In Vanishing World, Sayaka Murata peels back the layers of modern detachment and reconfigures them into something stranger, lonelier, and oddly beautiful. This isn’t dystopians the way we’ve come to expect it. There are no flaming cities or rebel uprisings, no rigid authoritarianism. Instead, Murata offers something quieter and more terrifying: a future that’s already halfway here, where people still smile, still live, but love has lost all its teeth.
Told through the eyes of Amane Sakaguchi, Vanishing World plays out like an eerie memoir from a society where desire is quarantined, family is outsourced, and real human connection is a nostalgic relic. But this novel is not without tenderness. It’s just buried under layers of societal programming, sterile control, and a deep longing for something that may never return.
A Childhood Built on Red Curtains and Fairy Tales
Amane grows up in the shadow of her mother’s walled garden — a home wrapped in red, filled with stories about love and marriage that feel more like curated myths than lived truths. Her parents are divorced. Her mother is unwavering in her belief in idealized love. So, Amane does what many do: she internalizes it, reimagines it, and finds her own version of it in a fictional character named Lapis.
Her first experience of love is not just emotional but physical. Lapis — a seven-thousand-year-old boy from an anime series — awakens something in her that feels real, sacred, and entirely hers. Unlike the sanitized version of childhood affection, Amane’s attachment is complete with desire, arousal, and the onset of menstruation. There’s no shame, no sense of confusion. This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a love story.
Through Amane’s friendship with Mizuuchi, a classmate who also adores Lapis but suppresses his feelings due to stigma, Murata reveals the way fictional love provides both refuge and revelation. Their shared rituals are not framed as immature, but as profound expressions of self in a world that doesn’t make room for them.
Domesticity, Decoupled
Adulthood in Vanishing World doesn’t follow the traditional arc. Amane marries, but her relationship with her husband, Saku, is more aligned with companionship than romance. They eventually move to Experiment City, which is a sanitized, computer-managed community where marriage contracts dissolve with a click and reproduction is handled via artificial wombs. Saku himself becomes pregnant, and Amane navigates this new version of family with something like curiosity but never awe.
Murata uses Experiment City not to shock, but to show how fluidly society can adapt when it’s given the right language and infrastructure. Families no longer exist. Children (called Kodomo-chans) are raised by the state. People live alone. Even sexuality is outsourced to Clean Rooms, where urges can be managed without the mess of another person.
And yet, even in this world of antiseptic efficiency, Amane still loves her fictional partners. She still cherishes what others discard. In fact, it’s these nonreal lovers who continue to define her identity in a world that actively works to erase it.
This balance, between participation and quiet resistance, is where the novel finds its teeth. Amane isn’t rebellious. She simply refuses to relinquish the parts of herself that are inconvenient to the system. In doing so, she becomes something rare: a fully autonomous woman who makes no apologies for her interior life.
What Happens When Humanity Becomes Optional
At its core, Vanishing World asks a series of quiet but brutal questions: What happens when love is no longer necessary for survival? When family is reduced to function? When sex becomes something you schedule, sterilize, and then forget?
Murata doesn’t offer answers. Instead, she presents a future where the scaffolding of human emotion still exists, but the structure has been gutted. Amane’s enduring love for fictional characters, which is unchanged by time and untouched by social shifts, is both a coping mechanism and a form of protest. It’s also oddly hopeful. In a world where everything real has been engineered to death, the imaginary still holds space for chaos, for longing, for something close to magic.
What makes Vanishing World truly unsettling isn’t its future tech or reversed pregnancies. It’s how easy it is to see ourselves sliding into its landscape — one compromised connection at a time. And while the novel doesn’t preach or mourn, it does leave readers with a soft, persistent ache: a reminder that intimacy, in all its messy, irrational glory, may be the only thing worth protecting after all.
About Sayaka Murata:
Sayaka Murata is the author of many books, including Convenience Store Woman, winner of the Akutagawa Prize, Earthlings and Life Ceremony. Murata has been named a Freeman’s “Future of New Writing” author and a Vogue Japan Woman of the Year.
Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated works by more than a dozen Japanese writers, including Ryu Murakami. She lives at the foot of a mountain in Eastern Japan.
