Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

Format: Kindle
Read: June 2025

Life Ceremony has been hanging around my TBR lists for a long time! I bought it ages ago on a 99p Kindle deal, after I had read and loved Convenience Store Women. Life Ceremony is a collection of short stories of varying length. The stories are:

1. A First-Rate Material
2. A Magnificent Spread
3. A Summer Night’s Kiss
4. Two’s Family
5. The Time of the Large Star
6. Poochie
7. Life Ceremony
8. Body Magic
9. Lover on the Breeze
10. Puzzle
11. Eating the City
12. Hatchling
13. A Clean Marriage

A lot of these stories are really fucking weird. I tried to explain some of them (everyday objects made of human remains (A First-Rate Material), a love triangle with a curtain (Lover on the Breeze), what the Life Ceremony is…) to my Husband, and he said, “And you said Malazan was messed up?!”

A few of the stories are more straightforward (less human remains) and focus on sweet stories about unconventional families and late-in-life love (Two’s Family), and the different forms empathy can take. Eating the City also found an interesting balance between the important cultural role that food plays, while also the choice of what food we put inside our own bodies can be such a personal preference. I also enjoyed Body Magic for the friendship between the popular girl and the quiet ‘weird’ girl, and their shame-free discussions of sex, which were so much healthier than the way their sex-obsessed peers would talk about it for status.

My favourite two stories were Hatchling and A Clean Marriage. A Clean Marriage is about a couple in a successful sexless marriage – free from the complications of romance and sexual expectations – except this poses a problem when they agree it is time to try for a child. They must go to a special clinic and undertake a radical procedure for ‘Clean Breeders.’ There was a logic in the idea of a clean marriage that I could understand (“We’re family, so we don’t have sex“), but also the absurdity of the procedures was absolutely hilarious.

Hatchling explores the tendency for people to switch and mould their personalities to fit the social groups that they are in. Haruka is too good at this, and has picked up so many contrasting identities in her life that she has no sense of what her true personality is.

Whenever I did something that was liked and praised, that part of me would develop, while if anyone said to me “That’s not like you,” I’d shed that part. As a result, the outline of myself was not mine at all. But this quality was apparently not just mine. If I paid attention to other people, I often thought that a certain person was simply responding to those around them. 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.

This story resonated with me the most because is a subject that I think about a lot. I am no good at being able to mould myself to fit different social groups, possibly because my Social Anxiety makes me hyper aware of things like! I always feel too aware of how others change in different social groups, in particular, how they may be different in groups compared to one-on-one with me. I am always distrustful of people I can feel moulding themselves in this way (I had an ex who was excellent at this, and he did turn out to be a huge liar so… yeah).

I also struggle with the fixed opinions of me that different groups of people in my life have, depending on the age at which I met them, and how difficult it is to change that. This is one of the reasons I keep thinking I need to be meeting new people in order to improve my social skills, because the people that I already know do not leave room for me to do that. They have decided my personality that might not be who I feel like I am inside or how I want to be seen.

Sayaka Murata has a matter-of-fact style that strips back our normal social conventions and offers a different point of view that is so good at examining the little arbitrary quirks and absurdities in how we run our lives, and asking who decided that this was the ‘normal’ thing to do? Maybe it is wasteful not to make use of human remains for furniture and clothing? Maybe it could be a beautiful tribute to eat the dead at their funeral? These are the questions I’ve contemplated after reading this collection!

There are a few stand-out stories in this collection that bump the rating up to 4 stars overall. I am very excited to read more from this author because I have so far loved being inside her weird brain – I have Earthlings still to read, and I just got her new book, Vanishing World, too!