‘Vanishing World’: Sayaka Murata at London Literature Festival 2025

Hania Ahmed
49 minutes ago
4 min read

The first night of the London Literature Festival is opened by Sayaka Murata, interviewed by Octavia Bright. Sayaka Murata is a new-generation Japanese writer, celebrating the translation of her speculative fiction novel ‘Vanishing World’ into English. She has sold over two million copies of her books in over forty countries; famous for challenging family, romance and societal conventions in her blunt, defiant writing.

Her book ‘Vanishing World’ follows Amane, a young woman who is raised by parents who are attached to the ‘vanishing world’ of sex within marriage. She attempts to follow her mother’s worldview, but finds no emotional or sexual fulfillment in relationships with real people. Instead, through a small device, she can connect both romantically and sexually with fictional characters. Amane describes love and sexual desire like ‘waste material’ within a marriage – in this world, people marry for financial security and benefits.

Murata’s books often follow sexual taboo and push society’s conceptions of ‘normalcy’ to their limit. Parallels can be drawn between her three works which have been translated into English: Convenience Store Woman, Earthlings and Vanishing World. All of these books confront sexual relationships and what is considered ‘normal’ within our society.

‘Vanishing World’ was originally published in Japanese in 2015. This fact strengthens Murata’s position as a literary visionary – akin to the parallels drawn between Orwell’s 1984 and the security society we live in today, Amane’s view of sex and her attachment to technologically-simulated fictional characters as the source of sexual and romantic pleasure rings true with the rise of Artificial Intelligence, despite having been written long before AI was as present in our lives as it is now

Interviewed by Octavia Bright, a non-fiction writer and podcaster, Sayaka Murata provides context to her work during the London Literature Festival. Murata answers candidly in Japanese, and her answers are translated.

Bright opens up the interview by asking Murata about her inspirations for the premise of the book.

Murata begins by talking about how the book was written a long time ago. Parallels can be drawn between Amane’s struggles and our current age of artificial intelligence, but this wasn’t Murata’s inspiration. Instead, she discusses how a lot of her friends were getting married ‘to people they met off the apps’, and thus were meeting them through a set of filters to predetermine their compatibility. Despite this, Murata discusses how her friends would often talk about how it was ‘nauseating to copulate with these people’. When Murata was confronted by this fact, she set about to create a ‘utopia’ for her friends – though, she adds coyly, the audience reading the book see it as a dystopia.

Murata’s vision of marriage in ‘Vanishing World’ certainly seems to embody this. Marriage is a domestic institution for financial benefits rather than a place for passion or romance. Amane’s first marriage reflects this idea – the sexual struggles which we see as commonplace are seen rather as incompatibility, when contrasted with the idyllic utopia of technological relationships with imagined characters. The tenacity and foresight of Murata shines through in Vanishing World – it is stunning to think about how the world which she wrote about with such candor 10 years ago so closely reflects the world we live in today.

Bright presses down on this idea – Amane’s world is like ours but ‘pushed to the limit’. Murata appears hesitant in her response: like many authors, she envisions her characters as existing individually and autonomously in another world to ours, where she is simply cataloguing their actions in words. She talks of how her character in the new book she’s writing often does unexpected things without her input that are difficult to write about, much to the amusement of the audience.

However, she agrees with Bright here in the sense that Amane’s world appears as ‘beyond ours’ or where certain societal norms have indeed been shattered and reframed. Murata discusses how she’s been ‘fascinated by it… the act of pushing to the limits’ since childhood’.

Certainly, her protagonists do seem to possess a childlike naivete. Perhaps this is what makes her questioning of social norms so effective: like a toddler continually asking ‘why?’ to accepted facts about life, she seems to reach the barrier of ‘that’s just the way it is’ and continue pushing – where many of us don’t.

Bright touches on this idea in one of her following questions, where she asks Murata about Amane’s fight between ‘inherited desire’ and her ‘true desire’. In a world where Amane is shamed by her mother for engaging in ‘fictosexual’ relationships and where sexual incompatibility brought an end to her previous marriage, Amane uses her body as a compass to determine her real desires. On this note, Bright asks Murata, ‘can we use our body to understand our authentic self?’

In perhaps the most thought provoking answer of the night, Murata answers ‘Yes’. She goes on to discuss how our body is extremely important to understanding, but not just sexually. The body is like a ‘labyrinth’ or ‘maze’ in which we can imagine the brain as ‘a cave made of meat’. Furthermore, Murata discusses the body as a political object, an idea which she touches on all her fiction. The body can be invaded, controlled, interpreted differently – even brought under society’s domain for the wider good of society. The body exists as something extremely personal and private, yet still as a communal entity.

Long after I left the buzz of the Elizabeth Hall, brimming with tote bags and hardcover copies of Vanishing World, I continued to reflect on this answer. Murata, as a female author who writes about female protagonists, is unwillingly grouped into the subheading of ‘feminist literature’, as she tells Octavia Bright. On one hand, I can sympathise with this answer; on the other hand, in today’s world with the commodification of the female body as a communal enterprise and sexual desire as a marketable good, Vanishing World may provide more feminist commentary than Murata herself gives it credit for.

Edited by Dan Ramos Lay, Literature Editor