Rating: 3 stars
A collection of 12 short stories exploring interesting and original alternatives against traditional societal norms and expectations. Easy reads that really make you stop and think.

Life Ceremony is a collection of short stories by the author of Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings, exploring human bodies, reproduction, and social roles. Horrifying and darkly funny, the stories explore different mindsets or concepts taken to extremes, with cannibalism and using the human body for furnishing and clothes as just two of the topics covered.

I would say from the start that overall, the collection is probably more similar to Earthlings (which I preferred to Convenience Store Woman), with a good few of the stories being the sort of thing you finish and think 'what the hell' for a moment about the conceit. Perhaps most memorable is the titular story 'Life Ceremony', about a world in which eating dead people as part of a death ritual to increase conception has become the norm. I liked the atmosphere of it, with the strange descriptions of cooking someone (using recipes rather than the miso hotpot option that apparently everyone uses) and a weird ending. In terms of strange concepts, I liked 'Lover on the Breeze', told from the point of view of a curtain, and I also enjoyed the most understated vibe of 'Eating the City', about foraging.

However, quite a few of the other stories, especially a lot of the shorter ones, were less engaging for me, with some not quite feeling like they were doing anything. I was glad they were short though, as the collection quickly moved on to other stories, and I mostly liked the longer ones. As with a lot of short stories, I found that some of them I felt could've been a longer novella to draw out some of the settings and conceits, but others worked well at their length.

As someone who isn't always a huge fan of short story collections as I either want more of a story or don't engage, I did like this one, which brings the horrific moments and weirdness I expected, though some of the stories didn't hit the mark for me. I wonder if it'll depend on which of Murata's other books you prefer to which ones you like, as the stories do have different atmospheres, but it's certainly a collection to get people talking.

I loved Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman” and leapt at the opportunity to read “Life Ceremony”, her latest collection of short stories.

I have to say I was prepared for weird, but maybe these short stories were a little bit too “out there” for my taste. I only read the first seven short stories. I really wanted to enjoy this book as much as I’d enjoyed Murata’s earlier book.

“Two’s Family” was the only short story that I quite enjoyed, it was quite a touching story or Yoshiko and Kikue’s life together and the family unit that they’d created. The other stories left me quite cold, I didn’t care for the characters and went from feeling quite bored to repulsed. Even though, I pushed on to the halfway point of the book, I don’t like reading when the book feels too much of an ordeal as it takes away any enjoyment that reading brings.

I think that even though I loved “Convenience Store Woman”, this book is just not for me.

Thanks to Granta Publications and NetGalley for making this ARC available for me for a fair and honest review.

This was a really quick read for me, this collection of short stories was so thought provoking and interesting. Each story was so well written and I literally got something from every story within the collection. A really good read,

I have read two other books by Sayaka Murata and loved them so I jumped at the chance to be able to read her new collection of short stories. Her stories tend to be about questioning what is considered a societal norm and those that live outside of that. Most of these would be interesting discussion points as they ask the reader to open their mind up to ways of thinking they may not have experienced before. I liked every concept the author proposed and especially enjoyed the longer stories, and could see the connection to her previous novels. However, some of the shorter stories could have been developed further as at times they felt rushed and almost unfinished. Essentially I enjoyed the book but wanted more of it.

Life Ceremonies (2022) is a collection of 12 short-stories from Ginny Tapley Takemori, translated from the Japanese originals (2019) by Sayaka Murata. The same translator-author were responsible for the brilliant Convenience Store Woman and the, to me, less successful Earthlings.

The stories range between the more prosaic setting of Convenience Store Woman to the more alternative-worlds and taboo-breaching of Earthlings, and several variations on a similar theme.

The title story "Life Ceremonies" is set in a near-future world where, post demographic decline, funerals are replaced by life ceremonies. Those gathered first feast on the deceased and then seek an ‘insemination partner’ amongst the other guests, the ceremony followed by a reproductive pairing-off, something our narrator, who remembers the old taboos of our world, finds difficult to accept.

"“Oh, I almost forgot. I heard that Mr. Nakao from General Affairs passed away.”

We all looked at her.“What? Really?”

“Seems it was a stroke.”

I pictured Mr. Nakao’s good-natured smile. He was an elegant man with silver-gray hair and often shared sweets he received from clients with us. He’d retired just a few years ago.

“This morning the company was informed that the ceremony will be held tonight. They said the deceased would have wanted as many of us as possible to come along.”

“Really? I’d better hold back on lunch today, then. Maybe I’ll skip dessert.”

We all put our custard desserts back, unopened, into the bag from the convenience store.

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

Similarly, “A First-Rate Material” is set in a future where human bodies are recycled so that e.g. a ring made of human teeth bones is more prized than one of platinum. Here however the narrator regards it as normal, whereas her fiancée is the one who refuses to buy her a bone engagement ring, and prefers cashmere to human-hair jumpers, which he forbids her to wear.

Others are set in our present-day world but focused on characters who have a very different view on city-life which they take to an Earthlings-like obsession.

Puzzle starts with the narrator realises how much she enjoys the physical closeness of other city dwellers, feeling her own body lacks the sensations she feels from others, before she starts to transform her view seeing herself, as well as buildings, as part of the city’s body and other people as organs within this organism.

“Sanae crinkled her eyes in a smile. “I’m fine!” As the train moved off, the passengers all raised their faces slightly, as if seeking oxygen. Surrounded by lips facing upward, Sanae relaxed her body and leaned into the eddy of body heat. Submerged in air full of sighs released from numerous mouths, she closed her eyes and savored the dampness on her skin, floating in it, happy being smothered in the carbon dioxide spewed out by passengers. Long ago the term forest bathing had been popular, but Sanae preferred “people bathing” like this. Even more people got on at the next stop, and enthralled by the mounting warm pressure, she opened her eyes a little and noticed the salaryman next to her cluck his tongue. She stared almost enviously at the black hole in his face, fancying that she could see through the thin, cracked lips to the red-black tongue bouncing against the inside of his mouth.
….
“Oh look, Sanae’s smiling again! No way it’s that DVD. It’s got to be a new boyfriend!”
“Right? Come on, Sanae, you’ve got to tell us!”
The membrane-covered fleshes all leaned toward her. Sanae laughed out loud in spite of herself. This triggered the internal organs, which also started to give off sounds, their flesh trembling.”

"Eat the City" has a character originally from the countryside who starts to try and forage wild plants from the concrete of the city, a pastime that turns into an obsessive mission:

“With my hand still thrust into the soil there next to the artwork, I savored the sensation of the earth that had raised my food for me. Nutrition nurtured by the earth flowed into my palm. I pushed my hand even deeper into the soil, and it overflowed the gaps in my fingers, staining my sallow hand brown. My hand looked like a tree. Normally I was different from plants, separated from the earth, but I was growing out of the earth too. Evidence of this was the fact that the plants I had picked in this city were spreading to all corners of my body. I squeezed together the fingers growing in the soil. My fingers and the soil mixed together, melded, and stared up at the plants growing out of them.”

The closing story “Hatchling” is perhaps closest to Convenience Store Woman territory, and my favourite of the collection. The narrator is someone who so much fits in with those around her, and, in particular their very first impression of her, that she has 5 completely different personalities for different friendship groups, and no real true-character, something that she realises could be an issue when she starts preparing her wedding invites:

“Whenever I met up with childhood friends, I was still Prez, and with high school friends I was Peabrain, and I was still Princess to college club friends, while emails from my coworkers at the part-time job I did while in college were addressed to Haruo. Now I’d become Mysterious Takahashi. My life continued with these five characters progressing alongside one another.

The one who liked sparkling wine was Peabrain. Haruo preferred beer, and Princess often drank sangria. Prez was usually organizing the parties, so she drank only oolong tea or, at most, one glass of lemon sour. Mysterious Takahashi drank shochu or whiskey on the rocks. “
A Magnificent Spread is another strong story – an engagement feast for a woman’s sister and her fiancees’s parents reveals some strongly different tastes in food, ranging from insects from a rural tradition, through junk-food, and space-style meal-in-a-tablet, to the narrator’s sister’s own odd preference for recipes from the magical city of Dundilas where she believes she lived in a past life. This has some interesting things to say on cultural differences and whether they are best accepted by each embracing other’s culture into a whole, or allowing each person to remain separate within their own preference.

3.5 stars – some of the stories definitely approach strong 4 star territory but I found the collection a little uneven (with some of the stories I haven’t mentioned above rather weaker), perhaps because of my preference for a certain style of Murata’s work over another