Name: Vanishing World
Rating: 3.461538461538462 (13 reviews)
ISBN: 9780802164667

Sayaka Murata

Ginny Tapley Takemori  (Translator)

Vanishing World

ikkychan

Many times I wonder what it would feel like to witness the limitless horizon of an author’s talent—to spectate the countless bursts of insight that seem to erupt from a single book, to lie awake at night, haunted by the genius of a story that dares to question the very foundations of our reality. Time and time again, I’ve found that experience in Sayaka Murata’s work. Reading her books—especially 
 Vanishing World
—is like biting into a perfectly ripe strawberry, only to realize halfway through that the sweetness masks something rotten at its core. You freeze, repulsed, but the taste lingers. You can’t quite tell whether the decay was always there, or if something inside you transformed it. The deeper you chew, the more it turns visceral, repellent, and disorienting. Murata has an uncanny ability to dissect societal norms with surgical precision, often through disturbing, near-clinical lenses. In this novel, she pushes her signature themes—alienation, bodily autonomy, the absurdity of social norms—to even more unsettling extremes. At its center is a girl named Amane, born into a society where the foundational ideas of love, sex, family, and romance are not just shifting—they’re being actively dismantled. In Amane’s world, the nuclear family still exists in form, but its inner logic has been rewritten. Marital sex is discouraged, even criminalized, under the logic that familial relations must remain non-sexual—after all, they argue, you wouldn’t sleep with your sibling, so why would you with your spouse? The label “husband” or “wife” now signifies a domestic, almost platonic partnership. It's not unheard of to hear accusations like, “That’s the sort of thing people only do outside the home. I can’t believe you tried to have sex with your wife!” Children are conceived not through intimacy but via artificial insemination, a process tightly regulated by the state. From adolescence, citizens are fitted with state-mandated contraceptive devices, a rite of passage carried out in government-funded clinics. The aim is clear: control reproduction, remove unpredictability, and sever sex from procreation entirely. This, in turn, reshapes the landscape of human desire. As sexual urges persist, the state encourages citizens to redirect them into para-social relationships—with anime characters, virtual idols, or TV personalities. These imaginary or distant figures become the acceptable outlets for desire. Fascination with real people is still tolerated, even encouraged, but emotional entanglement is carefully cordoned off from traditional romantic frameworks. It's routine to see married couples who maintain affectionate relationships with their respective lovers, and there’s no moral panic surrounding infidelity—because fidelity, as we understand it, has ceased to be a value. Yet even among these sanctioned affairs, physical intimacy has become elusive. Copulation no longer functions as a primary mode of expressing love. In fact, it's unclear what "making love" means anymore in this world. If sex is no longer practiced or valued, what replaces it? The novel doesn’t spell this out, but hints suggest a shift toward non-sexual affection—cuddling, emotional support, cohabitation—detached from physical gratification. In this context, Amane is the anomaly. She still wants sex. She initiates it—both with real lovers and with the para-social figures she worships. She believes it to be an ultimate act of love. But no one around her enjoys it. Her lovers initially comply, charmed by how deeply it seems to move her. Yet their enthusiasm quickly turns into discomfort. They begin to see the act as hollow and emotionally exhausting, like a house chore or school homework that they have to finish. One by one, they drift away—not because they don’t love her, but because they feel inadequate. They fear they are disappointing her, unable to meet her in the space where she believes intimacy lives. Mizuto, one of her lovers, confesses that sex with Amane feels like being devoured—as if she is consuming a part of him, taking something irreplaceable from his body. This devastates Amane. What she had always considered a mutual act of love now seems, through others’ eyes, like an act of selfishness. She begins to question whether she’s simply using their bodies as tools for masturbation. Even her attempts at intimacy with her fictional crushes—her “non-real” lovers—are dismissed by others as meaningless. To them, it's just another form of masturbation, another private compulsion masquerading as connection. This is, I think, where Murata’s writing is at its boldest: she doesn’t just subvert taboos—she inverts them entirely. In Vanishing World, sex within marriage is taboo, equated with incest, while extramarital affairs are normalized and routine. This reversal isn’t just provocative for its own sake. It lays bare the fact that our ideas about intimacy and morality are products of cultural construction. In Murata’s hands, the construction is deliberately alien, even grotesque, to show how fragile our own assumptions are. Murata’s world of government-controlled reproduction and emotionless relationships might remind some readers of classic dystopias like Brave New World, but her take feels darker and more personal. This isn’t a shiny future pretending to be perfect. It’s just bleak. People aren’t free or fulfilled—they seem empty, going through the motions without real connection. There’s no higher ideal driving this society. It’s just rules and routines where love and intimacy have been turned into policies. Like Keiko in Convenience Store Woman and Natsuki in Earthlings, Amane doesn’t quite fit in. She still wants emotional closeness and physical intimacy—things that no longer make sense in the world around her. Her so-called deviance isn’t about sex itself; it’s about wanting real connection. She sees love as something physical, messy, and deeply human, but that kind of love has become outdated, a relic of the past. When her lovers say being with her feels like she’s "devouring" them, it’s not just creepy—it’s sad. What she means as a shared, loving act ends up feeling one-sided and overwhelming. That image of “devourment” says a lot about how people can become tools for each other, used rather than truly seen or loved. The government pushing people to have crushes on fictional characters or distant celebrities sounds absurd, but it also feels strangely close to our own world. With AI companions, virtual idols, and curated online lives, we’re not that far off. Murata seems to ask: What happens when we stop turning to real people for connection? When we choose the safety of fantasy over the risk of being vulnerable with someone real? In the novel, Amane’s partners retreat into these sterilized relationships—ones that demand nothing and offer protection from real feelings. Her rawness, her physical need for closeness, becomes terrifying to them. In this story, bodies aren’t just things people use for sex—they’re monitored, controlled, and turned into problems to be managed. The government implants that prevent pregnancy are just one example. More deeply, they show how desire itself is no longer something people are allowed to own. For Amane, wanting sex becomes a kind of quiet rebellion. For others, it’s uncomfortable, even threatening. Murata explored this kind of tension before in Earthlings, where characters struggled with their bodies as sources of pain or confinement. In Vanishing World, she takes that idea even further. For me, this book depicts Murata’s bleakest ending yet. The title—Vanishing World—feels like more than a reference to a disappearing society. It’s about the disappearance of the very idea that people can belong anywhere without giving up pieces of themselves. Amane isn’t just losing a world—she’s losing the possibility of any world where she could live without fracture. In Convenience Store Woman, Keiko finds a warped kind of peace. In Earthlings, Natsuki escapes. But Amane stays. She sees it all and stays. And in staying, she becomes something else—something not quite human, not quite machine, but fully, heartbreakingly alone. Is there catharsis in this ending? I honestly don’t know. It left me feeling disturbed, shaken, and totally gripped. But that’s Murata’s brilliance. She’s not just critiquing one society—she’s taking aim at all of them. Utopian ideals, traditional values, capitalist roles—they all end up dehumanizing in different ways. If we’re only allowed to exist as workers, parents, spouses, or citizens, then what happens to everything else—the messy, painful, beautiful stuff that makes us who we are?

If you’re not familiar with Murata’s works, you’ll probably find this book deeply disturbing. I’ve read all of her books, and tbh, this one was the one that gave me the chills. It reminded me of the feeling I had when I read 

gender and sexuality, marriage, pregnancy, and womanhood

, truly questioning why people want to get married and have kids. What really unsettled me is the question of how much of what we call “normal” is actually just something we’ve been taught to accept. If society changes enough, the things we consider strange today might become ordinary tomorrow. And if you were born into that world, would you even question it? Or would you simply accept it as normal because you had never known anything else?

That’s probably what gave me the chills the most. 

The scary part isn’t that the world in the book is so different from ours. It’s wondering how easily our own idea of “normal” could change with it.

If you’re not familiar with Murata’s works, you’ll probably find this book deeply disturbing. I’ve read all of her books, and tbh, this one was the one that gave me the chills. It reminded me of the feeling I had when I read The Handmaid’s Tale.

It explores how we see gender and sexuality, marriage, pregnancy, and womanhood, truly questioning why people want to get married and have kids. What really unsettled me is the question of how much of what we call “normal” is actually just something we’ve been taught to accept. If society changes enough, the things we consider strange today might become ordinary tomorrow. And if you were born into that world, would you even question it? Or would you simply accept it as normal because you had never known anything else?

That’s probably what gave me the chills the most. The scary part isn’t that the world in the book is so different from ours. It’s wondering how easily our own idea of “normal” could change with it.

thanks to her ability to examine and push societal taboos—her clarity is so refreshing and thought-provoking—as well as her humor and unique voice, sayaka murata is one of my favorite living writers. as i love her short story "a clean marriage," i was excited to read the premise of this one, and she delivered! maybe i need to read more sex scenes, but i have never seen another writer write sex scenes the way murata does in this book. however, some of the pacing in part 2 flagged a bit and hurt the story for me; while 

 executes the characters' descent from 0–100 perfectly, amane's leaps feel a bit disjointed. that being said, the ending—murata's second best after 

, imo—sticks the landing in a memorable, well-crafted way.

alice

thanks to her ability to examine and push societal taboos—her clarity is so refreshing and thought-provoking—as well as her humor and unique voice, sayaka murata is one of my favorite living writers. as i love her short story "a clean marriage," i was excited to read the premise of this one, and she delivered! maybe i need to read more sex scenes, but i have never seen another writer write sex scenes the way murata does in this book. however, some of the pacing in part 2 flagged a bit and hurt the story for me; while earthlings executes the characters' descent from 0–100 perfectly, amane's leaps feel a bit disjointed. that being said, the ending—murata's second best after earthlings, imo—sticks the landing in a memorable, well-crafted way.

Vanishing World

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