Earthlings by Sayaka Murata and how to not be human

Translated from Japanese, Earthlings is literary fiction about the lengths an abused person will go to just to survive. Natsuki believes she and her cousin are aliens with magical powers from Popinpobopia. As a result, she builds a life that refuses to look anything like a traditional one.

There are real trigger warnings in this novel, and Murata doesn't sugarcoat them, so I'd suggest looking those up first if that's something you need.

At its core this novel is from the perspective of a young person being forced into a mould and to be “normal” when they feel completely detached from the world and that was portrayed in a way that I thought had real emotional impact. Natsuki asks herself "Would I ever be able to live without constantly trying to survive?". Many novels use taboo subjects to shock or intrigue a reader. Murata does this in a particularly tongue-in-cheek and simple way. It doesn't feel gratuitious and by grounding Natsuki's childhood in horrific, specific abuse, she makes Natsuki's actions and thoughts feel like the believable result of that abuse, not shock for its own sake.

I once took a class called Theory of Knowledge, where we studied anthropology. Our teacher gave us a paper about a tribe that had recently been discovered, and we had to figure out details about how they lived, their customs, their structure. Only at the end was it revealed that this wasn't a tribe at all; it was our own modern society, described in terms strange enough to make it feel completely foreign.

Murata's writing reminded me a lot of that exercise, the way it defamiliarizes ordinary life until you're seeing it from the outside. Take lines like, "The breeding pairs raise their young inside their nests. I live in one of these nests too," or "Inside his skin his body was making sounds." Both show just how far Natsuki wants to separate herself from the idea of being human, and she's willing to do almost anything, including everything we'd normally consider taboo, to get there.The novel's weirdest, darkest even funniest moments are sad and purposeful, tied tightly to the idea of what makes someone a functioning person in society. This, and much of Murata's other work, keeps asking the same question: what do we actually mean by "normal"? What counts as bad or taboo, and what gets waved through as acceptable?

It reminded me of Han Kang's The Vegetarian, where a woman tries to opt out of eating meat, and eventually out of being human at all, believing she's turning into a tree, as a way of refusing a world that keeps hurting her. Both Natsuki and Yeong-hye reach for a transformation into something not human. Natsuki convinces herself she's an alien, waiting to be taken home by her own kind. Yeong-hye convinces herself she's becoming a plant. Both authors seem to be exploring the same idea, that becoming other is sometimes the only way a woman can process how unfairly she's been treated. An escape, even. There's a horror to being human, and a horror that specifically comes from other humans, and both books suggest that being a woman means living especially close to that second kind.

Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation also came to mind when thinking of this theme. While the narrator here doesn't want to become anything else per se, she wants to stop being present at all, sleeping through a year of her life on a cocktail of prescription drugs. The idea to me is the same... being unable to escape the rigid norms and expectations of society, and how the physical, female body itself becomes something unbearable to be inside of. Something that we all search for in the end, to feel free.

3.5/5✰