Recommend: No<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Japan has issues. I can say that first hand having spent the Australian-standard two weeks there. The country consumes unparalleled amounts of single use plastics, condemns loud noises unless they bleat automatically from speakers, and menial roadwork that could equally be performed by a zebra crossing employs a whole generation of elderly men.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sayaka Murata has made a career out of exploiting these issues (well, maybe not those exact issues above) in her literature. Her first novel, Convenience Store Woman<\/em>, blew up, selling more than 2 million copies. This was a fine debut. The writing was average and unmemorable but the plot was captivating: a woman with no partner and an extremely average job (convenience store clerk) tries unconventional methods to fit into broader Japanese society and get by. Convenience Store Woman <\/em>was popular due to its hopeful and generically appealing mantra that contentment is accessible to the masses. The novel pitched that the high-earning trader was no further ahead than the casual retail worker when it came to inner peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The setup in Earthlings is thematically similar to Convenience Store Woman<\/em>. The central characters are partnered to present as ‘husband and wife\u2019 but, unbeknownst to society as a whole, are not romantically involved and have paired together as a way to limit the external judgement imposed by their families and colleagues. However, Earthlings<\/em> doesn\u2019t have such an easily digestible message as Convenience Store Woman. Earthings<\/em> tries to link childhood trauma to a disintegration of trust in the assumed structures of society. It asks: if society indirectly facilitates \u2018x\u2019 to occur (insert here an evil crime to prevent plot spoilers) and society is built on particular norms then why should we live by these norms? This is an intrinsically bleaker take on \u2018unconventional living\u2019 than Convenience Store Woman<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So this makes Earthlings<\/em> inherently less relatable. Nearly everyone wishes that they were satisfied with their day job, so we\u2019re naturally drawn to the protagonist of Convenience Store Woman<\/em>. In Earthlings<\/em>, the protagonist\u2019s past tragedy stunts her emotional growth, leaving her with notions of aliens that are acceptable in childhood but deranged in adulthood. This is much harder to empathise with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Narratively, all that is fine, admirable even \u2013 I laud the highly successful author with broad appeal narrowing her scope and trying something weirder \u2013 if the writing style shifted accordingly. But it doesn\u2019t. Murata is stuck in her twee style, which already bordered on annoying in Convenience Store Woman<\/em> and is just plain inappropriate in Earthlings.<\/em> Her sentences are extremely simple. Her characters are outsized in terms of life choices but unsatisfactorily lacking in complexity. Basic language and one-dimensional characters means that the dialogue is always cloying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This isn’t Murata\u2019s first time exploring the limitations of Japanese society through horror tropes. Murata\u2019s short story collection Life Ceremony <\/em>featured plots with cannibalism and corpses. While not a brilliant short story collection, the quality was better than Earthlings. <\/em>Having 30-odd pages to wrap up an idea was helpful for Murata. She gets lost in the 250-pages afforded to Earthlings<\/em>. She has two clear characters – her protagonist is impacted by trauma and the protagonists \u2018husband\u2019 is a bit of a no-hope loser weirdo \u2013 but her third character \u2013 the protagonists cousin Yuu \u2013 is very confused. Yuu\u2019s charactisation doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense and seems mainly there to fill space. Yuu is a vague loner, neither happy or unhappy, that drifts along to add padding to scenes, with no consistent set of values or motivations. Yuu is an example of where Murata flounders with the extra pages given to her by a novel, rather than a short story or novella. Murata also struggles with pacing in Earthlings<\/em>. She spends time on things that add little atmosphere (eg. Yuu) and then, as if startling herself, rapidly wraps up the horror-adjacent plot abruptly and, I have to admit, confusingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Earthlings <\/em>was disappointing and I found it had little to offer in way of style and message. The planets will have to align for me to pick up another Murata book in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My husband beamed. “I’m delighted. Your freedom has turned out to be in the same place as ours! What kind of miracle is that?” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1126,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1124"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1147,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1124\/revisions\/1147"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}