Life ceremony
story
Sayaka Murata
Translated by Genie Tapley Takemori
244 pages. Grove Press. $ 25.
Japanese author Sayaka Murata is best known for her 2016 novel “Convenience Store Woman”. She is a friendless woman who suppresses her dark urges and devotes her life to her work as an anonymous cashier at Foodmart in Tokyo.
Mr. Murata’s prose is as clear as cellophane and tidy like a bento. She is not the most delicate writer. You haven’t read her about her ultra-fine perceptual device. When her stuff goes well, you read her because it’s chilly and transcendental at the same time.
Her new book is “Life Ceremony,” a collection of stories. The character is a middle-class woman who lives in and around Tokyo like Keiko. They grew up in the suburbs. They live in a small condo in the city. Their career is unobtrusive.
Murata pushes normal until it sticks out in an unusual shape. The title story is about Maho, a young woman who works for a bland company. She was invited to a “life ceremony” for her deceased older manager. Life rituals include eating the deceased to honor them.
James Beard said that with enough tarragon, it could probably be cannibalistic. Here, the meat is boiled and served in a hot pot style. “You get a better soup stock from men,” someone comments.
Japanese society is divided by this new practice. Murata is interested in how disgust drives ethics and why some repel us and others do not. Proponents of life rituals consider them to be just a happy way to spread the energy of the deceased.
The story becomes horribly interesting in a “Fargo” -like way. Shortly after the manager’s ceremony, Maho was asked to help another colleague chop up and prepare her body. The mother of the dead man thinks Maho was his best friend. Maho has no intention of telling her that she is his smoking partner.
She strips the flesh from her bones and thinks, “I remembered his strong, hairy arms lifting his beer glass.” It feels good when she brings the leftovers of Tupperware home.
This story also delves into anxiety about population decline. The life ceremony also includes “sowing”. The couple goes out with a partner. I’m still confused about how these sowings differ from gender, but the story ends when a kind stranger gives me a small bottle of deposits in my maho.
Murata uses a similar flow in the story titled “First-class Materials”. It is set in Japan, where it has become chic to wear sweaters made from human hair, earrings made from teeth, and wedding rings. Human tibial chairs are coveted, as are thoracic tables and bookshelves that use the scapula as a partition.
Nana, a young woman, is preparing to marry a young man who opposes these things. The wise belief in the story is to make him a moral outlier. Nana commented, “He was a very kind person and I couldn’t believe he was so harsh and cruel that he should throw away his whole body even if he could reuse it.”
Another story is about two older women, a friend who has lived together for a long time and raised children. One is wildly indiscriminate. The other has never had sex. Murata likes to find out at the intersection where the two extremes meet.
Some stories are pretty long. Others are vignettes. A handful are mediocre. “Breeze lover” is spoken from the perspective of a high school girl’s bedroom window window curtain. Even in her best story, Murata has a weakness in the dissertation statement.
This is especially true of the weird story “Magnificent Spread”. It’s about a couple eating weird freeze-dried health foods because they’re popular with celebrities. Her younger sister, Kumi, thinks she is a warrior reborn from the magical city, and she claims that she only cooks and eats food from it. (One plate of dandelion flowers boiled in orange juice.)
Kumi’s future in-law likes to eat stewed caterpillars, larvae, grasshoppers and other insects. This group is miserable together at the table until they realize that they don’t have to eat from the same pot to understand each other, as if it were something special after school.
The best story of “Life Ceremony” is the easiest to understand. It’s entitled “Body Magic” and it’s about a teenage girl and her body, and her love and legitimacy. Narrator Ruri doesn’t think she’s rude, but she’s shocked by how advanced her friend Shiho is.
Shiho had sex in the summer one year before junior high school. “My first thought was that it must have been used by the perverts of Lolita fetishes,” Ruri thinks. But when Shiho begins to speak, Ruri is fascinated by her clear and organic sense of joy and control.
“I want to get inside someone’s skin,” Ruri thinks after Shiho uses the phrase. “That never happened to me. The other girls didn’t seem to be kissing the boy because of their own particular desires. After kissing, everyone It was like they wanted to prove that they had grown up with clues. “
Murata’s prose is generally very cool in this translation from Japanese by Genie Tapley Takemori, in which you can cool a bottle of wine. “Body Magic” is warmer and more delicate. I wondered if she really needed the big conceit.