Life Ceremony
Stories
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4.0 • 7 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The long-awaited first short story-collection by the author of the cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, tales of weird love, heartfelt friendships, and the unsettling nature of human existence
With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.
In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader’s interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In “A First-Rate Material,” Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can’t stand the conventional use of deceased people’s bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. “Lovers on the Breeze” is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child’s bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. “Eating the City” explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while “Hatchling” closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in.
In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this off-kilter collection, Murata (Convenience Store Woman) brings a grotesque whimsy to her fables of cultural norms. Eating habits are a recurring theme. In "A Magnificent Spread," a woman plans to serve strange dishes from her imaginary kingdom, "the magical city of Dundilas," at a gathering for her fiancé's parents, who have their own dietary preferences. The moral, it seems, is that one shouldn't impose one's culture on other people. The title story is set in an alternate Japan with an endangered human population, which has led to the macabre custom of eating deceased people at their funerals and then finding an "insemination partner." In "Eating the City," a forager prowls Tokyo for local greens—dandelions, mugwort, fleabane—in an effort to develop a closer connection to the urban jungle. Seeing a homeless person on one of her outings, she reflects: "I was probably more a feral human than he was." The final story, "Hatchling," presents a reductive take on the difference between one's social persona and one's authentic self. The wooden dialogue adds to the sense of comic defamiliarization, which produces the kind of laughs that catch in the throat. Like the author's novels, this brims with ideas though it's less enchanting.
