Vanishing World | Granta

  • Published: 24/04/2025
  • ISBN: 9781803511177
  • Granta Books
  • 240 pages

Vanishing World

Sayaka Murata

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Amane is ten years old when she discovers she’s not like everyone else. Her school friends were all conceived the normal way, by artificial insemination, and raised in the normal way, by parents in ‘clean’, sexless marriages. But Amane’s parents committed the ultimate taboo: they fell in love, had sex and procreated. As Amane grows up and enters adulthood, she does her best to fit in and live her life like the rest of society: cultivating intense relationships with anime characters, and limiting herself to extra-marital sex, as is the norm. Still, she can’t help questioning what sex and marriage are for.

But when Amane and her husband hear about Eden, an experimental town where residents are selected at random to be artificially inseminated en masse (including men who are fitted with artificial wombs), the family unit does not exist and children are raised collectively and anonymously, they decide to try living there. But can this bold experiment build the brave new world Amane desires, or will it push her to breaking point?

The Author

One of the most celebrated of the new generation of Japanese writers, Sayaka Murata has won not only the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, but the Gunzo, Noma, and Mishima Yukio Prizes as well. Her story, ‘A Clean Marriage’, was featured in Granta 127 Japan. She is 36-years-old and works part-time in a convenience store.

More about the author →

The Translator

Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated fiction by more than a dozen early modern and contemporary Japanese writers. Her translation of Sayaka Murata’s Akutagawa prizewinning novel Convenience Store Woman was one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2018, Foyle’s Book of the Year 2018, and was shortlisted for the Indies Choice Award and Best Translated Book Award. Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings (October 2020) has already been named one of Time’s ‘must-read’ books of 2020. Her translation of Kyoko Nakajima’s Naoki prizewinning The Little House was published in February 2019, and Things Remembered and Things Forgotten a short-story collection by the same author, co-translated with Ian MacDonald, is due out in spring 2021).  

More about the translator →

From the Same Author

Sayaka Murata on Granta.com

Fiction | The Online Edition

Earthlings

Sayaka Murata

An excerpt from Earthlings, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

Fiction | The Online Edition

Faith

Sayaka Murata

‘Hey, Nagaoka, wanna start a new cult with me?’

New fiction by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.

Art & Photography | Granta 144

Chameleon

Tomoko Sawada & Sayaka Murata

‘If Sawada can transform herself without limit, maybe I can too.’ Sayaka Murata introduces Tomoko Sawada’s photographs, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.