Review by Booklist Review
Murata's fourth and oldest (published in her native Japan in 2015) imported title is again fluidly translated by Takemori. Here Murata disconcertingly disrupts the socially acceptable "norms" of parenthood and family, reinventing sex--which, once upon a time, was necessary for procreation--as an annoyance to be sterilized out of evolution. Amane is unique in that she's the product of "copulation"; her parents fell in love, had sex, got pregnant, and birthed Amane. "Mom, why didn't you use the normal method to get pregnant with me?" Amane asks. "Normal" is artificial semination. "Normal" is falling in love with anime characters. Sex within marriage is incest. "Clean Rooms" are ready for "sexual urges . . . it's a bit like a toilet for eliminating sexual arousal and cleansing your body." Amane, however, has been "cursed" by her mother "with love and sex"; she's even had physical exchanges with a few (reluctant) humans. But "sexuality was evolving," and Amane must adapt--or not. Murata's unnerving fiction creates a disturbingly convincing surreality. Her groupthink future may well already be here.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Murata (Convenience Store Woman) delivers an intimate and disturbing speculative tale in which social isolation and population control are taken to extremes. Amane Sakaguchi lives in an alternate Japan where artificial insemination developed rapidly during WWII and became the de facto method of procreation. As a girl, Amane embraces this new way of life despite her mother's resistance to it (she used the "primitive copulation" method to give birth to Amane). In adulthood, Amane struggles with sexual lust but tries to conform by attending a series of matchmaking parties. She strikes out until at age 31 she meets and marries Saku, with whom she decides to have a child via artificial insemination at 35. Her mother casts doubt on their happiness ("A marriage that goes too smoothly gives me the creeps"), however, and as Amane and Saku each date other people (sexless polyamory is another societal norm), they grapple with the limits placed on their respective desires. Saku eventually convinces her to move to Experiment City in Chiba, where children are raised communally and each citizen is called Mother. Amane senses that something is deeply wrong there, and her quest to rid herself of all her bodily urges propels the narrative to an explosive and haunting conclusion. Murata's blunt and bizarre humor is on full display ("Amane, thanks for eating me," a boyfriend tells her after she swallows his semen), as is her incisive commentary on contemporary Japan. This nightmarish fable is impossible to shake. (Apr.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An ardent young woman navigates a world in which technology has eradicated the need for sex for all but its most devout practitioners. Amane is still a child when she learns the disturbing truth that her mother became pregnant with her through sexual intercourse with her father. In Amane's Japan, technological advances designed to "produce lots of children for the war effort" have replaced traditional modes of conception; sex in general is considered to be old-fashioned and sex between husband and wife is seen as incest. In fact, many of Amane's contemporaries find the idea of partnered sexual gratification so foreign that they are increasingly asexual, forging romantic attachments solely with anime characters. Amane, a rare woman who insists on sex, creates a division between the romantic life she enjoys with both real-life boyfriends and the 40 characters she loves and the sexless family life she's built with her husband, Saku; this works well until Amane's mid-30s. In the throes of a difficult love affair of his own, her husband decides to move to Experiment City, a government-run enclave where the last vestiges of the "family system" are being eradicated in favor of algorithm-controlled breeding. In spite of her doubts, Amane joins him in the name of "the religion of family," but she can't help but bring her belief in the physical union of two bodies along with her. The novel's frank exploration of desire from the perspective of an entire civilization of naïfs exposes some base-level assumptions about the part sexual reproduction plays in society. Unfortunately, the naïveté of the main characters seems to imprint on the novel itself, with the result that even the most potentially incendiary elements of this new world order are explored with neither nuance nor depth. The characters remain suspended in a kind of enforced adolescence--unable to either grow from worldly experience or totally abandon their society's inherited structures and forge something new. A great conceit filled with unrealized potential. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
