Vanishing World is like The Handmaid’s Tale on acid ... Murata deploys both visceral language and body horror ... Murata’s trick is to build a vividly detailed world around a topsy-turvy premise, and trace its contradictory effects with deadpan conviction ... Amane’s childhood frankness evolves into a forthright curiosity in adulthood, her blunt narration — sometimes comic, sometimes cruel, laced throughout with piercing imagery — whisking you along an eye-popping plot ... It all builds to a finale more luridly transgressive than feels necessary — but Murata is not in the business of either realism or restraint ... Although too extreme to be wholly persuasive, it invites us to consider how reproductive gender equality could transform society, with chilling ramifications.
An intimate and disturbing speculative tale in which social isolation and population control are taken to extremes ... Propels the narrative to an explosive and haunting conclusion ... Murata’s blunt and bizarre humor is on full display...as is her incisive commentary on contemporary Japan. This nightmarish fable is impossible to shake.
Murata took her quietly radical ideas about marriage, sex and conformity and only made them louder in Earthlings. Vanishing World appears to go even further, set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples is taboo.
A great conceit filled with unrealized potential ... 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.
