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.
By 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.
A bleak, funny vision of a future where our sad world gets a lot worse ... The ideas animating the novel might be weird, but Murata’s flat style, and the disappointing final pages, leave Vanishing World feeling a little bloodless. It reads at times like an overstretched thought experiment of societal collapse, a social conservative’s nightmare of the death of the family unit.
