From the author of Convenience Store Woman, a novel about a young girl who doesn't fit into the stifling society around her and comes to believe that she is an alien from another planet.
Murata’s latest novel...continues to explore life on the fringes in Japan through an even darker and weirder lens, one that will take most readers on a wild ride far beyond the outermost limit of their comfort zones ... so much of the story’s grotesque joy depends on the surprise at just how perverse things can get ... It is a book that must be experienced firsthand, but it is also a book for which a single trigger warning would not be adequate, as it enthusiastically challenges most of our most deeply held societal taboos ... Whereas Murata’s goal with Convenience Store Woman may have been to gently unsettle her readers, it’s clear that Earthlings’ mission is to actively disturb. By disrupting her readers’ complacency, Murata allows us to better empathize with the misfits she champions. As her characters’ unease and discomfort becomes our own, we gain greater awareness of how it feels to be an outsider looking in ... The journey is often rather harrowing and bewildering and will appeal to few readers. But for adventurous readers who revel in a book that defies expectations and dares to be outlandishly different, Earthlings is a mind- and soul-expanding countercultural battle cry that is utterly one of a kind.
As sole narrator, Natsuki relates all this in a spare, blunt tone that appears to hide nothing. The transparency of Murata’s prose and dialogue is jarring, seeming to rob the reader of all rights to interpretation. Yet what it really does is repeatedly throw us off balance—such matter-of-factness is dizzying. What are we to think of a character who has earned our sympathy yet whose unflinching take on a parent’s grief is: 'Humans got really worked up when an organism that had inherited their genes was killed' ... What happens when they return to Akishina is shocking, hilarious and hugely, darkly entertaining. Murata has crafted an unforgettable, original hybrid of absurd fantasy and stark realism.