A review by flying_monkey
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

challenging dark medium-paced
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I challenge anyone who has read this book not to come to the conclusion that it is an utterly repulsive novel, as disgusting as it's possible to be by the end, and worse because whatever has come before you were still rooting for the protagonist, Natsuki, until the last chapter. After Convenience Store Human (which is a better translation of the Japanese than Covenience Store Woman - I don't know why they did that, and the marketing and book design completely missed the point), I had Murata pegged as a champion of neurodivergent feminism, of noncompliant insider-outsiders all around us but not buying our neurotypical bullshit. It was a great book in all ways. Earthlings is for much of it, more of the same and just as interesting: we meet Natsuki as an elementary school student, a weird girl who feels she doesn't fit, who copes with her divergence from familiy and social norms by conjuring a life of secret magic and other worlds for herself. The only other person included in her word, and the one other person she knows who shares some of her traits and attitudes, is her male cousin, Yuu, who she only gets to see once a year at Obon (the Buddhist festival of ancestors). Natsuki and Yuu share an intense friendship which becomes physical (and as 'sexual' as undeveloped kids can be) after Natsuki has been sexually abused by her cram-school teacher, and this sparks what by the end of the book, we realise is a spiral to the worse kind of tragedy. But all the while, Natsuki still seems to be more of a catcher-in-the-rye type of acerbic and anarchic outsider, an unwilling participant in what she calls 'the factory' (the production line of birth-school-work death) than any kind of a monster. She seems to find a sort of balance with an asexual 'husband', Tomoya, who she meets through a 'dating' service for people who don't want a sex life, and they live what appears to outsiders to be a 'normal' existence, but it's not normal enough for her family or his, nothing it seems ever will be in 'the factory.' When people find out and try to break up the marriage, Natsuki and Tomoya and Yuu decide to make a genuine break from all social conventions and indeed from humanity itself, and from then things just get extreme. Really extreme. In fact so extreme, that it leads me to question my previous assessment of Murata's politics and commitments.
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