Sayaka Murata’s latest novel to be translated into English, Vanishing World, is a bizarre and often deeply troubling novel. As one of the stars of this year’s Manchester Literature Festival, she came to Manchester Central Library to talk about the book. If anyone went to the event hoping for clarity on the novel, or indeed the rest of Murata’s strange body of work, they would be left disappointed. Murata’s answers were overwhelmingly oblique, refusing to give straight explanations in a way that made the event far more interesting than if she simply told us what she means in her work.
The night’s discussion, hosted by broadcaster and writer Alex Clark, began with an attempt to establish where the novel, a dystopia of kinds largely based around a reorganisation of family and childbirth, came from. “When I write, I normally start with portraits of the characters,” Murata tells us through an interpreter, herself speaking only in her native Japanese. As Murata revealed throughout the event, the use of the portrait here is literal; her writing process always begins with drawing. “I’m not great at drawing, but I draw anyway,” she later says when an audience member asks her about this methodology.
However, the characters were unusually not Murata’s starting point for Vanishing World – “I started drawing something weird, very strange, drawings. I can’t quite explain in words. I think it was like a town or city to start with.” As she continued drawing, this became a place in the novel called Experiment City, a place that typifies the novel’s exploration of alternative values of the family.
The dissection of societal values was key to Murata’s thinking when coming up with the novel. She talks about having the thought experiment of a world where typical values are “upside-down.” This manifests itself in the novel in a few ways: the normalisation of falling in love with fictional characters, the stigmatisation of married couples having romantic or sexual relationships (in the world of the novel, this is framed as incest), and the removal of any birthing method aside from artificial insemination.
Despite how odd and sinister things get in the novel, Murata rejects the idea that she was trying to write a dystopia. “I was thinking of the people who are struggling to adapt to the world around them… I wanted to create a utopia for the people who think this world is a dystopia.” However, as the writing went on, Murata tells us she grew scared of the world and the people she was writing about, “I didn’t know where these people are heading to. And I still really don’t know why they headed that way.”
When Clark tries to dig deeper into the motivations behind certain aspects of the novel, Murata’s answers stray further and further into the abstract. When asked if she used her own experience to write the novel, Murata firmly tells Clark that “I don’t use my experience, definitely not consciously anyway.”
Her explanation for how she does write is steeped in multiple layers of metaphor – “There’s a fish tank, a clear glass fish bowl. So I put all my ideas, drawings, words in that little fish tank, just put everything in there, and one day it sort of clicks.” While this metaphor is clear, she also offers one far more oblique, “I feel like there’s me as a person, and there’s me as a novelist. So the human, the person, me, is lying in the lab on the slab. And the me as a novelist is there, but I can’t control myself. I just have to write.”
The idea that she can’t control the novelist side of herself is one that comes up again and again in the discussion, “I can’t control my stories, and I don’t want to control my stories.” She tells us that if she did understand her stories, then it would be boring for her. Murata seemingly thrives on the disconnect between what she views as her daily self and what emerges in her writing: “I want to be in a state where the human person, me, wouldn’t understand what my writer, me, is doing.”
Clark brings the discussion back into the realm of the novel, asking about the treatment of women’s reproductive rights in Murata’s work. “The theme always comes back to me,” she says, while again emphasising that what she discusses in her writing is “uncontrollable.” Murata admits that “ever since I was really young, I’ve always felt like the world is beating me with these values… And the feeling just never somehow leaves me. It’s like a pus coming off of me.”
The topic of Murata’s younger self continues when Clark asks about her childhood reading habits. “Books for me were where I was able to regain my pain. I was allowed to feel the pain,” Murata says. Her favourite book as a child was about a boy who was abused verbally and physically by his mother, with Murata emphasising the lack of reconciliation in the book as a reason she liked it. “…because I felt like I was beaten by my mother’s words when I was a child,” she explains, books being less escapism for her and more as a way to process and feel seen.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, however, Murata spoke about how when she first began writing as a young adult, what was influencing her was romance – “A boy and a girl fall in love was a favourite plot of mine.” She then recounted what she wrote when she attempted to replicate these stories, the results looking much closer to what one would expect of Murata’s work: “When I wrote them, an alien and a girl fell in love… and the hero, the boy, would die, but the girl would somehow do a brain transplant, and he would come alive, and they’d fall in love again.”
After getting more concrete details about her writing, Clark returns to questions rooted in Murata’s texts, this time asking about Murata’s breakthrough novel in the West – Convenience Store Woman – and how rooted it is in deeply ordinary, unremarkable daily events. “I wish I could say I planned all of that, and sound all cool but I’m sorry,” she says, once again returning to the idea that there was no specific conscious thoughts or intent that went into her writing. It cannot be overstated how often Murata returned to this concept over the hour discussion, there was a real sense that she rejects the very idea of her own authorship, the novels instead just coming through her out of a void.
When speaking about how writing process, Murata states, “I want to feel like I’m being bruised and cut, I want that sort of sensation when I write -” something that Clark (as well as the audience) clearly finds interesting. Clark asks if that feeling is one that Murata wants to pass on to the reader, touching on the habitually disturbing elements that pop up across Murata’s body of work.
She makes clear that she never intends to make the reader feel pain. She expresses this through a particularly visceral metaphor: “You have to have a knife in your book, but the blade is not facing the readers. It’s facing you. So keep your blade to your direction. So you might stab yourself, and then it stabs you through and then the blade might stab somebody who’s standing behind you. But again, that’s not controllable, it’s not your intention to hurt anybody else but you.”
She is however abundantly aware that her books can be distressing. She recounts that after giving a proof of her latest book to be published in Japan to a friend, and she vomited: “And she was so sick that she said, ‘I think you should have a warning.'” Murata tells us that she took her up on this and added a trigger warning to the book.
In what ended up being the final question she asked, Clark couldn’t stop herself from asking what it is that made Murata’s friend vomit just from reading. “So I created this fictitious, imaginary creature [that] could do procreation on the human’s behalf… I thought I would be writing a world that is very calm, happy, because there are these other creatures who have the responsibility for us. No, it didn’t happen like that, it turned out to be hell.”
It is perhaps fitting that the event ended with Murata describing how her story went in a completely different direction from what she anticipated. It reflects both the experience of reading a lot of Murata’s work, shocking moments often coming out of nowhere, as well as reflecting what emerged as the central idea of the event, her fundamentally unknowable process.
For more coverage of the 2025 Manchester Literature Festival, please see below:
Manchester Literature Festival: 8 must-see events
Sarah Hall & Daisy Johnson at Manchester Literature Festival: folklore and new voices
