This week we’re taking a closer look at Powell’s Pick of the Month Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
I’ve had some memorable conversations with my book club (which has been running for six years now!), but the most memorable evening I’ve spent with them, we spent arguing over Sayaka Murata’s novel,
Earthlings. We were out at a restaurant, a near-empty carafe of wine and bucket of fries on the table between us, debating whether the ending was deranged in a good way or a bad way.
I argued that it was deranged in a good way and I maintain that position — anyone in my book club who continues to disagree with me continues to be wrong.
Anyone in my book club who continues to disagree with me continues to be wrong.
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I won’t spoil it for you, but I will say: that ending had me so stoked for Murata’s new story collection,
Life Ceremony, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, and more than prepared for the way those stories interrogate what it means to be a human being living in a gross meatsack of a body, surrounded by other gross meatsacks.
Which isn’t what all of the stories are about, but it does seem like Murata is intent on exploring the disconnect between body and mind, especially in a world that only furthers that fracturing.
The twelve stories in this collection press the mundane up against the bizarre — similar to her slim novella,
Convenience Store Women, which made her main character more inscrutable the more she insisted on continuing her monotonous routines. In all of her books, Murata explores social customs, morals, taboos, and consumer culture in a world where what seems acceptable and normal is constantly shifting like tectonic plates.
Murata explores social customs, morals, taboos, and consumer culture in a world where what seems acceptable and normal is constantly shifting like tectonic plates.
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Take the title story, for example: a young woman goes to a “life ceremony” to honor a recently deceased manager. “Life ceremonies,” it turns out, are (oddly sexual) rituals where the recently deceased are consumed via hotpot. (A quote from that story: "I mean, normal is a type of madness, isn't it? I think it's just that the only madness society allows is called normal.") Then there’s the story where human hair is considered the finest, most desirable material to wear as clothing. (“What could be more normal than making people into clothes or furniture after they die?”) Or the story where a woman identifies as a building, not a human. Or the story where a curtain is maybe being taken advantage of.
Just to name a few telling examples.
Life Ceremony is visceral and lovely, erotic and thoughtful, distressing and consuming. More than anything: this collection is fun. Grab a copy, go out for some hotpot, grab yourself a human-knit sweater. We’re all just meatsacks, out here trying to do our best.