Thursday 16 July 2020

Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Earthlings 

by Sayaka Murata 

(translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori)

A Review


Let me start with a disclaimer and a warning.  I am a fan of Gothic and horror fiction.  Admittedly, I tend to favour less gory stories, but I do not consider myself a squeamish reader.   Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings, which is being published by Granta Books in a translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is no horror novel.  Yet, there were several instances when I felt like turning away from the book – disgusted and disturbed.

So what is this novel all about?  The first chapters introduce us to 11-year old Natsuki.  A sensitive girl, she is verbally abused by her mother and older sister, but things get markedly worse when she is sexually exploited by one of her teachers.   This paedophiliac abuse is explicitly described in a revoltingly graphic scene which would probably be cut if this book were a movie. 

Natsuki has her survival mechanisms.  She clings to Piyyut, a toy hedgehog which, she imagines, is an alien from planet Popinpobopia who has come to Earth to give her magical powers.  Another source of consolation is her family’s yearly visit to her grandparents’ house in a remote mountain village, where her aunts, uncles and cousins converge for the festival of Obon.  Natsuki looks forward to her meetings with her cousin Yuu with whom she shares her woes.  Yuu is understanding, as he also has his own problems, including a borderline-abusive relationship with his needy mother.  For his mum, Yuu is an alien, and both Natsuki and Yuu himself seem to accept this at face value.

Fast forward a couple of decades and we find Natsuki living in a chaste marriage of convenience with her husband Tomoya.  Both Natsuki and Tomoya settle for this peculiar arrangement in order to escape the strictures of what they call “the Factory”.  The “Factory” refers to  conventional Japanese society with its strict mores and pressures, especially on females to marry and have children.  When Tomoya learns of Natsuki and Yuu’s childhood ‘alien’ fantasies, he embraces them with a naïve enthusiasm. Soon, Tomoya, Natuski and Yuu team up to create their own ‘alien commune’ in the mountain home of Natsuki’s grandparents.  As they struggle to defiantly assert their own moral code, things get increasingly weird and surreal.

At its best, Earthlings is a darkly funny satire about society in general, and Japanese mores in particular.  For instance, there’s a wickedly funny scene where the hapless would-be rebel Tomoya, eager to “make a statement”, visits his brother to propose an incestuous relationship, provoking a hilarious overreaction from the rest of the family. On the strength of such scenes, Earthlings would have worked brilliantly as a black comedy.  More often than not, however, the novel comes across as merely gratuitous.   

The fact is that for all its contemporary feel, what Murata is trying to do is not particularly new.  The idea of the individual who takes on the rigid moral code of bourgeois society by breaking its taboos was a recurring one in the Romantic era.    Goethe’s Young Werther, fictional rock star of his age, is just one of many examples.  Looking at the literature of my country, Malta, this was also a theme dear to the modernist authors of the Sixties, whose novels often featured rebellious youths ostracized in a conservatively religious country.  A case in point is Frans Sammut’s Samuraj a novel inspired by Japanese traditions.  Samwel, the novel’s main character, struggles against what he feels are the stifling confines of a traditional, rural Mediterranean village, performing a hara-kiri in the final pages in homage to an “alien” culture at odds with local mores. 

The problem Murata faces is that in our permissive times, very few taboos remain (at least in literature), and the few which are still considered “taboos” generally have good reason for being such.  To jolt a jaded modern reader, Murata has to try hard.  Perhaps too hard for my tastes.  

HardcoverUK edition256 pages
Expected publication: October 1st 2020 by Granta Books 
(first published August 31st 2018)

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