Genre Fiction
![Sayaka Murata - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B00LT27POC.jpg)
Life Ceremony: Stories
The long-awaited first short story-collection by the author of the cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, tales of weird love, heartfelt friendships, and the unsettling nature of human existence
With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.
In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader's interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In "A First-Rate Material," Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can't stand the conventional use of deceased people's bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. "Lovers on the Breeze" is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child's bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. "Eating the City" explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while "Hatchling" closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in.
In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.
With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. In Japan, Murata is particularly admired for her short stories, which are sometimes sweet, sometimes shocking, and always imbued with an otherworldly imagination and uncanniness.
In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. Whether the stories take place in modern-day Japan, the future, or an alternate reality is left to the reader's interpretation, as the characters often seem strange in their normality in a frighteningly abnormal world. In "A First-Rate Material," Nana and Naoki are happily engaged, but Naoki can't stand the conventional use of deceased people's bodies for clothing, accessories, and furniture, and a disagreement around this threatens to derail their perfect wedding day. "Lovers on the Breeze" is told from the perspective of a curtain in a child's bedroom that jealously watches the young girl Naoko as she has her first kiss with a boy from her class and does its best to stop her. "Eating the City" explores the strange norms around food and foraging, while "Hatchling" closes the collection with an extraordinary depiction of the fractured personality of someone who tries too hard to fit in.
In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.
Editorial Reviews
Praise for Life Ceremony:
An Indie Next Selection
"Murata's prose is deadpan, as clear as cellophane . . . Chilly and transgressive at the same time . . . Murata is interested in how disgust drives ethics, in why some things repel us but not others . . . Murata's prose, in this translation from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is generally so cool you could chill a bottle of wine in it."-Dwight Garner, New York Times
"Twelve engrossing entries that probe intimacy and individuality while turning norms upside down . . . Strange and bold."-Time, "New Books You Need to Read This Summer"
"Picking up on themes in her novel Earthlings, most of these stories are about alienation, exploring what it means to be ‘normal' through a close focus on characters, nearly always women, who do not conform to social expectations . . . The author's plain, clear, observational style makes the stories strangely believable, easy to read and hard to forget."-Lisa Tuttle, Guardian
"Life Ceremony uncovers Murata's preoccupation with our species' norms writ large, beyond gender, sex, and reproduction. Several stories imagine near-future worlds in which bodies find new uses after death . . . In offering such exaggerated scenarios, Murata exposes the lunacy of the norms we so blithely follow . . . Murata's lifelong feeling of being a stranger has given her a perspective from which to create her worlds."-WIRED
"Sayaka Murata writes about the life more ordinary . . . But ordinary is a shape-shifting concept . . . Murata's prose, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is both spare and dreamlike . . . Murata's skill is in turning round the world so that the abnormal, uncivil or even savage paths appear-if momentarily-to make sense."-Louise Lucas, Financial Times
"Life Ceremony is not a book for the squeamish or easily shocked . . . Much of the humor in these stories comes from the incongruity of grotesque elements in quotidian settings, such as when the characters in ...
An Indie Next Selection
"Murata's prose is deadpan, as clear as cellophane . . . Chilly and transgressive at the same time . . . Murata is interested in how disgust drives ethics, in why some things repel us but not others . . . Murata's prose, in this translation from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is generally so cool you could chill a bottle of wine in it."-Dwight Garner, New York Times
"Twelve engrossing entries that probe intimacy and individuality while turning norms upside down . . . Strange and bold."-Time, "New Books You Need to Read This Summer"
"Picking up on themes in her novel Earthlings, most of these stories are about alienation, exploring what it means to be ‘normal' through a close focus on characters, nearly always women, who do not conform to social expectations . . . The author's plain, clear, observational style makes the stories strangely believable, easy to read and hard to forget."-Lisa Tuttle, Guardian
"Life Ceremony uncovers Murata's preoccupation with our species' norms writ large, beyond gender, sex, and reproduction. Several stories imagine near-future worlds in which bodies find new uses after death . . . In offering such exaggerated scenarios, Murata exposes the lunacy of the norms we so blithely follow . . . Murata's lifelong feeling of being a stranger has given her a perspective from which to create her worlds."-WIRED
"Sayaka Murata writes about the life more ordinary . . . But ordinary is a shape-shifting concept . . . Murata's prose, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is both spare and dreamlike . . . Murata's skill is in turning round the world so that the abnormal, uncivil or even savage paths appear-if momentarily-to make sense."-Louise Lucas, Financial Times
"Life Ceremony is not a book for the squeamish or easily shocked . . . Much of the humor in these stories comes from the incongruity of grotesque elements in quotidian settings, such as when the characters in ...
Readers Top Reviews
Very good and reassu
Full of silly Goofy stories. Everyone will find their favorite.
Alex KingstonJoe Pen
This book is very strange & disquieting. I don't think I like it, but I keep reading it because it is so weird & I never know where the stories will go next.
Adriano NishinariAle
This is a weird book. Every reader will have a "what the f*" reaction when reading most of the stories, but that is not a bad thing. In my anthropology classes it was often said that the process of understanding cultures is a matter of un-stranging the strange (sorry for the likely poor translation), and this book offers plenty of mind-boggling episodes to reflect upon. They're not hard to read also, so it's possible to read it for entertainment just as well.
