- A first-rate material - Nana shows off her jumper made of human hair. It's normal to have human remains used in furniture etc, but her fiancé Naoki objects to it. He didn't get on with his now dead father. His mother gives Nana a veil made from the father's skin, showing a scar caused by Naoki. Naoki agrees to let her wear it at their wedding. She holds his hand, his skin not yet made into material.
- A magnificent spread - The narrator and her husband eat trendy "Space" food because he wants to. For years her sister Kimi has been preparing meals for herself that are eaten in a Magical City she believes in. She's engaged to Keiichi. The sisters, Keliichi and his parents have a meal - their first meeting. The parents bring a present of food from their region - worms. Keiichi likes a limited range of trash food. They talk about how you have to trust the person giving you food, how you need to buy into the culture. Can Keiichi and Kimi live together? The narrator's husband arrives, fresh from a multi-cultural conference and likes all the food.
- A summer night's kiss - Yoshina, 75, never even kissed her now dead husband. She had 2 daughters by AI. A friend says eating warabimochi is like kissing a boy. She gets Yoshina to eat one. [only 4 pages]
- Two's family - Yoshiko, 70, goes to visit Kikue (who has cancer) in hospital. They met at school and have been living together for 40 years, with 3 daughters by AI. They're not lesbians - Yoshina is shy; Kikue has had many male lovers and is still on the look-out. Do they love each other? Yoshiko has no-one else now the children have gone. Kikue writes poetry in a notebook. The final paragraph is "The snow grew heavier, painting the world white outside the window. "It's so beautiful, isn't it?" Kikue said, leaning forward like a child. In the moment, the indigo notebook slipped from her wrinkled hands and, as though slowly flapping its wings, fluttered under the bed"
- The time of the large star - she and her father move to a place where nobody needs sleep. She meets a boy and tries to get them to dream together. She suggests that they leave. He points out that they'll never need sleep again. She hopes that one day they'll faint together [3 pages]
- Poochie - Yuki keeps a pet, Poochie, in a hut up a mountain. She invites schoolfriend Mizuho to help with feeding etc. It's a man on all fours, their fathers' age. Yuki had found him in the city's business centre. He's not chained up. One day he disappears to the city and comes back.
- Life ceremony - Women hear that an ex-colleague has died and are invited to his funeral. The custom is to eat the dead person. The population is shrinking. At funerals it's become the custom to pair off and try to have a child. Public sex is the norm. She goes to the funeral with a male colleague who she smokes with. No sex. She thinks that morals are fake. He thinks the world is a delusion. He dies in a traffic accident. She helps his mother and sister with the life ceremony meal. He's left recipes including a meatball recipe unsuitable for gamey, human meat. The event goes well. She thinks she might come to like the idea after all. She takes left-overs to a beach for a picnic. A gay talks to her. He goes away and returns with a semen sample for her. On the beach several couples are inseminating. She walks into the sea and uses the sample. [42 pages]
- Body magic - Ruri and Shiho are school friends. Ruri is tall and has breasts. Shiho looks pre-pubescent, having sex with her cousin yearly - they plan to marry. Ruri reacts to rude schoolroom talk. Shiho rises above it. When Ruri describes to Shuhi a strange feeling she once had when asleep, Shiho explains to her what an orgasm's like. She tries to induce it while awake. To me it sounds more like a non-sexual peak-experience.
- Lover of the breeze - It begins with "Naoko calls me Puff, because I puff up in the wind and billow in the breeze". Naoko (female) brings Yukio to her room. They kiss. The curtain (it's his PoV) feels a breeze as Yukio moves his arms. Naoko and Yukio sleep together. When Naoko's out of the room, the curtain blows over Yukio. He thinks it's Naoko. Later Naoko breaks up with him because she's always liked someone else. She embraces the curtain. The curtain missed Yukio.
- Puzzle - At work, Sanae has a reputation for being nice to everybody. She's interested in people's secretions and excretions. She likes the fug of crowded trains. She feels lifeless, like a building - her heart feels like a separate creature; "All the people crawling around in the world were the shared internal organs of all the gray buildings like herself". She feels suddenly less alienated. People think she's in love. She helps Yuka who's just finished a relationship with an obsessive man. Yuka invites Sanae to her flat. Her ex turns up who tells Yuka that Sanae is wierd. Sanae thinks that he's her heart, and Yuka a walking stomach. She hugs the ex - "as long as the pieces of the puzzle fit perfectly together, we can all live together forever", even if the pieces themselves are strange.
- Eating the city - The hot office-block air reminds Rina, 26, of childhood summer holidays in the mountains where her father grew up, eating vegetables. She dislikes shop vegetables. Her friend Yuki is influenced by her nostalgia. Rina searches for fresh plants in the city, feels like a wild animal, sees people as "Two-legged animals", feels "the body heat of a vending machine". She becomes obsessed with digging up and eating dandelions. She wants to tempt Yuki into seeing the world in this new way. The penultimate paragraph is nearly a repeat of the story's second paragraph, without spaces. She's talking to Rina. "Little by little the memories slipped into Yuki's body and wriggled around in her innards ... we would start to live a wholesome existence together in this world teeming with life"
- Hatchling - Haraka (the 1st person PoV) is going to marry Masashi. At school she was teased for being clever, so she pretended to be a Peabrain. "at university, I realised that I didn't have a personality of my own", she recalls. Then she was treated as a Princess, then as a tomboy. She blended in, wanting to be liked. People who saw her in two contexts thought her two-faced. She asks her friend Aki, the only one who knows about her 5 personae, to speak at her wedding. She's worried that at the wedding her husband will see her 5 personae as she talks to different friends. She shows Haraka her 5 personae and asks him to choose. He's upset. She shows him a 6th, less pleasant persona prepared for her by Aki, one that says she didn't like herself, that she wanted to be loved and took revenge on the world, on Haraka. Haraka suggests that he change too. They're happy.
- A clean marriage - Having found a husband online 3 years before, the first-person woman, Mizuki (33), agrees to have a child with him. They have a clean relationship - no sex with each other, though they have sex partners. He dumps his lover who angrily, mockingly, phones Mizuki. The couple undergo a procedure. Her husband's urged to push out semen and is congratulated. She is impregnated. Afterwards he has something "just like morning sickness".
Bodies, secretions, depersonalisation, non-standard fertilisation, separation of sex from love; questioning Real Selves; the connection between Body and Mind, Body and the World, Mind and Others.
Other reviews
- Zachary Houle (Life Ceremony can be sometimes weird for weirdness’s sake, and some of the stories mine a concept but then does absolutely nothing with that concept)
- Alison Fincher ( “A Magnificent Spread” [] is the funniest story in the collection and almost certainly the least disturbing ... “A Clean Marriage” is maybe the most typical of all Murata’s work to appear in English. It takes up motifs that appear in her work again and again: sexless relationships, asexual reproduction, unconventional families, and a general willingness to defy society’s expectations.)
- Kathleen Rooney (Horror is a genre full of feminist potential. ... its plots often hinging on a disbelieved woman. The female protagonist is the only one who perceives how screwed up a given set of circumstances really is. ... behaviors and customs that their practitioners accept as solid and given are actually arbitrary and relational and could just as easily be seen as silly or abhorrent in a different context.)
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