Author: Sayaka Murata

Format: Audiobook (with many narrators)

Life Ceremony is a short collection of stories by Sayaka Murata. Although there is no explicit theme for the collection, the stories tend to focus on societal taboos, especially around sex, food, and the body more generally, along similar lines to Earthlings (the only other Sayaka Murata I’ve read). Many of the stories are set in a society that is essentially normal, except for one key feature — in the story ‘A First-Rate Material’, the narrator attempts to adapt to her fiancé’s tastes: he, weirdly, is grossed out by the usage of human material for commercial items (human hair coats, finger bone rings). Fortunately, he seems to start taking a turn for the better once the narrator is gifted a wedding veil made of his dead father’s skin and he finds it beautiful. The other story that heavily plays into this setup is the titular ‘Life Ceremony’, wherein population collapse has caused society to hold so-called ‘Life Ceremonies’ where a person’s corpse is cooked and eaten and hookups among the participants are heavily encouraged to manufacture ‘insemination events’. As someone who grew up just before the population collapse, the narrator finds herself oddly uncomfortable with the entire construct of Life Ceremonies, but knows that she would be treated as a pariah if she fully voiced her thoughts. When her close friend / drinking buddy dies, however, she ends up volunteering to help prep his body and discovers a beauty in the ceremony (incidentally, she then runs into a gay guy who is so moved by her story that he does an impromptu sperm donation for her).

Beyond the obvious poking at societal taboos, the stories also emphasize how society shapes and controls women, especially in their sexuality and their bodies. A large number of the other stories in the collection feature a ‘normal’ society whose protagonist, invariably a female office worker of some sort, finds herself extremely disconnected from society and/or from her own body — in ‘Hatchling’, the narrator discusses how she adopts different personas for different environments, and her subsequent belief that she must be completely personality-free. Another story, ‘Lover on the Breeze’, told from the perspective of a curtain in a girl’s room, tells the story of a woman who breaks up with her boyfriend because she’s realized she’s always been in love with her curtain.

I enjoyed the collection overall, but at some point it does feel like the schtick would get old — luckily, it ended before it could get to that point 😌. idk its short go read it I should probably also read Convenience Store Woman at some point.