Life Ceremony

Sayaka Murata — 2022

From the author of international bestseller Convenience Store Woman comes a collection of short fiction: weird, out of this world and like nothing you've read before. An engaged couple falls out over the husband's dislike of clothes and objects made from human materials; a young girl finds herself deeply enamoured with the curtain in her childhood bedroom; people honour their dead by eating them and then procreating. Published in English for the first time, this exclusive edition also includes the story that first brought Sayaka Murata international acclaim: 'A Clean Marriage', which tells the story of a happily asexual couple who must submit to some radical medical procedures if they are to conceive a longed-for child. Mixing taboo-breaking body horror with feminist revenge fables, old ladies who love each other and young women finding empathy and transformation in unlikely places, Life Ceremony is a wild ride to the outer edges of one of the most original minds in contemporary fiction.

Reviews

p.@softrosemint

Oct 5, 2023

Sayaka Murata, you're the world to me, and I will visit you in jail if your Google Docs get seized.

Murata - and I feel like I have said this before - is one of those writers completely haunted by the formative events of their lives. They pick and unpick them through repeated themes in their works, working out the different ways to approach them.

In that sense, the short stories in "Life Ceremony" could hardly be surprising for people familiar with Murata's previous works, with some of them making direct references to the remainder of her oeuvre (and between themselves). But they are still just as effective in representing issues of modern society and issues of womanhood and sexuality. And in fact, the self-referencial nature of the stories begins to create the impression that each one of us is an outlier in society and that we are all finding our own ways to existing and survive within the strict set of moral rules imposed upon us by society where society is each other.

"Life Ceremony" asks a number of questions on companionship, interpersonal relationships, the restrictions of being a woman in a world obsessed with your ability to produce children - and does it in creative and visceral ways that do not shy away from the grossness of human bodies. One of the more straightforward reads is "Hatchling" which reminded me of this interview of Murata with Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/09/sayaka-murata-i-acted-how-i-thought-a-cute-woman-should-act-it-was-horrible); it seems to be a direct interpretation of her own experience and what she has seen in the world around her. "Two's Family" and "A Clean Marriage" also seem to make an observation on traditional gender roles and societal structures.

Murata is just extraordinarly good at using her characters' inner worlds in order to make an observation on wider society and for that alone it is worth approaching her work with an open mind.

My favourite entries in the collection were "Life Ceremony", "Two's Family", "Eating the City", "Hatchling" and "A Clean Marriage"