PositiveThe Wall Street JournalBy making normalcy itself so strange, Ms. Murata offers her readers an alien eye of their own, a way of noticing the illogical demands of the everyday reality we accept ... There is certainly a sense of the miraculous in play in Vanishing World ... Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori into clear, even simple English prose, which renders the novel all the more troubling and grants the reader little room to hide ... The reader who has followed Ms. Murata’s provocative fiction will find in Vanishing World cruder versions of ideas she has explored more delicately elsewhere ... Offers, like all of this writer’s books, something you just can’t find anywhere else.
