Life Ceremony

Gave up at 29%.

First-Rate Material
3.5⭐

A Magnificent Spread
3⭐

A Summer Night's Kiss
2⭐

Two's Family
2.5⭐

The Time of the Large Star
1.5⭐

Poochie
1⭐

Who would guess that cannibalism could be so dull?

Pushes the boundaries of what is normal. When you think it can't get weirder, it does. Smooth read.

Best short stories:
- Two's Family
- Life Ceremony
- Body Magic

Murata Sayaka has such a unique way of story-telling. It was almost impossible for me to predict what was going to happen. And even then, the stories were never normal. The stories were very quirky, unusual, and just overall weird. Which I absolutely love.

Some of the other stories were an acquired taste, though.

3.75

Life Ceremony is a collection of 13 short stories, each filled with unusual and thought-provoking narratives. I found myself engrossed in the peculiar activities depicted in each story, making for an enjoyable read overall. After finishing one story, I was compelled to dive into the next, eager to uncover more of Murata's unique storytelling.

Each story explores unusual activities, like making materials from dead bodies and food culture clashes, making them intriguing but potentially off-putting for some readers.
For instance, the first story, “A First-Rate Material,” explores the concept of materials crafted from dead human bodies, while the second story, “A Magnificent Spread,” delves into food culture clashes, making them intriguing.
While some readers may find certain stories a bit too eccentric, but I found them really different and made me think. The book talks about some serious stuff like cannibalism, so it's good for readers to be careful. But overall, “Life Ceremony” is a special book that I think deserves a good  

I love her dry approach to surreality but the short stories didn't give me the depth or emotional weight like her long form ones

I'm disappointed that I'm not going to make it to book club tonight, because this would have been really interesting to discuss. (Stupid weather changing/daycare germs.) I don't even really know what to think - normally when I read short stories, I like to write mini reviews and then aggregate my star ratings, but I realized almost immediately that I couldn't do that with this collection - some of the pieces were so short (A Summer Night's Kiss - 2 pages, The Time of The Large Star - 3 pages), abrupt, and so ... bizarre (Poochie, Lover on the Breeze, Puzzle) ... that I wasn't even sure what to really say about them, let alone how to rate them.

This is definitely light horror, in that it's meant to be grotesque, and also there's a kind of distance here. Sometimes almost imagining alternative futures, in which everything about the current way of life is no longer a viable option, whether due to loss of population (Life Ceremony), technological advances (The Time of the Large Star), or an attempt to go back to the way things used to be (Eating the City).

Did I enjoy Murata's creativity in this collection? Absolutely. Did I always enjoy the way it was told/translated? Not always (especially re: the remove of the author from the reader).

Favorite pieces:
- Life Ceremony - life on earth (/in Japan?) has dwindled dramatically, so when someone dies, their loved ones hold a Life Ceremony, in which the body is cooked and served followed by mass copulation, in which the goal is Insemination to further the species. One woman's colleague died, and he had planned all the recipes he wanted made of his body. Especially interesting ideas re: births as merely propagating the species and the idea of not necessarily having ties to your offspring after birth.
- Hatchling - a woman realizes that she has no personality, rather adapting to every scenario in her life through a handful of personas that allow her to be neutrally well-liked, and what happens when she confesses this to her fiance, when he no longer feels like he needs to mask his own true personality.
- Two's Family - two platonic friends who never married, but created a family of their own with children and a life, and are looking back now that they are in their 70s and one is in the hospital for cancer treatments. One of the least creepy of this collection.

Ultimately coming down around 3 stars.

She recycles the same trick over and over but it never really gets old to me. She demonstrates how all the expectations of society, seen under the right lens, are as offensive as our greatest taboos.

It worked for me in Earthlings, Convenience Store Human (I dislike the title translation to Woman), and in this book the short story format lets her explore a larger breadth of topics, which was a lot of fun.

Rating: 3.5 stars

I love how whimsical Murata's short stories are and it reminds me of one of her earlier novels, Earthlings. Some of the short stories were forgettable but some stuck out to me. Overall the pacing was well done and the variety of topics presented in these stories were decent.

Loved this latest collection of stories by Sayaka Murata in all their weirdness. Some of them I could easily see expanded into novels.

  ‘'A hundred years later, what would our bodies be used for? Would we be chair legs or sweaters or clock hands? Would we be used for a longer time after our deaths than the time we'd been alive?''
Sayaka Murata's stories defy genre, time and place. We are transported to an alternate reality and we move on to an almost psychedelic future before we return to contemporary Japan. The characters of her stories are women who are burdened - although they'd never confess it - by a desperate need to belong, to be liked. However, Murata's version and depiction of what we would define as ‘'Love'' is not only highly arbitrary but dubious, suspicious, oppressive. It is a mirror of society's projections, artificial aspirations, a strange kind of idolatry that leads nowhere.
Sayaka Murata marries the abstract, the eerie and the mundane and proves she is one of the most exceptional writers of our time.
A First-Rate Material: A couple is planning a wedding but the future spouses don't really see eye-to-eye in a story that depicts a time when it is acceptable, fashionable even, to make all kinds of objects from dead humans.
A Magnificent Spread: In a humorously absurd, yet poignant story the woman is about to meet her fiance's husband and his sister is there to help her with the dinner table. But the eating habits of the diners are strange. Too strange...An interesting commentary on how eating is a product of each culture and its significance in the forming of our identity.
A Summer Night's Kiss/ Two's Family: Another lady who has had her two children through artificial insemination contemplates kissing and sex while her best friend, her lifelong companion, is fighting for her life. The memories of society's prejudices are still painfully acute. Such a moving, tender story!
The Time of the Large Star: A girl and a boy meet in a land where the moon is adored, the sun is hated and sleep does not exist.
Poochie: If you have readEarthlings, Murata's writing won't come as a surprise. This is a (very short) story of a girl that decides to have a middle-aged man as a pet.
Life Ceremony: This is a world where sex for pleasure is frowned upon. Where pregnancy is a result of insemination during a ‘'Life Ceremony''. Will women have to produce the humans that will secure the existence of our species. When mourners consume the flesh of the deceased to conceive a child. This story is strange and twisted and beautiful, but proceed with caution because you may find it deeply disturbing.
Body Magic: Two teenage girls explore relationships and sexuality, ignoring the preconceived notions of their classmates.
Lover on the Breeze: A beautiful blue curtain watches a girl falling in and out of love.
Puzzle: A young woman newly arrived in Tokyo sees and experiences the functions of our bodies in a vastly different way than her colleagues. ‘'I could hear the voices of some people outside, but they were speaking in a foreign language, so I didn't understand what they were saying. As I listened, the voices began to resemble the calls of animals. In my mind they overlapped with the night presences I had sensed on the other side of the torn window screens during those childhood summers, and before I knew it, I had fallen asleep.''
Eating the City: The hunting for weeds in Tokyo and the simple act of eating become metaphors for navigating and experiencing life in the metropolis, for the memories of childhood.
Hatchling: A bride-to-be narrates the evolution of her five “personalities” that were created out of her desperate need to be liked by everyone. We all develop “faces” we deem appropriate to every interaction but Is there a real ‘'us'' buried deep inside us or are we truly vacant?
‘'Look, at this point in time, there are five me's existence. I can't choose which one to be by myself. So I want you to choose which one you want.''
Many thanks to Grove Press and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/