Life Ceremony | Granta

  • Published: 04/05/2023
  • ISBN: 9781783787388
  • Granta Books
  • 272 pages

Life Ceremony

Sayaka Murata

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

From the author of international bestseller Convenience Store Woman comes a collection of short fiction: weird, out of this world and like nothing you’ve read before.

An engaged couple falls out over the husband’s dislike of clothes and objects made from human materials; a young girl finds herself deeply enamoured with the curtain in her childhood bedroom; people honour their dead by eating them and then procreating. Published in English for the first time, this exclusive edition also includes the story that first brought Sayaka Murata international acclaim: ‘A Clean Marriage’, which tells the story of a happily asexual couple who must submit to some radical medical procedures if they are to conceive a longed-for child.

Mixing taboo-breaking body horror with feminist revenge fables, old ladies who love each other and young women finding empathy and transformation in unlikely places, Life Ceremony is a wild ride to the outer edges of one of the most original minds in contemporary fiction.

These stories laid complete claim to me. Ominous and charming. Brilliantly sad. There is not one word wasted here. I lost significant sleep over this collection

Kiley Reid, author of Such a Fun Age

Undoubtedly shocking... unnerving... bizarre and outrageous... Life Ceremony reminds us how fragile we - and the society we take for granted - really are

New Internationalist

Strangely believable, easy to read and hard to forget

Guardian

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.

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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.