Life Ceremony
by Sayaka Murata
Translated by Ginny Talley Takemori
Buy on Amazon , Bookshop.org
What It’s About
Life Ceremony is a collection of short stories that imagine slightly altered worlds where familiar social rituals around love, marriage, sex, and death are pushed just far enough to feel wrong. These stories are often unsettling, sometimes darkly funny, and occasionally shocking..
Rather than building a single dystopian world, Murata moves from scenario to scenario, using each story to examine how moral systems and social norms might change if taken to their logical extremes.
What Stuck With Me
This felt like a place where Murata put all of her ideas.
Reading this collection, I kept noticing echoes of her other work. There are moments that feel like early versions of Vanishing World, and concepts that recall Earthlings. You can see her testing ideas, stretching them, and letting them break.
That’s what made the book feel so rich to me. Instead of a single argument, it’s a series of thought experiments. What happens when marriage becomes a form of consumption. When intimacy is ritualized. When bodies are treated as resources or symbols rather than people. Each story pushes you to reexamine beliefs that usually go unquestioned.
Yes, some of the stories are shocking. Murata doesn’t shy away from discomfort. But beneath that is a deep curiosity about how people adapt to systems that quietly dehumanize them. I found the collection surprisingly poignant. It exposes how fragile our ideas of “normal” really are.
Murata’s imagination is relentless, but it’s also precise. Nothing here feels careless. Even the most extreme moments are doing conceptual work.
Would I Recommend It
Yes, especially if you already read Murata and want to understand her thinking more fully.
This is a good book for readers who enjoy speculative fiction that questions social norms rather than world-building for its own sake. If you liked Earthlings or Vanishing World, this collection adds depth and context.
It may not be the best entry point if you’re new to her work, particularly if you’re sensitive to disturbing material. But for readers willing to engage with discomfort, it’s a rewarding and thought-provoking read.
My Takeaway
This felt less like a collection of stories and more like a map of Murata’s mind and thoughts for the future.
If You Want to Explore Murata’s Short Fiction
Sayaka Murata’s work often circles similar questions about social expectation, intimacy, and the limits of conventional life. If Life Ceremony left you thinking about those themes and want to see how Murata approaches some of them in shorter forms, these two stories offer strong, related perspectives:
“A Clean Marriage” — A look at how marriage can transform into a transactional kind of safety, where the rituals are clear but the meaning is uncertain. Short Story Project has the full text here: https://shortstoryproject.com/stories/a-clean-marriage/
“Faith” — A story that asks what it means to believe and belong when conventional systems don’t fit you. Published in Granta, available here: https://granta.com/faith-sayaka-murata/
I’m linking them because they feel like conceptual siblings to the ideas in Life Ceremony.
