Overview

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But Amane's parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can't help questioning what sex and marriage are for. But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?

Full Product Details

9781803511191

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Reviews

Makes the ordinary world as we see it look strange again... Publishers will continue to seek out imitations of [Sayaka's] vision - but why bother, when the real thing is so good? * Financial Times * In the imagination of Sayaka Murata, nothing seems to be off limits... Like The Handmaid's Tale on acid... It invites us to consider how reproductive gender equality could transform society, with chilling ramifications * New York 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... A reminder of how quickly even the strangest ideas can become convention * Guardian * Japanese fiction leads a boom in translated novels and Murata is its queen, striking a chord around the world with her weird tales of urban alienation under patriarchy and capitalism... Fit to burst with eye-popping twists and conceits... A typically wild ride * Daily Mail * Murata is a phenomenon... Vanishing World could not have arrived at a more fitting moment, given the Trump administrations' preoccupation with women's bodily autonomy... Murata's brilliantly unsettling ending will leave you reeling and questioning your own beliefs * Stylist * Japan's answer to Brave New World... Murata has the uncanny prescience of the best sci-fi writers * Daily Telegraph * Quirky and thought-provoking * Grazia * A bleak, funny vision of a future where our sad world gets a lot worse * Sunday Times * Through her fiction, Ms. Murata has resolutely explored the strangeness of the cultural practices we otherwise consider ordinary... For those who feel haunted by the whole idea of the normal, Vanishing World offers, like all of this writer's books, something you just can't find anywhere else * Wall Street Journal *

Author Information

Sayaka Murata has won all of Japan's major literary prizes. She is author of Convenience Store Woman, Earthlings and Life Ceremony. Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated Ryu Murakami and Kyoko Nakajima, among others.

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