FINISHED READING - Life Ceremony by Sakaya Murata

I had mixed feelings about approaching a collection of short stories by Sakaya Murata. I truly loved Convenience Store Woman, but absolutely loathed its successor Earthlings. Which side would this collection of short stories fall on?

The first thing that is apparent is that Murata's stories, whether short or long in form, possess a similar underlying theme. Her characters all live outside of a conventional lifestyle, culture or social expectation. They proceed through the story to achieve some sort of acknowledgement or resolve concerning their 'outsider' status. There are a handful of stories in Life Ceremony that hold a uniquely perverted, if not grotesque world view at their centre. In these two senses Life Ceremony forms a thematic link between Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings. The former held its unconventionality in check, whereas Earthlings did not.

Life Ceremony begins with a disconcerting story about Nana, who is about to marry her banker fiance Naoki. They live in a world where everything is recycled and put to good use, including the dead human body. Its made into furniture, fabric or accessories and this is considered by everyone else to be perfectly normal. Its become a beautiful thing to do. But Naoki believes it to be vulgar and barbaric and will have none of it. Socially this could be disastrous, so Nana is uncertain about her own decision to marry him.

This story forms a precedent for the central story in this compendium - Life Ceremony. Here the conceit is that at a funeral the recently deceased is cooked in a hot pot that everyone eats from. Once the feasting on the dear departed is over, all those attending go out, find a sexual partner and inseminate them. The end of one life and the beginning of a new one, become inseparably linked.

Other stories are not quite as gross in their subject matter, and are more whimsical. In the story Puzzle, the central character Sanae, everyone thinks is so serenely calm and unruffled. In fact she is quite alienated from her own emotions and body. As the story progresses this distancing from her own body, thoughts and feelings expands to take in the body, thoughts and feelings of anyone she has a close encounter with. Until finally they are completely absorbed into her.

These sort of incremental twists in the story from mildly neurotic into something altogether more puzzling, and worryingly bizzare, is a structural story device she overuses within this collection. It works well when you have not yet recognised the pattern. But once you do, you are left waiting for each story to turn on your expectations of it. One has to question whether with all the grotesquerie of her story lines, she has anything more to say than this? Convenience Store Woman was so touching because it had a real humanity to it, drawn as it was partly from her own personal experience. Once she takes a step away from this she ventures onto trickier territory as a writer. Its ok to use these clever inversions of social norms, but somehow they need to acquire more depth, they tend to stay self satisfied within the parameters of their particular conceit. There is a lack of real heart behind all this novelty.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8