📁 RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
📁 RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS

Click HERE to read all entries in Cha on Life Ceremony.

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

Whenever I encounter the name Sayaka Murata, I experience a slight unease—not because of her fiction (which is, if anything, profoundly poignant), but owing to an interview she gave to the Financial Times in 2018. Though she handles the questions with thoughtfulness and grace, the interviewer’s framing of her mind and body strikes a distinctly discordant note. From casual descriptions of her being “dressed in the prim blouse and cardigan of an off-duty Mary Poppins” to self-congratulatory asides like “She isn’t remotely dopey-looking”, the tone is more cringe-inducing than the “pair of aunt-types” at a nearby table who scowl at Murata’s frankness. The discomfort does not stem from a lack of genuine interest in her work or character, but from the persistent compulsion to measure her brilliance against that of men. As a recipient of Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature, it seems almost reflexive to name her alongside her male forebears, as though her achievement can only be legitimised through association with theirs (rather than the reverse). Moreover, the interviewer’s appraisal of her attractiveness is treated as a metric of her literary worth—as though she must be alluring in a way she herself does not claim, so that her fiction may appear all the more astonishing coming from someone so apparently demure. Imagine, for instance, if Tom Hanks were to begin publishing slasher fiction: the astonishment would be uncontainable that such a mild-mannered, affable figure could delve into the darkest recesses of the human psyche—and therein would lie the hook. The praise would be thick enough to step in. But Murata is a different matter. Ultimately, the joke is on us, for it is we whom she exposes—our unresolved internal conflicts laid bare.

Were I compelled to name a single theme for this collection of short fiction, I might well settle on that of disgust, particularly as it pertains to the human body. In “A Magnificent Spread”, cultural values collide as the narrator begins to question the freeze-dried meal substitutes her husband imposes upon her, while her sister, Kumi, favours food from an imaginary, enchanted city—a culinary fantasy the narrator finds disingenuous, lacking any foundation in reality. When Kumi prepares to cook one of her “fictitious” meals for her fiancé’s parents, she enlists the narrator to host the potentially fraught gathering. Yet when the guests present peculiar delicacies from their rural hometown, we discover that disgust cuts in all directions—uniting and dividing in equal measure. In “A First-Rate Material”, we are introduced to a world where human remains are upcycled into clothing, jewellery, dishware, and even furniture. Nana’s fiancé, Naoki, does not share Japan’s near-universal embrace of this trend, while she views it as a way of remaining relevant and of service beyond death. When an experience profoundly unsettles Naoki’s convictions, Nana glimpses the possibility that his resistance may soften into acceptance.

Nowhere is disgust so powerfully rendered as in the title story, which envisions cannibalism as a remedy for the birth rate crisis. The so-called “life ceremony” involves consuming the dead in remembrance, followed by a loveless orgy wherein participants pair with an “insemination partner” to perpetuate the species. Here, it is the narrator who struggles with what all those around her accept without question—being just old enough to recall a time when eating human flesh was taboo. “I had the feeling that humans were becoming more and more like animals,” she reflects, in her own search for resignation.

Despite the morbidity of such subject matter, to describe Murata’s fiction as cynical seems overstated. It strikes me instead as deeply sceptical—and in that, deeply relatable. One could easily point to stories such as “The Time of the Large Star”, in which a young girl moves to a distant town where no one sleeps, or “Puzzle”, in which Sanae delights in the writhing mass of biological matter that constitutes her urban existence, as symptomatic of the fantasies we claim to abandon in adulthood yet which unmistakably shape our routines. “However much her inner organs raged and moisture oozed heavily out,” Murata writes, “Sanae felt that she was simply their container.” Is that not how we all feel, at times—when our flesh seems conscripted by systems of social, political, and economic entanglement?

Even “A Summer Night’s Kiss” and “Two’s Family”—a dyadic pairing of stories that share something of Banana Yoshimoto’s laser-focused, bittersweet tenderness—elicit a particular kind of resolve: one that regards the world with one eye closed. Whether in the sexual awakening of “Body Magic” or the psychological interplay of “Hatchling” (the latter a heartfelt exploration of dissociative identity disorder), we encounter avatars of ourselves functioning as machines, programmed to blend seamlessly into their environments. A personal favourite in this regard is “Eating the City”. Here, we are introduced to Rina, a finicky eater who nostalgically recalls summer holidays spent in the countryside, where the physical landscape itself seemed edible. Now living and working in Tokyo, she feels acutely the absence of that sensory connection, growing increasingly alienated by what passes for food. When her friend Yuki casually suggests she try foraging in the city, Rina reinvents herself as a self-styled “scavenging crow”, picking her way through scraps of urban greenery. Her early efforts leave her feeling physically unwell and strangely estranged from her own body, but she soon begins to locate nourishment in what she terms the “gaps of the city”—those liminal spaces where abandoned traces are the only evidence of human passage. In a pivotal scene, she prepares a meal using her foraged finds and invites Yuki to share it, hoping to inspire a broader conversion. The gesture is quietly wondrous, and it left my heart unexpectedly uplifted.

All of which returns us to the question of whether we must continually evaluate an author’s insights against how well they do—or do not—conform to our expectations of their appearance and demeanour. For if we insist on living that way, painting the bodies of artists in the image of their own prose, how far removed are we from the very characters we pretend to regard with detachment? Are we really so different from Mizuho, the protagonist of “Poochie”, who keeps a fully grown man as a pet of the same name? Can we dismiss Naoko, who in “Lover on the Breeze” confesses a romantic attachment to the windblown curtain in her room, without betraying our own hypocrisies? For the moment we declare such characters aberrant or antisocial, we are obliged to examine ourselves in earnest. Do we not also keep others as pets, trapped within the cages of our mobile devices, switching them on and off for our amusement, sustaining their existence with just enough digital affection? And do we not, too, form dubious attachments to those same screens—sold to us as portals to the sacred, when in truth they merely monetise the profane? Even before reaching the final pages of Life Ceremony, the answers to these questions feel all too clear.

How to cite: Grillo, Tyran. “Tender Aberrations: Reading Sayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 23 Jun. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/06/23/ceremony-life.

Tyran Grillo holds a PhD in Japanese Literature from Cornell University and is an avid reader, translator, music critic, and photographer. His latest book, Fuzzy Traumas: Animals and Errors in Contemporary Japanese Literature (2024, Cornell East Asia Series), explores complex interspecies relationships through a posthumanist lens. Although he has left academia to pursue a full-time career as a professional editor, he remains deeply engaged with his fields of interest through lived experience and creative practice. [All contributions by Tyran Grillo.]

---