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Sayaka Murata (author), Ginny Tapley Takemori (translator), Life Ceremony, Granta Books, 2022. 266 pgs.

A human heart, resting on a bed of rice noodles, omelette, and strips of raw beef, is what drew me to Life Ceremony, a collection of stories by Sayaka Murata. And as this striking cover image suggests, this collection is not for those with a weak stomach.

In the opening story, “A First-Rate Material”, Murata depicts a world in which human body parts are used for clothing and furniture. This is followed by “A Magnificent Spread”, in which a family sit down to the most incongruous feast I’ve encountered in fiction. From the “dandelion stems braided and simmered in orange juice” to the “freeze-dried vegetables … with bright blue dressing”, the spread both intrigues and repulses the reader. And all this is before the story about cannibalism.

But despite first impressions, the reader quickly acclimatises to the strange balance of grotesque and sentimental that is typical of Murata’s writing. Some stories are more light-hearted narrative experiments. “Lover on the Breeze”, for example, is the simple story of a teenage relationship that blossoms and dies, told from the perspective of a jealous bedroom curtain named Puff. There is sadness in this story, but the kind synonymous with young romance, and this story is a brief respite from the deeper and more unsettling explorations of the human condition.

Across this diverse collection of speculative character studies, Murata straddles an uncomfortably fluid boundary between reality and dystopia. At its most dystopian points, Life Ceremony tests alternative models of morality that could be no more distant than those of a century ago. The title story, for example, depicts a society in which “insemination” is performed openly in a ceremonial fashion after funerals. As the protagonist muses:

“[B]ack in the old days, it was good manners to wear a condom when you had sex. Do that now, and you’re told off for copulating for pleasure and not in order to give birth to new life.“

And as her partner reflects:

“It’s the way the world is, right? Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone. But that’s not true—actually, they’re always changing… Things keep transforming.“

This is speculative fiction at its best, because, by including characters who can recall a time when things were different, the reader is eased into the dystopian vision, as though we too have experienced this gradual shift. And so, it is not an alternate world we are immersed in, but a vision of our own possible future.

“A First-Rate Material” is similarly alarming and immersive. Taking place in a society that uses human body parts to produce commodities, the story is focalised through a character whose attitude toward this practise is in flux. An argument encapsulates this conflict:

“It’s sacrilegious! I can’t believe you’re so unfazed by using items hacked from dead bodies.”

“Is using other animals any better? This is a precious and noble aspect of the workings of our advanced life-form—not wasting the bodies of people when they die, or at least having one’s own body still being useful. Can’t you see how wonderful it is?… It’s a waste to throw them away… isn’t that more sacrilegious?”

However, while this vision is disturbing, Murata hints at what may also be arcane or hypocritical in our current reality—where bone jewellery, skin rugs and leather garments are synonymous with luxury, but the idea of using human parts is seen as “barbaric”. Here, by juxtaposing moral frameworks, Murata tests our ideas of civilisation and decency. Murata pushes this experiment further still, depicting human donors who envision the transformation of their body as a bizarre form of afterlife. By weighing fashionable concepts like sustainability against societal taboos, Murata highlights the central premise: that human morals and ideologies cannot be quantified, compared, or reduced.

“Life Ceremony” makes explicit the most challenging theme of the collection: cannibalism. In a playful exploration, this title depicts a society in which cannibalism is celebrated as a way to honour the dead and initiate new life, and, practically, as a cheap alternative to a funeral. Characters speak openly of their culinary preferences and exchange tips:

“I bet Mr Nakao tastes good,” said a woman a year older than me as she ate her pork and potato stew.

“Maybe a bit tough, don’t you think? He was thin and muscular after all.”

“I’ve eaten someone with a similar physique to Mr Nakao before, and he was actually quite tasty. A bit stringy, maybe, but smooth on the tongue.”

“Really? They say you get a better soup stock from men, don’t they?”

As with the other stories, Murata eases us into this confronting dystopia through the lens of a protagonist who is similarly repulsed. But an ironic twist is introduced when we meet a character who isn’t opposed to the practice on moral grounds, but because he once “suffered a bout of food poisoning after eating some slightly raw flesh”. Here, Murata forces the reader to challenge, not the correctness, but the complexity of our values, ideas, and impulses. In this case, the story interrogates taken for granted concepts like disgust, highlighting its reflexive, psychological, and psychosocial aspects.

There is more to the collection’s use of cannibalism than its shock value, and this theme permeates beyond the title story. While “Life Ceremony” is the most explicit exploration of this taboo, other stories in the collection toy with the idea of something cannibalistic in the way we influence, admire, and love. In “Eating the City”, the protagonist’s attempt to win over a friend to her newfound foraging lifestyle resembles a predator alluring its prey:

I had to gently and caressingly stimulate her empathy and slowly, slowly, pull her over to my world… to infiltrate her mind with some feral sensations…

I now felt as though I was beginning to eat the city in a different sense than before. Once I had finished marinating Yuki, how would I get started on the next person.

In choosing “Life Ceremony” as a title story, Murata points to a commonality in the way we build relationships, by “consuming” the ideas and essence of others, which is either “feral” and perhaps disturbing, or wholesome and symbiotic, again depending on the character or reader’s framework. Whether used explicitly or figuratively, “eating” is a metaphor for the human condition—illuminating our relationships to each other, to our cognitive frameworks, and to our environments.

In “A Magnificent Spread”, for example, ideologies are pitched against one another, as in-laws are forced to contend with each other’s idiosyncratic eating habits. On one level, the story questions ideas of taste. There’s the “green artificial rice in a Tupperware box” of the super-food fanatic, and the “grubs stewed in soy sauce and syrup” of the traditionalist, each dish as revolting as the next, and accepted only by those who “believe” in it. As each cuisine represents a different lifestyle and value structure, Murata highlights the inseparability of food and ideology. This plays out also in the story’s parody of social etiquette. Presented with dish after dish, the characters politely decline each other’s offerings, desperate not to offend, confronting the reader with arcane notions of civility.

This dinner party setting thus develops into as a platform through which to explore deeper societal frameworks. Food becomes a way in to discussions around marriage, family loyalty, and heritage. In this story, I am reminded of Leung Ping-kwan’s collection, Islands and Continents, which similarly uses food to examine ideas of tradition and multiculturalism in contemporary Hong Kong. However, while in Leung’s work, multiculturalism is a converging force, in “A Magnificent Spread”, food sparks debate around the value of separateness. As one character says:

“What people eat is part of their own culture. It’s the culmination of their own unique personal life experiences. And it’s wrong to force it on other people… We don’t have to eat out of the same pot to understand each other.”

While other characters disagree, clinging to tradition, the resolution of this story is a profound recognition of divergent world-views.

“Eating the City” also uses food to explore human relationships—to each other and to our living environment. A young woman, inspired by childhood memories of mountains, begins to forage in the city. Recalling an almost utopic past, she reflects:

“When you were in that house, you could hear the rustling of the trees and the chirring of insects, which made you feel the overwhelming power of the outside world.”

Here, the casual shift into the second-person draws the reader into her vision, as though we too share the memory of pastoral beginnings. But as the story progresses, instead of a romantic reacquaintance with her roots, the protagonist finds herself “feeling like a pickpocket” or “a scavenging crow”, looked down upon by colleagues, and almost poisoned by the dandelions she plucks from a city park. While her illness is psychosomatic, it feels somehow more serious than a physical ailment, hinting at an irreparable estrangement from the natural world.

These stories hence ask a deeper question: without shared ideological frameworks, common across times, places and cultures, what is it to be human? In response, the collection turns to the physical body to look for answers. Teasing the boundary between the visceral nature of being human, and a metaphysical essence that underpins consciousness, Murata probes, dissects, and transfigures bodies—quite literally, in some instances, and in others as a metaphorical search for a “core of life”.

Several stories in Life Ceremony pay an intense attention to the hair, teeth, bones and skin of characters, as though detached from their living owners. And yet in so doing, Murata invites us to search for an elusive quality that animates them. The narrator of “Puzzle” guides the reader’s search:

Inside the body, squirming organs were densely crammed within a faintly transparent skin. Around them stretched the muscles, like roots, and blood was constantly circulating in the veins that stood out on the neck.

While the narrator’s attention here is on the character’s physical body, there is something obsessive in her gaze that hints at a more abstract quality commanding attention. The “faintly transparent skin” gives the suggestion of something deeper, which can’t quite be identified.

In the story “Body Magic”, the collection reaches maturity as these two paradigms converge. On one level, it explores the sexual encounters of adolescent girls, teenage folklore, cliques, and idolisation between friends. But this is not a typical coming-of-age story, with a predictable arc of enticement and disillusionment. Instead, Murata artfully avoids clichés, offering an insightful exploration of sexual maturity from the perspective of a young girl intrigued by her friend Shiho’s authentic sexual impulses. Shiho captivates not because she represents the adult world of sex, but due to her unique affinity with her body and desires. This sense of oneness transforms something of the body into something transcendent. And thus Shiho embodies the collection’s core message: being human is essentially to straddle this boundary.

While the collection can be read as a refocusing on the visceral animalistic nature of humanity, the opposite is also true: Murata draws attention to the inextricability of the physical (body, food, and environment) and psychological (mind, values, morality). The human heart on the cover is indeed a motif: while initially jarring and grotesque, by the end of the collection the image comes to represent the collection’s sentimental core. From story to story, characters mature, explore, love, suffer, (and eat), their worlds teetering on the edge of familiarity, but their experiences always painfully human.

_{How to cite: Hamilton, Lucy. “A Hearty Feast: Food, Cannibalism, and the Human Condition in Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Aug. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/08/29/ceremony/.}

Lucy Hamilton is a novelist and academic from Sheffield, UK. Her debut novel, The Widening of Tolo Highway (Penguin Random House SEA, 2022), set in Hong Kong’s New Territories, is now available worldwide. She lectured in Stylistics at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China, and now works at the University of Leeds. [Read all contributions by Lucy Hamilton.]

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