Earthlings

Gulped up Earthlings by Sayaka Murata. Imagine the strangeness of Han Kang's The Vegetarian, the tension of Sarah Moss and the mournful beauty of Ocean Vuong. Yet it's also like nothing else I've ever read. So much to unpick and digest. What a book.

I read this based on how much I enjoyed the author's previous novel, Convenience Store Woman, and the very effective Twitter video of readers finishing the book, which intrigued me.

The story follows Natsuki at 11 years old and again at 34 as she experiences terrible traumas and tries to come to terms with them within a culture that prioritises conformity above all else. Natsuki, her cousin Yuu and her husband Tomoya, all of whom have suffered abuse and are failing to handle it, develop a shared universe in which their alienation from the world makes sense and which drives them to increasingly bizarre and terrible behaviours.

Although the novel includes a series of horrific scenes including, child sexual abuse, incest, violence against children and murder, the detached and "alien" perspective of Natsuki means that the true horror is society's attempts to deny, cover up and hide them in order to force all the characters into what Natsuki and Tomayo refer to as The Factory, where they will act as good tools and good reproducers.

Earthlings is a book full of horrors and monstrosities, of which the worst is the real world. and a gripping tale of destroyed lives. At its core, it is thematically similar to Convenience Store Woman, but it goes much further in its exploration of the theme.