In 2024, there were just six births per 1,000 residents of the country of Japan. That’s a total of 686,061 babies in a country with a population of 122 million.
To put that in context, that’s about the same number of babies that were born in California, New York, and Minnesota last year—and Japan’s total population is twice the size of those three states put together. Japan’s birth rate is not the absolute lowest in the world; some small island nations, war-torn Ukraine, and the gender relations hellhole that is South Korea still have it beat out. Still, the demographic writing is on the wall for the Land of the Rising Sun. Japan’s births haven’t been above replacement rate since the mid-1970s, and three in ten Japanese residents are age 65 or older. Japan’s population peaked in 2010, at 128 million people, and barring dramatic change, that number will drop by one-third by 2060.
It’s no wonder, then, that a literary star in the tradition of Aldous Huxley and P.D. James may well be emerging from the Chrysanthemum Kingdom. A decade-old novel, newly translated into English, takes on new resonance amid debates over eugenics, birth rates, and the future of fertility.
Sayaka Murata’s Vanishing World portrays a future in which sexual desire is disposed of in “clean rooms,” artificial insemination is the path for all would-be parents, and “family” has been fully rationalized to avoid the messiness of feelings or irrational attachments. If today’s tech CEOs dream of a world in which “sex is for fun, and embryo screening is for babies,” Murata’s novel takes that logic just one step further.
Vanishing World depicts a world in which procreation has been remade to fit modern sensibilities, and human beings are stuck living with the aftermath. Whether or not it is intended as a cautionary tale, it should be treated as one—signaling what we are at risk of losing if we allow the tyranny of “convenience” and scientific precision to run roughshod over the messy reality of being human.
Deconstructing Marriage, Demystifying Sex, and Dehumanizing Procreation
In Western literary circles, Murata is best known for her treatment of asexuality and female ambivalence. Her 2016 novel, Konbini Ningen (“Convenience Store Woman”), drawn from her own experience as a part-time worker at a Japanese convenience store, won her the Akutagawa Prize (the Japanese equivalent of the Booker Prize). The titular employee finds purpose in her job at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, even as she struggles to explain her surprising contentedness in having no real relationships, extended family, or desire for children. The novel’s empathetic treatment of a largely friendless and aromantic woman in her mid 30s struck a chord in Japan, selling over half a million copies.
Murata says that she, like her character, has given up on men, and she has no children. She wants to help Japanese women who opt out of sex, romance, and childbearing to feel reassured in their choices. “Under the conventional conservative way of having sex, the woman is just treated as a tool or object,” she is quoted as saying. Instead, she argues, women should seek “true intentional sex, because that is beautiful.” Yet even if Murata’s statements reflect a certain postmodern sensibility around sex, she’s not afraid to shy away from darker, dystopian effects of the severing of intimacy and procreation.
Vanishing World depicts a Japan in the not-too-distant future in which sex is passé, if not taboo, and where children are all conceived via artificial insemination. In her review for the New York Times, Madeleine Feeny describes the novel as “‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ on acid.” This feels like a slight disservice to both Murata’s taut prose (as translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) and her ability to create plausibly speculative fiction. While Margaret Atwood took inspiration from the Puritans and the Iranian Revolution to conjure up an unlikely American theocracy, Murata offers a more or less straight-line projection of contemporary trends: deconstructing marriage, demystifying sex, and dehumanizing procreation.
The novel’s main character, Amane, tells herself that what she truly wants is to be “normal.” She seeks a celibate marriage with her husband, an impeccably timed child conceived via artificial insemination, and intimate relationships with both real and fictional boyfriends. Her authentic desires are harder to discern, much less fulfill. Amane’s parents, we learn, conceived her the “old-fashioned” way, which becomes a source of much teasing in school. As she searches for sexual and romantic connection as an adult, Amane views her retrograde desires as a “curse” bestowed on her by her parents. “Now that pregnancy and childbirth occur by scientific means, they are separate from romantic love,” Amane tells us, with a clinical finality and a hint of regret. Indeed, the prologue hints that she may be the last woman in the world to have sexual intercourse.
In this society, without the traditional linkage between sex, procreation, partnership, and parenthood, marriage becomes a sort of comfortable playacting of domesticity. Men and women pair off as conversation partners and roommates, not lovers. Husband-wife intercourse is considered “incest,” while sexual desires are channeled into masturbatory dalliances with fictional characters or casual acquaintances. These arrangements may not sound dissimilar to those of today’s “enlightened” polyamorists. Similarly, in Murata’s hands, playing up the sometimes ridiculous physicality of sex is more than just a way to get cheap laughs. The clinical way Amane must reintroduce her male lovers to actual sex sounds uncomfortably close to reality in a nation that had to coin a phrase (“grass-eating men”) for the growing share of young men who have declared themselves uninterested in having sex with women.
Though Murata doesn’t dwell on the eugenic elements, the book’s final section, in “Experiment City,” imagines a world in which pregnancy is no longer reserved for women, and children are optimized with an engineer’s precision to keep the overall birthrate in tune. “Things are getting more and more convenient, aren’t they?” one character asks, echoing the novel’s constant refrain: in this society, human beings have opted for self-contained convenience over the contingencies of the unplanned or unexpected. Progress has meant irrevocably turning the messiness of love and lust into tidy, tied-off actions.
It’s a perfect illustration of how what one generation may think of as “responsible” the next thinks of as “mandatory.” After all, if you have the tools to genetically identify which of the dozens of embryos you have created has the lowest risk of genetic disease, why take the risk of conceiving naturally? Once these technologies become widespread—like testing unborn fetuses from Down’s syndrome, the better to eliminate them before birth—those who opt out of such “advances” will be deemed the weird ones.
Amane’s resistance to the new world order initially makes it seem as if, even in this world, rationality can’t wipe away all of biology. When Amane (spoiler alert) suffers a miscarriage in the second half of the novel, the medical staff hasten to assure her that she needn’t worry, as the population will be kept in balance by other women. “The doctor seemed to be telling me it was all in the calculations so there was no need to worry. I wanted to shout at him that it was my child that I’d lost, not one I was carrying for humankind, but I couldn’t even do that.”
Amane feels the connection between her and the fetus she bears (conceived, against the rules, with her husband’s sperm) in a way that goes beyond the sterile, white-coat view of human reproduction. Yet, over time, she finds herself caught up in the social conformity of the new social experiment. “Men and women were now all the same, all wombs in service of the human race. The inaudible music of rightness played over our heads, controlling us.” In the end, she, too, loves Big Brother.
A Freely Chosen Dystopia
This dystopia isn’t imposed from on high; it’s chosen, more or less freely, to avoid the heartache of broken relationships or sick children, to give individuals complete autonomy over when and how to have children, to avoid tangling up what the heart wants with what’s best for society.
In other words, Vanishing World does not depict patriarchy or autocracy run amok. It is an heir to Brave New World, or even Plato’s Republic, with children in an experimental city conceived with anonymous gametes and raised communally. Each of the children are referred to as kodomo-chan (little child), all the parents as interchangeable “Mothers,” without old-fashioned sentiments like family lineage, blood ties, or individuality getting in the way of a clean, cohesive new tomorrow. After all, as Amane tells us, “Numerous research centers have published papers showing that the family system is an unsuitable method of reproduction for highly intelligent animals.” Can’t you just hear those words being blandly recited by a public radio host, or activist, or lawmaker, ushering in brave new tomorrow that treats family as a constellation of unrelated individuals, rather than an integrated and integral unit in which two become one, and then more?
Murata’s novel shows a society that is optimized, rationalized, and technically triumphant. Is she applauding these trends? Decrying them? Warning us about them? Her background, and the dark, deadpan humor of her writing, makes Murata hard to fully pin down. Yet it is a mark of her honesty that the result is clearly not recognizably more human—and may, in fact, be more inhumane. In an interview with Wired, Murata said she wrote stories to explore what it would look like to relieve women from the burden of childbirth. But, she laments, “it just got more and more hellish… I didn’t solve anything.”
Murata offers unflinching, even extreme, willingness to examine a culture which prizes safety, control, and rationality over the unplanned and unpredictable vulnerability of being human. More fundamentally, she offers an insight into a potential future in which the old constraints on reproduction—from the ever-present male libido to even the bond between a mother and her child—can no longer be taken as given. We may be closer to that world than many believe. On average, demographers estimate, Japanese women today are expected to give birth to about 1.15 children over their lifetime. Last year, less than half a million Japanese couples tied the knot; the lowest number in almost a century. Without cultural shifts and policy tweaks, these trends will continue.
Murata clearly has a soft spot for the old-fashioned and the organic, a lingering hope for a love that spills over into creation of a new life. By pushing our current trajectories to their extreme, Murata’s novel helps us appreciate what the rational logic of scientism seeks to erase: a society grounded in romantic love, the unpredictable dynamics of organic male-female partnership, and the messy, biological connections between spouse, partner, and child. If we don’t want Murata’s bleak vision to become reality, we’ll have to work to keep this particular world from vanishing.
