Several months ago, the New York Times podcast The Daily recounted how a woman had fallen in love with the ChatGPT (artificial intelligence) character she had made for herself. Later in the episode, teachers in high schools described their students having become truly invested in falsified romances with these automated responders. In the classic and often very strange way of American liberals, the hosts of the episode made a good go of saying, essentially: “Isn’t it possibly fine if this happens so long as nobody is hurt?”
To which my reaction was: absolutely not. It is very wrong for us to normalise being in love with images and little films. I wrote it to my group chat in London, I said: “3-5 per cent of this teacher’s students are in relationships with bots – are we ok with this?”
My friend Stan replied: “All teens want to marry their computers. And that’s amazing.”
There is much marrying of the computer going on, and many novels attempting to depict our current computer-wedding moment. There have also been many works of theory, of speculative fiction, of science fiction, to do with the future of reproductivity. The Japanese writer Sayaka Murata’s latest novel, Vanishing World, produces a world in which the grotesquery of copulation is divorced from the idea of family – at last! In this alternative history, postwar, people began to understand how alien the idea of family combining with the eroticism of reproduction is.
In this world, Amane, our narrator, is among a few, dying iteration of the species, one of the last created through biological reproduction between a mother and father who had sex with each other. That was the old days – now, people make children in artificial wombs, and more importantly, they do not exchange physical touch within a marriage. Husband and wife are family, and so, to be sexual together is incest. Lovers can be had outside marriage, where it is natural to experience romantic feelings (though not, except for Amane, including physical sex – they romanticise one another but are repelled by the excretions and humiliations of sex).
Amane is guiding us through a near but not-quite-yet world, in which we have acknowledged the devastation of romantic love and how it depletes us. She is mostly in love with characters instead of people, and gradually becomes aware of the inevitable contradictions between family and romance. Eventually, Amane returns to her home city, Chiba, where men as well as women can now become pregnant, and all children who are born belong to every adult citizen. The communally raised children romp about, as we who espouse socialism insist upon. But what happens when you want your own child? What happens if you do want to bite deep down into your lover, but then they leave anyway? Does human instinct and jealousy and the base animal urge to rut disappear if we try to think our way out of it?
The best parts of this novel are the expression of irrepressible sensuality. Amane knows that in the world she lives in, unkempt desire is a thing that has no purpose. What is sexier than a feeling or inclination without purpose? Things that make no sense are the sexiest of all. But the novel doesn’t do that truth justice. It turns out, in the end, to be a surprisingly fearful book, one that conflates biological essentialism with what is good and natural in the world.
The hypotheticals of this book are hardly novel – anyone with the slightest interest in speculative fiction has encountered worlds where biological reproduction is no longer necessary. The important thing this one, for me, is confronting the strange and porous life we all live between familial and erotic. We hear our elderly relatives refer to one another as “Ma, Pa, Mam, Dad” – and yet that decisive de-sexualising is only possible after reproduction. Murata is correct about how creepy and odd this is: how is your husband of 40 years not family? How is he not closer to you than a brother you haven’t seen in that time? What exactly is family, and what exactly is normal?
The plain, repetitive style of Vanishing World reminds me of one of my favourite books, Pig Tales by Marie Darrieussecq. I was intolerably excited when I read that book ten years ago. It burrows down into the shame of being a woman, of being a woman getting bigger, and dirtier, and less definable. In that book, the devolution from bodily shame is a chaos one must puzzle out for themselves, no matter how strange and absurd and alien.
Vanishing World indicates, by contrast, that shame has an essential purpose and is on some level correct. While it is true that shame does serve some crucial social functions, it has no empirical origin point we can accept as natural. Though there is something invigorating about the commitment to physical desire, it is, in Vanishing World, expressed as a squalid and, eventually, self-serving act. This potentially good book further depressed me about the current limitations of popular speculative fiction.
Vanishing World
Sayaka Murata, tr by Ginny Tapley Takemori
Granta, 240pp, £16.99
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