Vanishing World
Sayaka Murata
Apr 2025 · Granta Books · Narrated by Nancy Wu
5.0star
1 reviewreport
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5 hr 48 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But Amane's parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can't help questioning what sex and marriage are for. But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?
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5.0
1 review
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May 29, 2025
I am mystified, creeped out, and mind boggled in the way only Murata can. The bizarre genius of Murata is how she has such an exquisitely alien approach to the idea of the normal and strange within a culture and perspective. For me Murata's books are like Dark Souls, I absolutely adore them all for different reasons. Convenience Store Woman is Dark Souls - My first love and the one I have the most nostalgia for. Earthlings is Dark Souls 3 - The one I most enjoy and directly vibe with. Vanishing World is Dark Souls 2 - So incredibly clever and experimentally different, but probably my least favourite, despite how much i love it. Gonna need more time to reflect and get my thoughts together, but Murata continues to be such an aberrant treasure!
About the author
Sayaka Murata has won all of Japan's major literary prizes. She is author of Convenience Store Woman, Earthlings and Life Ceremony.
Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated Ryu Murakami and Kyoko Nakajima, among others.
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