A Clean Marriage

About

A couple meets through a matchmaking website. His profile specified what he wanted: “a clean marriage” — an amicable daily routine like brother and sister, without being a slave to sex. They are happy. Then they decide they want a child, and the architecture of their contentment cracks open against the question of how. Murata’s short story, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, does what her best work always does: takes a premise that sounds like satire and plays it so straight that the satire lands on the reader instead. In Japanese, the title word seiketsu means both “hygienic” and “honest” — and the story asks whether those are the same thing, or whether we’ve just decided they should be.