Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC! Although this is the ‘new’ Sayaka Murata in English, it’s actually one of the earliest she wrote and I do think that’s evident. I didn’t find Vanishing World as compelling from the get go as I have with her others, but it did pull me in more as I reached the second half. It’s got her usual themes of picking apart modern society, with marriage and reproduction on the chopping block. In this world, sex with your spouse is seen as incest, and couples take lovers (sometimes fictional) instead, as well as use artificial insemination to have babies. I got a bit tired of the repetition of the MC’s relationships with various anime characters. 

But the second half where the MC and her husband move to ‘Experiment City’ kicks the weirdness up a notch. All babies are everyone’s babies, kept in a sort of communal holding pen where people go to spend time with them - utterly bizarre. It’s not a Murata novel if you don’t say ‘what the fuck’ out loud at least once. I certainly was by the ending, but I really don’t know how I felt about the end - apart from icky.

Not as strong as her others, including the collection of short stories she has out in English.