Published: 2018 (Shinchosa)
Setting: 1990’s and 2010’s Tokyo and rural Nagano
Summary: In Murata’s second novel to be widely-translated, Earthlings, an idiosyncratic young girl named Natsuki confronts childhood trauma in an unorthodox and revealing manner, ultimately ending in total detachment from human “Earthlings,” and their society at large, twenty years later.
Natsuki, unfit to be in her normal everyday family with her mother, father, and sister Kise, has one solace in life. She believes that she is an alien from a faraway planet that must acquiesce, and survive, in a world where a woman’s sole role is to produce children for the society, which she deems as “The Baby Factory”. Natsuki shares this theory with her cousin Yuu, the only other person in this world who understands her, during the summer holidays. Yuu and Natsuki form a pact to survive and eventually marry in spite of The Factory’s overarching influence until the next holiday between 5th and 6th grade. Just before the next summer holiday, Natsuki is targeted by her cram school teacher, who coercers her into sex against her volition. Natsuki reports the sexual assault to her family, but they do not believe her and chastise Natsuki for her suspected lie. Natsuki recedes farther into her worldview that she is an outsider because of this incident, and while at the family house in Nagano during the subsequent summer holidays, has sex with Yuu to reclaim her body. Her family finds her with Yuu early the next morning, shunning and beating both of them, ultimately separating them for the better part of twenty years.
Fast-forward twenty years, the reader finds Natsuki to be an in arranged and asexual marriage, facilitated by an online dating app for couples that don’t want children or sexual contact, to a man named Tomoya. The helps Natsuki and Tomoya create a mirage of marital bliss and keeps their parents’ hopes of joining “the Factory” alive even if they know they have no interest in even touching each other. Through an odd sequence of events, Natsuki finds herself reunited with Yuu at the family house in Nagano. Yuu seems to have changed and abandoned his delusions of grandeur relating to their belonging to an alien race. Yuu and Natsuki have an uncomfortable reunion, but eventually they leave having had some sort of closure of the childhood incident.
After leaving the house in Nagano for the first time, Natsuki reveals in a flashback that after being shunned by her family, she was forced to go back to the cram school and be taught be her assailant once again. Natsuki, prompted by a conversation with her stuffed animal, decides to “survive” the night before going back to school, by killing her rapist with a garden scythe. Natsuki hides the evidence of her revenge, and goes on living her life of survival and faux-conformity.
As the novel reaches its apex, Natsuki, Tomoya, and Yuu descend into madness while distancing themselves from the conformity of modern life and accepting that they are not like anyone they have ever known. They agree to live in the Nagano house together, subsisting on plants and stolen food from nearby houses. As winter sets in, they are attacked by the family of the cram school teacher, who were given the evidence from the twenty-year old cold case by Natsuki’s vindictive sister. After Natsuki, Yuu, and Tomoya kill the cram school teacher’s elderly parents, they decide to finally distance themselves from “Earthlings” by eating each other in an act of cannibalisitic connection and self-preservation. The end of the novel is a four-page tour-de-blood and gore as their families stumble upon their half-alive, mangled bodies.
Quote of the book: “The phrase “close-knit family,” which I’d come across in a school library book and had stuck in my mind, always cam back to me whenever I saw my parents and sister together. If I wasn’t there, the three of them would make a perfect unit” (15).
You can’t tell how this story is going to end by the alienation reported by Natsuki early in her life, but Murata deftly sows the seed which she know would reap benefits at the end of the novel. It is not hard to see how Natsuki would detach so completely from the accepted practices of modern society.
Favorite Character: Yuu, although Natsuki is our protagonist she seems to be beating the same drum throughout the novel. Yuu is a very dynamic character, who really tries to join mainstream society but ends up transforming the most towards the end of the novel.
Favorite Setting: Akishina (the Nagano Home), the descriptions of rural Nagano remind me of my time in the mountains of rural Japan, where rice fields and wild plants rub up against flowing rivers.
Favorite reference: Social Media Dating Apps, they have an app for everyone apparently, even those who feel like they need to escape the exact scenarios these apps promote.
Please stay for: Murata’s unflinching examination of how society places people into roles they cannot escape. She provides a rather bleak and confusing, but enlightening, route to radical non-conformity.
Please Question: Murata’s character development of Natsuki, I thought this book was well-constructed in terms of the time jump, but Natsuki’s post-traumatic psyche and experience felt under-explored before jumping right into the climax of the novel.
Rating: 3.8/5, A page-turner with a soul and a message that sacrifices some of the soul to hammer the message into the ground. I recommend reading this book.
Will Reviews Things 