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Vanishing World
Author:	Murata Sayaka
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2015 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	233 pages
Original in:	Japanese
Availability:	Vanishing World - US
	Vanishing World - UK
	Vanishing World - Canada
	Vanishing World - Italia

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Japanese title: 消滅世界
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

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Our Assessment:

B : intriguing concept, and compelling enough, if a bit rough in its presentation

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Financial Times	.	17/4/2025	John Self
The Guardian	.	30/4/2025	Caleb Klaces
The Japan Times	.	14/4/2025	Thu-Huong Ha
Literary Review	.	4/2025	Zoe Guttenplan
New Statesman	.	16/6/2025	Megan Nolan
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	11/5/2025	Madeleine Feeny
Sunday Times	B	22/4/2025	Emily Lawford
The Telegraph	.	17/4/2025	Claire Allfree
Wall St. Journal	.	25/4/2025	B.D.McClay
The Washington Post	.	21/5/2025	C.J.Anders

From the Reviews:

"It makes the ordinary world as we see it look strange again. (...) In this upside-down world, everything is reversed. (...) It’s in Experiment City where the book achieves its greatest heights, full of rapidly switching feelings -- creepiness, alarm, delight -- but where the lasting response is laughter. Vanishing World is a comedy, its darkness almost indistinguishable from horror under Murata’s restrained style" - John Self, Financial Times

"Murata dispenses with conventional world-building and incidental detail, focusing on the points where character and society come into conflict. Her writing is compulsive, and she has an uncanny gift for intimate observations that get under the skin." - Caleb Klaces, The Guardian

"(A) loose salad of thought experiments that lean toward sci-fi. (...) The book tries to unpack a lot. But rather than focusing on one or two ideas, Vanishing World goes room to room taking out stray items, a hat here, a boot there, then abandoning the task. (...) Throughout the novel, what sounds potentially freeing -- the uncoupling of romantic fixation from family stability and the removal of sexual jealousy from partnership -- is warped, and relationships between people become so clean and clinical they morph beyond the point of anything recognizably human." - Thu-Huong Ha, The Japan Times

"The hypotheticals of this book are hardly novel -- anyone with the slightest interest in speculative fiction has encountered worlds where biological reproduction is no longer necessary. The important thing this one, for me, is confronting the strange and porous life we all live between familial and erotic. (...) Though there is something invigorating about the commitment to physical desire, it is, in Vanishing World, expressed as a squalid and, eventually, self-serving act. This potentially good book further depressed me about the current limitations of popular speculative fiction." - Megan Nolan, New Statesman

"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. (...) Murata’s trick is to build a vividly detailed world around a topsy-turvy premise, and trace its contradictory effects with deadpan conviction. (...) It all builds to a finale more luridly transgressive than feels necessary -- but Murata is not in the business of either realism or restraint. (...) 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." - The New York Times Book Review, Madeleine Feeny

"(A) bleak, funny vision of a future where our sad world gets a lot worse. (...) The ideas animating the novel might be weird, but Murata’s flat style, and the disappointing final pages, leave Vanishing World feeling a little bloodless. It reads at times like an overstretched thought experiment of societal collapse, a social conservative’s nightmare of the death of the family unit." - Emily Lawford, Sunday Times

"(A) kind of reverse, pre-Fall allegory. (...) Murata’s calling card as a novelist is her cute, glassy-eyed language, which often contrasts to the lurid reality it describes. (...) Murata has the uncanny prescience of the best sci-fi writers (.....) Murata by comparison pursues a rigidly conventional formula that relies too much on surface style: the messaging is heavy-handed and the peculiar, sensational ending unsubstantiated. And yet, there are still moments that jolt you." - Claire Allfree, The Telegraph

"Defamiliarization powers Vanishing World (.....) What feels at first like a fascinating thought experiment -- a sexless world -- slowly seeps into your skin, itchy and confounding. It all leads to a brutal ending that somehow feels at once gratuitous and like the only way this all could have turned out." - Charlie Jane Anders, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Vanishing World is narrated by Amane Sakaguchi, living in a Japan that in most ways resembles the contemporary one -- except as far as sexual activity and procreation go, where things apparently veered off course a while back: conception now practically only takes place through artificial insemination and sexual intercourse is not widely practiced; when Amane is in high school she reports hearing on the news that: "Apparently, 80 percent of our generation would reach adulthood without ever having had sex" -- and, as one of her friends points out: "It won't be very long before nobody bothers to have sex anymore. It's very unhygienic, after all" Amane's mother had explained to her, when she was in fourth grade, that she was conceived naturally -- or, as Amane puts it: "by an abnormal method" --, her parents having had ... sexual intercourse. In this day and age that is out of the ordinary: "breeding through copulation has all but disappeared", and Amane's sex education class involves: "endless videos about the mechanism of artificial insemination and the mystery of bringing a new life into the world"
       People do still have sex (including the young Amane: "when I fell in love with a real person, without fail I had them put their penis in my vagina"), but the general attitude seems to be: "sex is a relic of old-fashioned copulation. Even when people do fall in love, most of them deal with their libido by themselves". The nature of romantic relationships has also changed, with inanimate beings -- "characters from books, animations, and manga" -- being the 'loved ones' ("consumables to help us process our desire") as often as (or more often than ...) other human beings; Amane has many and long clings to such imaginary-being love interests. Marriage, meanwhile, is seen more as a partnership, including a way to share the costs and burdens of childcare, with husbands and wives seeing themselves more like siblings and sex between them as nothing less than another form of incest. Amane first gets married when she is twenty-five, and all goes well enough until ... her husband gets aroused by her: "I was horrified. I'd never imagined a member of my family would have an erection because of me".
       After divorcing her first husband, Amane marries Saku Amamiya when she is thirty-one. The couple plan to get artificially inseminated when Amane is thirty-five. In the meantime, it's not uncommon for them to go out on dates with other people; Saku has six girlfriends over the course of the first three years of their marriage. But they are always happy to return to each other at the end of the day: as Saku explains to his wife with relief:

"It's only when I'm at home that I don't need to be in love."
I nodded. "That's right. Me too, when I'm here with you like this, Saku, I can truly forget there's such a thing as love in the world," I said, gently stroking his hair.

Amane does hook up with a neighbor, Mizuto, who has never had sex ("You mean like copulation in the old days, right ? I've had lovers, but we never did anything old-fashioned like that") -- but Amane convinces him to give it a go.
Vanishing World is quite explicit in its depictions of the sexual act, but the descriptions are about as unerotic as it gets, not least when Mizuto and Amane first get it on:

     "You have to put that into something called the vaginal opening. I don't think you can find it by yourself, so I'll show you." I opened my legs and pointed to my vagina.
     "I can't really see any opening ... Is that okay ?"
     "It's made from quite an elastic material, so it's okay."
     "Weird. Did people in the old days really do this ?"
     "Everyone did, apparently. I mean, this is how humans are designed to copulate."
     "Very strange."
     Mizuto looked totally mystified as he pushed his penis against my groin.
     "Now you have to move your hips to stimulate our sexual organs. Then some liquid will come out of your sexual organ, Mizuto, and when that happens, it's over."
     "Sounds difficult ! I'll do my best."
     By trial and error we stimulated our sexual organs, and eventually some liquid came out of Mizuto.

Later, we are treated to an erection, where the man's: "protrusion was beginning to harden, like dried paper clay" .....
Amane had grown up in Chiba; in the years since she left it has been transformed into 'Experiment City', a separate entity, complete with border controls, where things are done a bit differently. For one, they're experimenting with making it possible for men to bear children as well, through artificial wombs. As far as procreation goes, citizens are selected by lottery every year to be artificially inseminated, all on 24 December. The babies are immediately taken from their parents and raised in a local Center -- and taught to consider every adult 'Mother':

This paradise in which children are raised and loved equally by all adults is called the Paradise-Eden System.

Eventually, Amane and Saku sign up and move to Chiba -- though they have to pretend to just be friends, taking adjoining apartments but not letting on that they were married:

In this city, everyone was expected to live alone. The concept of couples and family were considered disruptive for public morals and unsuitable for Experiment City.

Before she moved to Experiment City, Amane had already observed among her friends that:

Not only sex but love between people seemed to be disappearing from this world.

Saku's girlfriend, too, laments: "We humans are no longer capable of being in love", and though Amane clings to her love-objects for a time, she too finds herself going with the antiseptic and asexual flow around her. Another Experiment City innovation also helps, the 'Clean Rooms' that lets a person quickly: "cleanse sexual arousal from their body".
The novel becomes increasingly dystopian, and while Amane recognizes: "I was fitting into this world too well", she can't bring herself to fight it, inexorably drawn into this brave new anodyne world:

Normality is the creepiest madness there is. This was all insane, yet it was so right.

       Murata effectively ratchets up the creepiness in the novel's conclusion, too.
       Vanishing World presents a world in which interest in the sexual act is quickly drying up -- and once that connection, of mutual engagement in the act, is lost, Murata sees connections between people and relationships in general being lost: the relationships left at the end of the novel are all, in different forms, deeply unhealthy and even unnatural ones. It certainly makes for a creepy read. Unfortunately, Murata's world-building -- and/or her narrator's account -- is too limited. This odd kind of passionlessness presented here seems at odds with human biology -- the sex drive -- as well as with the versions of 'love' presented here, including Amane's for (so many) imaginary characters as well as Saku and his girlfriend's; all of this really needs more of a build-up or explanation.
       The focus on children -- showered with attention and affection in Experiment City, but interchangeable rather than individual (all children are 'Kodomo-chan'; all adults 'Mother') -- is intriguing but also (surely intentionally) very unsettling; Murata has this all being a relatively new experiment, Experiment City only around a decade old, and so even the first cohort of children are (just) pre-pubescent, so sex isn't yet much of an issue; it remains an open question of what will happen (or explode ...) next here as this new generation matures.
       It doesn't seem a stretch to think that Vanishing World is also a commentary on declining (Japanese, though in fact most everywhere by now) birth rates and the attempt to encourage people to have more children: among the messages of Vanishing World would seem to be: don't focus so much on the babies/children and how to get/make more of them, but rather pay attention to and get adults to have healthy relationships of their own -- not least, in having a healthy sex life.
       Vanishing World is a bumpy ride and read, not least because it covers a relatively large time-span quickly, and while the personal and societal evolution presented here is plausible enough (for a novel), more exposition would have been welcome. Amane's introspection is compelling, but also somewhat flat; with her account focused on her sex-life and relationships, we learn too little about her otherwise.
       There's enough here to make for a thought-provoking -- and certainly disturbing -- engaging read, but it is, in too many respects, just a bit too underdeveloped.

- M.A.Orthofer, 6 April 2025

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Links:

Vanishing World:

Grove Press publicity page
Granta Books publicity page
Kawade Shobo Shinsha publicity page
edizioni e/o publicity page

Reviews:

Other books by Murata Sayaka under review:

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Japanese literature
See Index of Erotic, Pornographic, and Sex-related books

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About the Author:

Japanese author Murata Sayaka (村田沙耶香) was born in 1979.

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