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Book Review: Life Ceremony
Sep. 15th, 2022 08:23 amSayaka Murata’s Life Ceremony: Stories (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) is a mind-bending experience and with certain caveats I highly recommend it. Many of the stories are built around the question “What if this really weird thing was just a totally normal custom that almost everyone takes for granted?”, and by “really weird” I mean that in the first story, “A First-Rate Material,” the custom in question is “what if after people died we took their hair and skin and bones and nails and made them into fashionable high-end clothing and furniture?”
A lot of stories of this ilk are designed to leave the reader thinking “thank God we don’t do that,” but Murata plays her premises totally straight. The title story, “Life Ceremony,” refers to a custom where the mourners at a funeral gather to eat the deceased. The mourners are supposed to try to find a partner for the night, and they go outside and have some nookie right there in the hopes of getting inseminated to increase the falling birthrate.
The above-mentioned caveat arises from the fact that I realize not everyone wants to read a story where mourners enthusiastically inform a widow, “Your husband is really tasty!”, or the heroine muses tenderly over seeing her work friend’s body transformed into meatballs. What could be a greater act of love than eating the dead? Well, uh, that’s certainly a culturally specific way to look at things. “It really is a good custom,” muses a mourner. “We partake of life, we create life…”
“I feel like it’s human instinct to want to eat human flesh,” someone else comments.
Maho, our narrator, recalls an incident when she was a child, when cannibalism was still taboo: as a joke, she said she wanted to eat human flesh, and the teacher scolded her as the other kids in the class cried. “Instinct doesn’t exist. Morals don’t exist. They were just fake sensibilities that came from a world that was constantly transforming,” she grumps.
But her coworker (the one who will later be meatballs) tries to help her see this in a new perspective: “Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone. But that’s not true - actually, they’re always changing… And this isn’t something that happened all of a sudden, like you seem to think. It’s always been that way. Things keep transforming.”
This is the theory that animates many of these stories: most people, most of the time, consider the customs of their society natural, instinctual, right. Of course there are outliers. In both “A First-Rate Material” and “Life Ceremony,” there are people who oppose these customs on principle, and also people who don’t partake for personal reasons. One of Maho’s friends got food poisoning at a life ceremony and therefore can’t stand the taste of human flesh - a fact that he apologetically explains at the ceremony, so that no one thinks he’s one of those killjoy weirdos who think it’s wrong to eat the dead.
Some of the stories explore this idea with less cannibalism. In “Two’s Family,” Yoshiko and Kikue bought a house and raised children and grew old together - and people assume they are a lesbian couple, and grow very uncomfortable upon learning that they’re best friends who have never had sex with each other. (Yoshiko has never had sex at all; Kikue has lots of lovers.) It’s not that these people necessarily approve of lesbianism, even, but at least then Yoshiko and Kikue’s relationship would fit the established pattern of “life partners are supposed to have sex with each other.”
One of my favorite stories, “Body Magic,” has a very interesting take on the contrast between knowledge about sex as a social construct and expectation, and knowledge of sex as an internally experienced thing. “It’s not that you don’t want to know, Ruri, it’s that you want to be free, isn’t it?”
We are controlled by these social expectations; not just controlled but created. “We kept responding back and forth in our community, turned ourselves into a character, and started behaving according to that character. I began to think that maybe nobody had such a thing as a real self.”
A lot of stories of this ilk are designed to leave the reader thinking “thank God we don’t do that,” but Murata plays her premises totally straight. The title story, “Life Ceremony,” refers to a custom where the mourners at a funeral gather to eat the deceased. The mourners are supposed to try to find a partner for the night, and they go outside and have some nookie right there in the hopes of getting inseminated to increase the falling birthrate.
The above-mentioned caveat arises from the fact that I realize not everyone wants to read a story where mourners enthusiastically inform a widow, “Your husband is really tasty!”, or the heroine muses tenderly over seeing her work friend’s body transformed into meatballs. What could be a greater act of love than eating the dead? Well, uh, that’s certainly a culturally specific way to look at things. “It really is a good custom,” muses a mourner. “We partake of life, we create life…”
“I feel like it’s human instinct to want to eat human flesh,” someone else comments.
Maho, our narrator, recalls an incident when she was a child, when cannibalism was still taboo: as a joke, she said she wanted to eat human flesh, and the teacher scolded her as the other kids in the class cried. “Instinct doesn’t exist. Morals don’t exist. They were just fake sensibilities that came from a world that was constantly transforming,” she grumps.
But her coworker (the one who will later be meatballs) tries to help her see this in a new perspective: “Everyone always says that things like common sense or instinct or morals are carved in stone. But that’s not true - actually, they’re always changing… And this isn’t something that happened all of a sudden, like you seem to think. It’s always been that way. Things keep transforming.”
This is the theory that animates many of these stories: most people, most of the time, consider the customs of their society natural, instinctual, right. Of course there are outliers. In both “A First-Rate Material” and “Life Ceremony,” there are people who oppose these customs on principle, and also people who don’t partake for personal reasons. One of Maho’s friends got food poisoning at a life ceremony and therefore can’t stand the taste of human flesh - a fact that he apologetically explains at the ceremony, so that no one thinks he’s one of those killjoy weirdos who think it’s wrong to eat the dead.
Some of the stories explore this idea with less cannibalism. In “Two’s Family,” Yoshiko and Kikue bought a house and raised children and grew old together - and people assume they are a lesbian couple, and grow very uncomfortable upon learning that they’re best friends who have never had sex with each other. (Yoshiko has never had sex at all; Kikue has lots of lovers.) It’s not that these people necessarily approve of lesbianism, even, but at least then Yoshiko and Kikue’s relationship would fit the established pattern of “life partners are supposed to have sex with each other.”
One of my favorite stories, “Body Magic,” has a very interesting take on the contrast between knowledge about sex as a social construct and expectation, and knowledge of sex as an internally experienced thing. “It’s not that you don’t want to know, Ruri, it’s that you want to be free, isn’t it?”
We are controlled by these social expectations; not just controlled but created. “We kept responding back and forth in our community, turned ourselves into a character, and started behaving according to that character. I began to think that maybe nobody had such a thing as a real self.”
