sayaka murata: whisperer of forsaken feeling

Spoilers for: Convenience Store Woman, Life Ceremony, Clean Marriage

Thank the heavens for Ginny Tapley Takemori, without whom we English monolinguals would never know Sayaka Murata. I knew my bookshelf was about to change when in those first few pages of Convenience Store Woman the narrator recounted a childhood memory in which she’d found a dead bird:

There was the time when I was in nursery school, for example, when I saw a dead bird in the park. It was small, a pretty blue, and must have been someone's pet. It lay there with its neck twisted and eyes closed, and the other children were all standing around it crying. One girl started to ask: "What should we—" But before she could finish I snatched it up and ran over to the bench where my mother was chatting with the other mothers.

"What's up, Keiko? Oh! A little bird ... where did it come from I wonder?" she said gently, stroking my hair. "The poor thing. Shall we make a grave for it?"

"Let's eat it!" I said.

"What?"

The adults glitch in response, as if the narrator’s idea is incomprehensible, but all she’s done is follow the ambient social logic to its natural conclusion: they eat some animals, so it’s okay to eat all animals. The complex rules of sorting animals into type 1: object (food) and type 2: independent entities deserving burial hadn’t taken root in the narrator as it had in the other children.

Later, when her teacher asks someone to stop two classmates from fighting, the narrator reaches for a shovel. Her first instinct is to use force, the same tool adults typically use against children. The complex rules of sorting humans into type 1: object whose behavior should be modified by physical force (children, in the norms of most cultures) and type 2: independent entity who should be treated as both a mind and body, spoken to with words, entreated with arguments, permitted time and space to nurture intrinsic motivation to change (superiors and peers, in the norms of most cultures) hadn’t taken root in the narrator. She’d internalized one of the two logically consistent interpretations of the childhood experience of needing to address adults with words while adults use discipline (pain or coercion) to address children: that it’s okay to address everyone with pain and coercion, including peers, or that it’s okay for anyone to address children with pain and coercion, even a peer.

Throughout the novel the mechanisms of the narrator’s thinking remain consistent, even when the conclusions disturb:

The baby started to cry. My sister hurriedly picked him up and tried to soothe him. What a lot of hassle I thought. I looked at the small knife we'd used to cut the cake still lying there on the table: if it was just a matter of making him quiet, it would be easy enough.

Murata has said in interview that she depicts a world without anger, and further that she lives a life without access to anger. But I find that while nothing on the surface of the rising action suggests a moment of anger (her considering infanticide was, in the moment, neither caused by, accompanied by, nor followed by a change in affect; it was matter-of-fact problem solving), anger is the engine of the novel, and many of her other stories. As soon as the narrator’s anger rises to consciousness and she chooses her own life path as a Convenience Store Woman Animal, rejecting both Shiraha and the cultural expectations to which he (and she, until that moment) was slave, the story ends, having lost its engine.

In her near-future short story Life Ceremony, a woman who grew up in our present time realizes culture has moved on without her. Due to rapid population decline, values have shifted to embrace whatever makes more babies. Sex with strangers with the goal of pregnancy, in public places, is common. Women can keep their infants, or entrust them to a municipal rearing center. Either way, their coworkers greet them on Monday with a "Thank you for your service.”

The public sex was an interesting move. Without it, a society that recognizes the fact that women birthing children is a public service, and that raising them to renew society is society’s shared responsibility rather than an “inborn dream” or “natural vocation” for women (an idea imperial, patriarchal nation states elevate to scripture in order to repress the knowledge that if women organized, they could refuse to produce the next generation until the existing society guaranteed good conditions for mothers and children) risks landing as allegory, or an idealization of historical matriarchal values. Public sex introduces irrationality and exuberance to the future culture, which is necessary to make a culture plausible. A culture without unconscious contradictions would be psychotic. People would walk around saying shit like, “We imprison and forcibly impregnate pigs to have enough to eat—their intergenerational suffering be what it may—but we would never do that to dogs, because our investment in them on a personal level yields returns for our overall reproductive fitness.”

Murata’s management of internal inconsistency extends to the individual. While the narrator carries the expected nostalgia for an era that made more sense to her, and a gut reaction against the new status quo, her desire to connect with those around her threatens to shift her values anyway.

At first the narrator understandably refuses to eat human flesh (cooking the deceased is a new funeral tradition), even though all of her coworkers do it. But then, later, she not only eats it—she cooks it! This is a wild political transition, and she doesn't undergo it because she read an articulate manifesto of the new order, or a shaming polemic against the values of her childhood. (These come from the plane of consciousness and amount to white noise.) What sparks the change is when a close friend leaves a recipe in his will, explaining how he wants to be eaten. Because of their mutual respect, cooking him and inviting people over to get pregnant at his funeral life ceremony became a concrete relational act, exiting the dissociated plane of ideas, where change is impossible, and entering the realm of action, where change is possible.

Murata respects the supremacy of subjectivity. Humans are born with a wide range of instincts, for cooperation or brutality, for honesty or deceit, etc, so that we have the tools necessary to survive and achieve reproductive fitness in a wide range of situations, and reproductive fitness usually means belonging to and having sexual status within a group or culture. The most effective way for the brain to prevent the body from acting in a way that would get it expelled from the group is by occluding the possibility from consciousness and surrounding the action with a fence of shame or disgust. Murata can see that judgements like "eating human flesh is a disturbed behavior" is just the way the human tongue moves when its owner counts itself among a cultural group that employs cannibalism as a boundary issue: if you do that, you’re out. There’s nothing much different, morally, about eating a human being versus eating another sentient animal with the same emotional equipment. A pig can’t speak or do calculus, but it’s got a limbic system, and therefore the experience of both love and fear. Plenty of cultures eat people, and if you eat animals, you already demonstrate the repressive capacity to mute whatever concern you’d have for the human who becomes food. And that’s adaptive!

Hand a lesser writer the premise of Life Ceremony and you'd get a story in which characters argue about the pros and cons of this near-future culture. A lesser writer, less in touch with the heart, would get lost in the realm of logic and symbols, but logic isn’t the substrate of human life.

Most disturbing among her stories is not the notorious Earthlings, which has a cumulative numbing effect, but Clean Marriage, published in Granta in 2014.

The A plot is that a married couple which has very intentionally never introduced sex to their relationship wants a child. A service and technology called Clean Breeder promises to help them conceive without sex. The wife and narrator prefers it because the artificial insemination process would be harder on her body, and the husband, in spite of hesitations relating to the vague marketing speak and a strong aversion to any sexual contact or sexual vibes of any kind with the narrator, agrees. But it turns out Clean Breeder is just some nurses jacking her husband off with a fleshlight and sticking his dick in her at the last second. Afterward, the couple floats in a daze, and we conclude on a reference to the B plot which offers a clue to interpret that daze.

In the B plot, the narrator’s husband’s lover harasses her by sending her pictures of the two having sex, under the mistaken impression the content will anger or hurt the narrator. This does a lot of craft work, in a story-telling sense. That the lover can’t understand the asexuality of the marriage situates the couple against the norms of the story world. It tells us they’re still an uncommon type, even if their type is big enough to constitute a market for Clean Breeder. Further, the content of the photos (age play, in which the husband plays baby), suggest a reason for his desire to be free of sexuality at home: his sexuality is of a kind he needs distance from most of the time. It’s emotionally complex.

Both the narrator and husband want to compartmentalize their sexuality. Another person’s sexuality influencing when or how they have to enter the mood unsettles them:

My husband wanted to ban all sex from our home. That was fine by me.

‘As far as I’m concerned, sex is an act you indulge in alone in your own room, or deal with outside. In some homes the partners come home tired from work and have sex together, but I am completely averse to this,’ he said.

‘So am I,’ I said. ‘Sex is fine during the early stages of a love affair, but as time goes on and you’re living together, it’s horrible when your partner feels you up when you’re asleep, or he suddenly comes on to you when you’re relaxing. I want to be able to turn my sexual desires on and off when I please, and to keep the switch off at home.’

‘That’s precisely what I think. I’m relieved to know I’m not the only one who’s abnormal.’

It’s only because of that B plot adding some depth to the sexuality her husband needs to keep in a lockbox that the reference at the end—the young girl shouting for her mom, like he himself did in the videos sent to the narrator by his lover—drags the whole thing into the light. The Clean Breeder followed by the reminder of his age play (whether he knows his wife knows or not) destroys the boundary he erected between his two faces. Now when in the company of his wife, he cannot inhabit his comfortable, sexually dissociated identity to the exclusion of all others. She’s seen this other side of him, so when he performs the natural mental act of intuiting how she sees him, these two sides that can’t be reconciled emerge in the conscious fore at the same time. He vomits.