Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, book review.
What can I say about this charming book, well, exactly that, it was simply charming, though, the charm is also in the books take on large subjects. This book is a collection of short stories, which are, in my opinion, a commentary on Japanese society, and perhaps more globally, societal at large. Murata is celebrated for her original, peculiar and clearly humorous voice when it comes to exploring societal norms in his stories. She writes in such extremes, such as, eating human flesh upon its death, and then having sex, so as to reuse the deceased life to make a new life, or using a dead human body to make different objects, such as human bones for furniture, as an attempt at extreme recycling, so to say. These are obviously extreme rituals which are not practiced in societies today, but are meant to make us reflect on the absurdity of our own societal practices and rituals which we take for granted. Practices such as, basically everything we do that destroys the world and ourselves in the process, literally consuming ourselves to death. (This is my own take on the matter). Murata in a way aggrandizes these norms, to highlight the ridiculousness of our accustomed norms. Three short stories in particular stood out to me. The first being ‘Body-Magic’, which is about sex and our modern ideas of sex. We are so infected by pornographic and mediatized notions of intimacy that we’ve forgotten what intimacy and connection actually are. It’s become less of an exploration, and curious discovery and more of an attempt to recreate the ridiculous and hyper-sexualized standards of sex imparted by porn of mainstream media. The second short story which piqued my interest is ‘Eating the city’. This is a story about a lady who longs for the freshness of mountain and homegrown vegetables, as she used to eat as a child going to her grandparent’s rural home in the Japanese mountains. Living in an urbanized city, a concrete jungle, she hasn’t access to this, so she resorts to excavating plants from side-walks, parks, basically any green patch she can find in the city. Ridiculous, I know, but it’ s almost as though a primal longing for nature, and the richness of non-processed vegetables is compelling her to do so. Evidently a commentary on the processed, and basically fake food we all eat on a daily basis which provides us with nothing close of the nutrition we would receive from eating home grown vegies. Lastly, the final short story of this book called, ‘Hatchling’, was fascinating to me as we follow the short story of a lady with multiple personalities. Depending on her social environment, her personality hatches into something different, but to an exaggerated degree, so as to be liked by everyone. Definitely a caricaturized interpretation of the effect of social media, as we are conditioned to seek the validation of others, literally, being constantly reminded, through social media, that being liked by others is more important than taking care of ourselves. Furthermore, our main protagonist always puts into question what her true self is, ultimately seeing that she does not have a true self… Y’all know I love Buddhism, and this sounds very Buddhist doesn’t it! Thanks.
