Reading Sayaka Murata was quite a journey, and is not for the faint of heart. I’ll go in order that I read them:

Convenience Store Woman
I absolutely loved this, and I think it was incredibly successful in getting its point across. The main character is probably autistic, and has had a hard time figuring out the guidelines to society. She gets a literal manual on how to act when she gets her job at the convenience store, and that’s the first time she starts to feel like she belongs. Everyone has an opinion about her lifestyle, and yet we as the readers never stop rooting for her to live life exactly how she should. Brilliantly done!

Earthlings
I don’t think that this book was anywhere near as successful as the first one. The main character challenges society in her own way after being SA’d by her teacher, and she then turns to incest with her cousin. She then ends up in an unconventional marriage with someone who only furthers some of her delusions. I really think that the point could have been made without the incest. I’ll be real, the murder didn’t bother me and I think that could have been a more interesting avenue to explore than the one it did. Not a fan of this one!

Vanishing World
90% of this book was SO GOOD, and I wanted to love it at the full 100%, but the ending REALLY ruined everything for me. Most of the story was so successful – Sayaka Murata set up a future society where artificial intelligence is so advanced, available and normalized, that marriages have become completely platonic and sex is almost obsolete. There’s so much to say about how this book really challenges the idea of a normal family, advancements of science, and what becomes cultural norms and traditions. There’s even an Experiential City, which is essentially a commune, that the main character and her husband go to towards the end of the book. So many great concepts, all to be ruined at the very end where the main character SA’s a child. This obviously ruined the book for me if I’m being honest, which is so disheartening considering how good the world building was. Ugh!

Life Ceremony
This is a collection of stories that feel almost like small pitches for the novels of Sayaka Murata’s that I’ve already read. All of these stories center around a piece of society that differs from our present in a somewhat shocking way, yet it has been normalized. I would say that the point of all of Sayaka Murata’s work is to showcase how anything at all can be normalized if everybody normalizes it. I think there are certain stories that do this successfully than others, and in this collection I loved the first one and the one in which the book was named after, although I enjoyed almost all of them.

Thanks for reading!