A review by wordsareworlds
Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

adventurous dark emotional medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

A solid anthology, Murata uses a lot of extremely weird and unsettling elements as a way to comment on life and society. I enjoyed it, but felt like some of the stories were really heavy handed in their commentary, rather than letting the reader infer anything. 

Not all the stories were weird in a body horror/dealing with mortality way. One was about a love triangle between a girl, her boyfriend, and a sentient curtain hanging in her room, and I did really enjoy that one. My favorite overall was Puzzle. None of them were a complete miss, but there was one (or two nested together) about the ways the relationship between two women could have gone that were the most "normal" but also the least interesting in how they flowed with the rest of the anthology.

There are elements of gender essentialism I find on par with most other Japanese literature I've read, but I don't think it really veers into anti-queer or anti-trans sentiment.

I'd recommend this to people who are looking for the literary version of Black Mirror that deals with society and mortality using bodies and extreme personalities instead of technology. 
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