In Japanese literary sensation Sayaka Murata’s novel Vanishing World, sex between married couples (both for pleasure and for procreation) has all but vanished. In response to a largely absent male population throughout the Second World War, extensive research and development of artificial insemination practices subsumed Japan’s medical and scientific community, inevitably supplanting natural conception within families altogether. As artificial insemination among married couples became increasingly commonplace, sex between married couples devolved to a taboo akin to incest.
Though an alien, quasi-asexuality has largely become the norm in Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World, some, like the novel’s conflicted protagonist, Amane, find themselves still drawn to the “old ways” of conventional sexuality and chafe against this new, sexless world. As a product of “sexual copulation” between her parents, Amane, from an early age, feels a stark sense of estrangement from her artificially conceived, sexually disinterested classmates.
Amane, like many of her classmates, projects her sexual urges and desires not towards her fellow man, but instead onto fantastical animated characters who function as surrogates for the unfulfilled carnal and romantic desires of her and her classmates. As sex becomes increasingly estranged from familial life and procreation, the borders between sex and masturbation effectively collapse, reducing sex to bodily gratification entirely separated from romantic desire.
Generally unconcerned with the precise machinations a total societal overhaul like this would entail, Sayaka Murata’s work instead sets its gaze on the emotional reality that a complete reconfiguration of sexuality like that in Vanishing World would entail. Unfettered by the conventional constraints of sci-fi worldbuilding and logic, Murata’s writing instead dissects the more profound, cerebral truths of confronting one’s sexuality in an uncompromising, almost alien world. Whereas much of Murata’s previous work, like the international best-selling novel Convenience Store Woman (2016), confronts the profound alienation asexuality can spawn, in Vanishing World, it is Amane’s very presence of sexuality that divorces her from much of the broader society.
While Amane’s intersection of romantic and sexual attraction may be unexceptional through our contemporary lens, in Murata’s Vanishing World, the presence of any semblance of romantic and sexual desire intermingling is an anachronistic occurrence bordering on perverse. Interestingly, while much of romantic and familial relationships in Vanishing World appear wholly divorced from our understanding, certain sensibilities like pervasive heteronormativity and marriages based on pragmatism and convenience remain intact.
Through the novel’s delightful frankness and almost startling emotional sincerity, Sayaka Murata confronts the reader with our own stifled, inflexible understanding of love and life within the nuclear family. During a particularly fraught argument between Amane and her mother, who, like Amane, finds herself naturally drawn to the “old ways” of love and sex, Amane laments, referring to her pursuit of a more familiar romantic and carnal love, “Love is about having the courage to be called a pervert!”
As Amane struggles to reconcile her unorthodox sexuality with the newly elastic parameters of family, her hometown of Chiba has been converted into the mysterious Experiment City, a shadowy government project trialing raising children communally as opposed to within stratified nuclear families. Even as the very topography of her hometown adapts to the new, widely accepted modus operandi of forging familial bonds, Amane remains an aberration of the “vanishing world” of an intertwined understanding of sex and love.
Though Sayaka Murata originally released Vanishing World in Japan in 2015, its English release, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, coincides with Japan’s “marital ice age” reporting a 90-year low in marriage rates among Japanese youth. In 2023, the Japanese government even founded the Child and Families Agency to address the precipitous decline in young Japanese couples’ marrying and having children, to minimal success. While most young Japanese cite socio-economic issues like high cost of living, childcare, and broader social uncertainty, Vanishing World is a cogent portent of our ever-evolving conception of marriage and family.