Life Ceremony

About

An engaged couple fights over the husband's refusal to wear clothes made from human materials. A girl falls in love with her childhood bedroom curtain. A society honors its dead by eating them and then procreating. Sayaka Murata's stories take the conventions of modern life — marriage, mourning, desire — and push them one logical step beyond what anyone is comfortable with. From the author of Convenience Store Woman, these stories share that novel's central preoccupation: the arbitrary nature of social norms and the absurdity of the line between "acceptable" and "deviant." Murata writes with deadpan precision, each scenario presented as perfectly reasonable by its participants, making the reader's discomfort the entire point. A collection that rewrites the rules of civilized life — and dares you to explain exactly which rule it broke, and why that rule existed in the first place.