Life Ceremony

May 2, 2022
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.

Starred review from June 1, 2022
Once more, internationally bestselling Murata confronts unspeakable topics with quotidian calm, shockingly convincing logic, and creepy humor in a dozen genre-defying stories, translated again by her chosen, Japanese-to-English enabler, Takemori. Death is no longer an ending, full stop, in "A First-Rate Material," in which all body parts of the departed are recycled into clothing, jewelry, and furniture, while in "Life Ceremony," the lifeless are consumed to nourish the living, who then are inspired to procreate immediately after. Sex is replaced by artificial insemination as the preferred method to produce children in "A Summer Night's Kiss" and "Two's Family." Food at a family gathering becomes highly individualized in "A Magnificent Spread": "The spread on the table now included the dishes from the magical city of Dundilas, the high-quality pouches of Happy Future Food, and the various insects." Fantastical impossibility becomes commonplace in "The Time of the Large Star" (sleep no more), "Poochie" (homeless humans as children's pets), "Lover on the Breeze" (a possessively anthropomorphized curtain), and "Puzzle" (a woman's body parts might involve an acrimoniously estranged couple). Then there's an urban forager in "Eating the City" and a woman with five personalities in "Hatchling." Murata groupies will appreciate a glimpse of characters from Earthlings (2020), while readers seeking the undefinable will enjoy these tales immensely.

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Starred review from June 15, 2022
A singular collection that probes the most foundational rituals of human society. "Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone," Yamamoto, an affable 39-year-old businessman, muses. "But...actually, they're always changing....It's always been that way." In her debut short story collection, the author of Convenience Store Woman (2016) investigates the validity of our most basic rituals--how humans eat, marry, procreate, and die--and incisively explores the rich, messy stuff left behind once they're violated. "A First-Rate Material," set in a society that repurposes the body parts of dead people into home goods, features a woman who desperately covets a ring made from human bone despite her fiance's steadfast disapproval. The unsettling "Poochie" features two elementary school girls who adopt a suit-wearing former businessman as a pet; when they suspect his escape, the girls confront the idea of owning any living thing. "A Magnificent Spread" and "Eating the City" unpack the strangeness surrounding food rituals. The title story explores a society whose severe population shrinkage has turned procreation "into a form of social justice," spurring the creation of "life ceremonies"--wakelike celebrations that involve partaking of the deceased's body and finding an "insemination partner" for "copulation." "Recently I'd been getting the feeling that humans had begun to resemble cockroaches in their habits," the dubious businesswoman Maho muses, given their propensity to "gather to 'eat' a deceased one of their number." Still, upon the unexpected death of a close co-worker, she's taken aback by the otherworldly beauty of a final encounter with her friend. Murata's stories are tightly woven and endlessly surprising, with far more going on beneath the surface than is initially evident and surprising moments of unexpected beauty. If there's a drawback, it's that sometimes the characters seem less like three-dimensional people than vehicles for ideas, rendering the collection almost too thematically cohesive. Nonetheless, Murata's writing remains essential and captivating, expertly capturing the fragility of social norms and calling into question what remains of human nature once they're stripped away. Beautiful, disturbing, and thought-provoking.

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July 1, 2022

"Thirty years ago a completely different sense of values was the norm, and I just can't keep up with the changes," moans Maho in the title story of Murata's first collection published in the United States since her 2018 breakout with Convenience Store Woman. What has Maho so flummoxed is the eating of a deceased person's flesh at the joyous celebrations that have replaced funerals, and many of the stories here explore inversions of accepted standards, challenging us to consider why we believe what we believe. Engaged couple Nana and Naoki quarrel because Naoki is repulsed by the use of human bodies for clothes and furniture, which to most people seems both to honor the deceased and to use resources efficiently. In a wily sendup of cross-cultural (mis)understanding, a woman gulps down blue-powdered health drinks with her husband even as she is horrified to learn that her sister plans to cook for her future in-laws--the sister claims to come from the magical city of Dundilas, where the food is decidedly different. But rapprochement is achieved in the end. VERDICT Though a few stories could have been better developed, Murata's premises are always eye-opening, and the result will intrigue and satisfy readers of literary and speculative fiction alike.

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