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Sayaka Murata

Författare till Hur mår fröken Furukura?

13+ verk 4,228 medlemmar 258 recensioner 3 favoritmärkta

Om författaren

Verk av Sayaka Murata

Hur mår fröken Furukura? (2016) 2,961 exemplar
Earthlings (2020) 952 exemplar
Life Ceremony (2019) 290 exemplar
A Clean Marriage 10 exemplar
Faith 3 exemplar
地球星人 (2018) 2 exemplar
Dziewczyna z konbini (2019) 2 exemplar
Dünyalılar (2023) 2 exemplar
Kjörbúðarkonan 1 exemplar
Femeia minimarket 1 exemplar

Associerade verk

Granta 127: Japan (2014) — Bidragsgivare — 124 exemplar
早稲田文学増刊 女性号 (2017) — Bidragsgivare — 1 exemplar

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Flaggad
RandyMetcalfe | 10 andra recensioner | Mar 14, 2024 |
I simply loved this book! It was quite sad, thought-provoking and fun at the same time. I finished reading it a few days ago and I can't stop thinking about it.

Keiko is strange. She knows about it and she is trying very hard to be "normal"; that's why she is copying the behaviour of the people around her - she talks like one woman and dresses like the other one, keeps pretending everything is fine with her. But she is already 36 and she realises, that not having a man in her life makes her original, noticeable. So - she finds a man, as strange as she is, to live at her place and lets her family and friends believe, that they are actually a couple.

What I found interesting was that Keiko was a very happy, balanced person at the beginning of the book. Her unconventional life was giving her lots of joy - yet, none of her friends seemed to notice or appreciate it. They forced her to become someone else, someone unhappy, and they were very satisfied about it, because now Keiko seemed more similar to them. And I don't know, are we really all like that? Is being normal really so important for us that we are ready to destroy somebody's life? I truly hope I'm not.

I'm very glad about the ending of the book - I'm not going to write about it, but I think it was perfect. I wouldn't like any other kind of ending to this book.

It was a great book and I'm very happy I read it.

From my blog: https://dominikasreadingchallenge.blogspot.com/2019/04/convenience-store-woman-b...
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
Donderowicz | Mar 12, 2024 |
Don’t be fooled by the cute hamster on the front page, this was the most disorientating thing I’ve read in a long time.
 
Flaggad
Belbo713 | 52 andra recensioner | Mar 11, 2024 |
Edited to add: some great discussion of this book in the Newest Literary Fiction group (Dec 2020 group read) has helped me with the ending, which I can see now as a metaphor either for the self-destructive tendencies of trauma victims (pessimistic take) or for breaking down one’s dysfunctional beliefs/behavior patterns and being born-again, so to speak, with a new way of seeing your place in the world (optimistic take).
——————-

Earthlings is a novel of abuse, alienation, and horror wrapped up in a deceivingly cute package. The whimsical tone is a stark contrast to the content which creates some interesting dissonance and some laugh-out-loud moments of black comedy sprinkled throughout the disturbing story (but there's still no excuse for the misleading blurb the book advertises itself with: "Immensely charming" says John Freeman from LitHub, er, no).

Natsuki is eleven years old at the novel's opening. She suffers constant degrading emotional abuse from her mother and sister and then sexual abuse from a popular teacher. She attempts to cope by imagining she has magical powers conferred onto her by a cute stuffed animal who is from another planet. Once a year at a family gathering she meets up with her cousin Yuu, who suffers abuse from his own mother and copes by imagining he is actually from another planet. They truly share a tragic fraternity, and the examination of their childhood experiences is excellent.

"Yuu, have you ever thought that your life doesn't belong to you?"

For a moment he couldn't get his words out, but then he said in a small voice, "Children's lives never belong to them. The grown-ups own us. If your mom abandons you, you won't be able to eat, and you can't go anywhere without help from a grown-up. It's the same for all children." He reached out a hand to cut a flower from the bed. "That's why we have to try hard to survive until we've grown up ourselves."


The novel then moves a couple of decades ahead and loses some of its power. Natsuki marries a man she meets online for convenience and a separate togetherness; both severely damaged people, they find a sympathetic friend in one another while struggling to deal with "the Factory", what they call family and society's rigid insistence on everyone becoming productive working and reproducing cogs in the machine:

Everyone believed in the Factory. Everyone was brainwashed by the Factory and did as they were told. They all used their reproductive organs for the Factory and did their jobs for the sake of the Factory. My husband and I were people they'd failed to brainwash, and anyone who remained unbrainwashed had to keep up the act in order to avoid being eliminated by the Factory.


This critique of adulthood in the novel has all the nuance and insight of an angsty teenager vowing never to be anything like their perfectly normal mom and dad, though I tend to think of Japanese society being considerably more heavy on the push to conformity than my own, so perhaps it bites harder for that.

Natuski's break with reality however is even more complete now than as a child, she has come to believe she is from an alien planet herself, and a horrifying scene of butchery and murder from her childhood that took place shortly after the novel jumped ahead in time explains her continued mental slide. Her husband comes to adopt her reality as well. They then meet with Yuu at the family's old gathering place, and while at first he's naturally skeptical of Natsuki's alternate reality she shares with him, his apparent dissatisfaction with life leads him to adopt their worldview, concluding in a final bizarre and surreal scene of human slaughter, cannibalism, and then mutual voluntary cannibalism as the three characters literally consume parts of each other's bodies that is difficult to make sense of. What Murata was going for with this ending, I'm not sure to be honest. Maybe it makes more sense in a Japanese cultural context?

The part of the novel focused on Natsuki's childhood I thought was excellent, the part focused on her adulthood I got less from, so I probably would have enjoyed this novel more if it had remained a story of childhood and powerlessness in a sometimes brutal world of adults. However, it is certainly memorable.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
lelandleslie | 52 andra recensioner | Feb 24, 2024 |

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Statistik

Verk
13
Även av
3
Medlemmar
4,228
Popularitet
#5,940
Betyg
½ 3.7
Recensioner
258
ISBN
94
Språk
18
Favoritmärkt
3

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