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Vanishing World

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Vanishing World

By: Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori - Übersetzer
Narrated by: Nancy Wu
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About this listen

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she's not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in 'clean', sexless marriages. But Amane's parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can't help questioning what sex and marriage are for.

But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?

©2025 Sayaka Murata (P)2025 Sayaka Murata Absurdist Genre Fiction Magical Realism Science Fiction World Literature Marriage
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Because of reviews, I expected this novella to be a great deal more interesting.
The singular theme is hammered repeatedly, making the experience feel far longer than it is. Lacks complexity. Characters are shallow. Concepts are naive and superficial.
As is her habit, Mursta offers no plausible reasons for anything that happens, ignores science (Stepford children are explained away as being nothing more convincing than mere mimickery!), and relentlessly makes her one note point over and over.
I would class this as a YA novel, but it's probably not challenging enough for most teenagers.
I had read of a shock ending. It's naff, rather than shocking. The single tedious theme taken to a metaphorically logical conclusion, and designed solely for shock value (yet isn't shocking in any true sense). It's not an earned ending. it's random.
Nothing satisfying about this novella.

Tedious, uninteresting

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Extremely well written & somewhat dark fictional tale about a future world where the concepts of families, sex and conventional child bearing are turned inside-out as society evolves into a new era.

Strange and fascinating

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