Lydia Millet
“Earthlings” is the Japanese author Sayaka Murata’s second novel to be translated into English, after “Convenience Store Woman,” which was published to critical acclaim in 2018. The new book’s plot makes a charming elevator pitch, even if you leave out juicy tags like pedophilia, rape and murder.
Two cousins — Natsuki and Yuu, whose extended family gathers yearly in the mountains during the holidays — agree that they’re aliens, abandoned at birth among humans. Natsuki, the narrator, has a plush hedgehog toy who comes from a planet with a long, silly name and assures her she has magical powers. When Yuu confesses that he too hails from a distant sphere, they embrace their outsider kinship. The sweet 9-year-old misfits make a pact to get married in secret.
It’s fairly standard imaginary play until, back home, Natsuki is sexually assaulted by a male teacher. During the next vacation, at her instigation, the two prepubescents have a (consensual) version of sex — and get caught and punished.
Natsuki doesn’t see Yuu again until she’s a young adult, after having entered into an empty, contractual marriage in order to escape her cruel mother and spoiled-brat sister. Living alongside each other in a spacious apartment, she and her husband, Tomoya, use the semblance of marriage to avoid the clutches of their unloving families and repressive society. Renouncing the “Baby Factory” in which they’re expected to be cogs, the roommates deny both their sexuality and earthly reality. (Natsuki has never relinquished her alien status, though her hedgehog has fallen silent.)
When they visit Yuu in the remote mountain house where the childhood misadventure took place long ago, the platonic duo turns into a trio, and the dimwitted Tomoya decides he needs to violate a major taboo. He picks incest: “I’m going to go to my parents’ place this weekend. I will have sex with someone in my family before coming back here.”
Aspiring to live in a moral vacuum, the cousins make no attempt to stop him. So he acts on his diabolical plan, driving off and proposing sex to his brother — the best way he can think of to show off how far outside society he considers himself to be.
Predictably, the gambit doesn’t end well, and Tomoya’s chased down by his irate, bullying father, who delivers a vicious beating. But the most outrageous, theatrical acts of psychopathy are still to come, and I won’t ruin the surprise.
The novel’s tone hovers between deadpan and naïveté: Even in its episodes of violence it has an affectless quality, which we presume is a function of Natsuki’s PTSD from the sexual assault (plus her E.T. origins, of course). Its appeal lies precisely in this tonal flatness — the anthropological distance the narrator maintains from her subjects. Reminiscent of certain excellent folk tales, expressionless prose is Murata’s trademark. If her description of “the Factory” strikes a superficial note, we can ascribe its stripped-down literality to Natsuki’s automaton identity. Extraterrestrials, it seems, are less like living beings than rudimentary robots with limited powers of affective analysis.
In “Earthlings,” being an alien is a simple proxy for being alienated. The characters define themselves not by a specific notion of what they are — other — but by a general idea of what they are not: humans/breeders. Soon their mission becomes the achievement of a more perfect detachment: They wish to divest themselves of all learned norms and strictures. We know this because we’re told directly; no need, in Murata’s stories, for a tedious interpretive struggle.
Their project of de-acculturating themselves is rendered matter-of-factly, without suspense, since — existing in a half-life of childish patter and reductive reasoning — they didn’t exhibit much tension of personality or emotional intelligence in the first place. But the proposition that we can deconstruct our socialization through an act of will is intriguing and important. Here it comes with a dose of pathos, since these characters don’t possess the conceptual tools to explore with depth or nuance the human nature they’re so focused on rejecting. Their beef with society is the reproductive pressure it exerts; other systemic oppressions that might give a thoughtful alien pause, like widespread inequality and injustice, are of no interest.
Yet not wishing to have children is hardly evidence of inhumanity.
In a sense the three lonely people become libertines, eager to enact their mental freedom by breaking basic rules. If the Marquis de Sade were reanimated as a polite Japanese millennial — less French, less political, less relentlessly graphic and less obsessed with feces — he might produce a document like “Earthlings.”
At first the characters’ rebellion is meek. They steal food from neighbors and swear off laundry, tidiness and artificial lighting. It’s as if they’re newly discovering the hippie lifestyle more than 50 years late, and calling it their personal invention. This confirms them as pitiable figures: Much as no one ever took them aside and told them kindly that they didn’t have to procreate, so no one ever bothered to show them any movies about the 1960s.
But when aggressive senior citizens suddenly invade their Eden, the spaceship swerves off the path of innocent experimentation and lands squarely in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” territory.
Murata’s presentation of alienation as a natural response to the pressures of conformity may not give us much that wasn’t on offer in, say, European existentialist writing of nearly a century ago. The strength of her voice lies in the faux-naïf lens through which she filters her dark view of humankind: We earthlings are sad, truncated bots, shuffling through the world in a dream of confusion.
Lydia Millet is the author, most recently, of “A Children’s Bible.”
EARTHLINGS
By Sayaka Murata
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
247 pp. Grove Press. $26.
Source: New York Times
