Vanishing World

I wanted to read this book since the day it came out, but I waited until it would appear in bookstores so I could get it physically since I already have all of Murata's books in physical format... Idk why I didn't want to order it. It didn't appear so I gave up and got it digitally.

I gotta be honest, this is her weakest book I've read. The plot is way too contained, and while sometimes that can be a good thing, here we're given insight into a protagonist that hardly ever considers any outside factors and questions nothing bar one or two things, and those things get extremely repetitive. It feels very dull at points, even if that was the intention, it made the reading experience less enjoyable.

I'll talk about the plot in detail so don't read the rest if you don't want to know almost everything. I'll spoiler the ending though.

We don't really know what type of world the protagonist, Amane, lives in besides a couple of things.

Having babies through sex is now taboo Marriage partners are now considered platonic family, having sexual relations with one is incest. People date while married People have 2d waifus and husbandos to get rid of their sexual desires, some take it seriously some less so Having sex is becoming a rarity, but is still accepted as a way of releasing your sexual desires Other countries outside of Japan allow homosexual marriage partnerships, Japan doesn't Protagonist was conceived through sex - has hangups over it and becomes obsessed with having sex with anyone she could be with (except her husband)

                   With this list, I've effectively summed up  the first two parts of the book. These few concepts keep being talked about in repetition, as Amane struggles to find her place or stand out in this weird, new world. At times she comes to terms with it, at times she has doubts about it. All of this sounds interesting on paper, but the conversation between Amane and other characters are again... very repetitive. At times the book leans into this cult-ish religion like system of the new world and it seems like the plot would take an interesting direction or the protagonist would come to an interesting conclusion, but it kinda trails off quickly before we get back to the status quo.

Now, taking the ending into account, I guess this book is about normalcy and adaptability less than it is about these strange utopian/dystopian worlds that flip our expectations of love and sex upside down. Murata usually writes female characters that are outcasts in some way, or don't understand why or how the world around them works the way it does, and why everyone is fine with it. This time around, she wrote a character that adapts quickly no matter what, despite her taboo way of being conceived, and struggles to become less normal which is why I assume the ending was what it was. She made a world that was hard for everyone to understand (much like how the normal world is hard for her usual protagonists to deal with), but in this world, her protagonist got to be the one that is completely able to function under its weird frameworks and we got to question ourselves how she's dealing with it. I guess? I think, if I take her whole body of work and compare it with this book, that's the best conclusion I could come to.