Murata"s bestseller Convenience Store Woman was a favourite book from last year. Quirky. with an identifiable and relatable central character whose attempts to fit in, as a person with some type of Aspergers, you could nonetheless identify with, it was humourous and touching. The story portrayed how conservative and deeply traditional the issues of career family, marriage and children still are in modern Japan. The central characters in Earthlings similarly start off by trying to create a marriage that is a front, whose function is to simply keep parental demands for conformity off their backs.
Maybe I got off on the wrong foot with this novel, but it just annoyed and perplexed me from the start. Earthlings does follow a few of the tropes used in her bestselling novel, but to far far less effect. The novel begins in Akishina, a sort of idyllic bygone lifestyle and village. Natsuki is a teenager, and with her cousin Yuu they have formed a world within the world of Popinpobopia. They think of themselves as aliens awaiting the arrival of the mother ship to take them to their real home planet. They also write a marriage contract between themselves.
This naive fantasy world protects them from growing up, becoming absorbed as Earthlings and having to be part of The Factory. The Factory being ordinary life, a career, family, house and children. This feels clumsily written and is not believable. When Natsuki and Yuu are caught experimenting with teenage sex, it doesn't come across as transgressive, shocking or understandable. Murata's trademark neutrality in authorial tone does not help here at all.
In the second half of the book we move twenty years ahead and Natsuki is in a mutual marriage of convenience with Tomoya. Tomoya wants to see Akishina that he has heard so much about, so they go there to stay and encounter Yuu. What happens thereafter I'll not go into their details of, but only to say it turns more than a bit gruesome. Though Earthlings concluding chapters do redeem the book a bit, the nature of what preceded it does not make it an earned one. The whole alternative lifestyle is not coherent or convincing. I read the book constantly wondering why this? What purpose does this emotional removal serve? Why is none of this identifiable and able to connect? Why am I bothering with this?
Having made her name writing a charming, but off kilter international bestseller, Murata appears to be trying to write and ramp up the weirdness to order. For me this did not work, even on the level of a modern parable. It alienates to no effect, failing to capture the imagination and take you with it. A follow up to Convenience Store Woman would be a tough thing for any writer. However, a book cannot be as empty and completely heartless as this one is, even if your central characters are emotionally damaged self-centred fantasists. Hopefully she will be able to move on after writing such a flat uninteresting mess of a novel. It is a very odd book indeed, but not in a good way.
CARROT REVIEW - 3/8
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