A Vanishing World
Reading Murata in context of Alone in Japan
There is a question that haunts Tom Feiling’s Alone in Japan - our Wabi Sabi Bookclub read this month, though he never quite asks it directly. Beneath all the data about falling birth rates and emptying villages, beneath the hand-wringing of politicians and the grief of the last inhabitants of dying towns, the question sits quietly: what would it take to fix this, and would the remedy be worse or better than the situation as it is?
Sayaka Murata, writing a decade before Feiling, has already answered this question. Her answer is in her novel Vanishing World recently released in the UK.
Vanishing World is set in a version of Japan where sex between married couples has vanished and all children are born by artificial insemination.  The birth rate, in this alternative history, is doing fine. The demographic crisis has been solved. Women are no longer under pressure to couple in the old ways, to subordinate desire to duty, to produce children through intimacy with men they may not want. In this world, much of what we think of as innate and important is vanishing; family is redefined, love is redefined, the body itself is redefined. 
This post continues below for members of the Wabi Sabi Inner Circle — full essays, guided meditations, and the reading group, for £5 a month.This little income is important to me as a part time worker and carer and I appreciate each and every paid subscription. 🌸
Dystopia or Utopia?
When Murata began writing this novel, she has said, she was thinking about her friends, women who were marrying people they met through algorithms, filtered in advance for compatibility, and then describing how alienating physical intimacy with those people felt. She wanted, she said, to create a utopia for her friends.
Vanishing World is a cunning inversion of her novel Convenience Store Woman. Both are literary platforms for arguments about sex and relationships and family structures; both are savagely thorough and deadpan funny.  But where Convenience Store Woman gives us Keiko, a woman who feels no desire, who is persecuted for her contentment; Vanishing World gives us Amane, a woman born the old way, through physical love between two people, in a world that has moved past all of that. Amane is the deviant now. She is the one out of step.
A prescient novel?
Vanishing World asks us to believe in a reality where sexual desire is muted, love is not essential, and biology no longer determines who can give birth.  And yet Amane cannot quite let go of something older, stranger, more inconvenient. She keeps feeling things the society around her has decided are unnecessary. Embarrassing, almost primitive feelings.
Murata is doing something very precise here, and it connects directly to what Feiling documents in his non-fiction.
The novel sits with the discomfort of knowing that women have been constrained by old structures and that dismantling those structures does not automatically produce freedom.
Murata’s prevailing theme across all her work is the notion that “normal” is not innate but an artificial construct imposed by society.  In Vanishing World, she pursues this to its most challenging end. The society Amane inhabits has reorganised around a new normality one that looks, from outside, like liberation. No more female bodies as vessels of obligation. No more reproductive coercion. No more of the structures Feiling watches collapse in real-world Japan.
But the novel is a satirical examination of society’s obsession with efficiency and control, critiquing the dehumanising effects of the pursuit of perfection.  The new normality is still a normality. It still produces outsiders. It still has edges, and people fall off them.
There is a line in the novel that stays with me: “Normality is the creepiest madness there is.” It works in every direction. The old normality, women as wives, mothers, invisible sustainers, is creepy madness. The new normality, desire excised, reproduction administered, family restructured into something more like a managed community, is also creepy madness. What Murata refuses to offer is the alternative. The sane thing. The world where women simply exist, fully, without being required to contort themselves around whatever society currently needs from them.
That refusal to resolve is, I think, where her feminism lives, in the persistence of the question.
Reading both books together
What I find most remarkable, placing Vanishing World alongside Alone in Japan, is how precisely they illuminate each other across the gap between fiction and non-fiction.
Feiling watches Japan empty and asks: what happened? Vanishing World asks: what if the structures changed instead? What if we built a world the politicians claim to want, sustainable birth rates, functional families, but without demanding the old female sacrifice to get there?
Murata’s answer is not necessarily hopeful, but it is not despairing either. It is something more useful: it is honest. The structures change, but the pressure to conform to them does not. The institution adapts, but the outsider remains. There is always someone like Amane, born the wrong way, feeling the wrong things, unable to dissolve herself into whatever collective society has decided is clean and normal and good.
The feminist insight that both books share, in their very different registers is that the problem was never really about birth rates. It was never about women’s choices. It was about the relentless pressure on women to make their inner lives useful to systems that were never designed around them and a system designed by men that is no longer viable.
Both declining birth rates and changing sexual mores among younger generations tend to go hand-in-hand in the minds of cultural traditionalists, with the solution coming down to one basic edict: people need to have more sex in order to have more babies.  Murata builds an entire novel around the absurdity of that premise. What if they did have more babies just differently? Would anyone be satisfied? Would Amane be free? She would not, and that, I think, is the point.
A note for your reading
Vanishing World was published in Japan in 2015, a decade before it appeared in English which means Murata was imagining this world long before AI companions, algorithmic matching, and falling intimacy rates became the dominant anxieties of our cultural conversation. Reading it now feels less like fiction and more like a letter that arrived ten years late, addressed to exactly this moment.
Don’t forget you can order any of the books mentioned here with The Honnomushi Cat Bookshop at a 20% discount just add code WABISABI20
