Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her family and her cousin Yuu in her grandparents’ ramshackle wooden house in the mountains of Nagano, Natsuki decides that she must be an alien, which would explain why she can’t seem to fit in like everyone else. Later, as a grown woman, living a quiet life with her asexual husband, Natsuki is still pursued by dark shadows from her childhood, and decides to flee the “baby factory” of society for good, searching for answers about the vast and frightening mysteries of the universe--answers only Natsuki has the power to uncover.

Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Murata’s status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.

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This was... weird

Weird. So weird.

I need to think about this one… a lot. It’s disturbing and creepy and… weird.

Content warnings for child sexual abuse.

Edited to add: Yesterday I finished Earthlings by Sayaka Murata and it’s one of the creepiest books that just gets more and more disturbing and weird as you read.

The plot is ridiculous, but it’s also dark, about child sexual abuse, and I’ve never seen that tackled in this way before. I also wasn't quite prepared for how dark this book was going to be as the marketing blurb doesn't really indicate that. I was expecting a semi-dark story about a woman whose best friend is her childhood toy and who believes she herself is an alien.

But this book is so much more than that, in a very dark and twisted way. Natsuki's sexually abused by a teacher as a child, which leads her to have sex with her cousin when she's eleven years old--she does this as a way to 'survive, no matter what', and the POV is so close to her as a child that you can kind of see why she'd think that.

This book is well written, there's no doubt about that. But then we have the rest of the plot. Natsuki's shunned for her actions with her cousin, and she's abused physically and verbally by her family. She murders her teacher, and eventually marries her husband in a marriage of convenience. He definitely seems to be ace-coded and they say multiple times how they're not friends. They're marrying to get their families off their backs.

And their families are so obsessed with them having children. Natsuki refers to this as 'the factory' and she wants to be an 'earthling' and want this, because she wants to fit in. But she doesn't--as she still thinks she's an alien... Yet marriage and babies are all society wants from Natsuki. And so the book also shines a light on acephobia too. There are so many conversations between characters that Natsuki witnesses/overhears/has directed at her that really focus around the acephobia, though it's never named as such.

I’m not really sure how I feel about the ace rep in the book either. Like, the term asexuality isn’t even used on page, but it’s in a lot of marketing copy, and just… I felt at times that celibacy was actually being looked at in relation to Natsuki... but then other times it did seem to be ace-coded. Yet if this is supposed to be ace rep then it’s problematic. —hello ace husband who at one point tries to commit actual incest to be normal, and likening an character to an alien/having the ace character be one of the three in the book who think they are aliens as they're not indoctorined into the family.

And, like, that ending—I have to talk about it. Natsuki, her husband, and her cousin can't fit into society so they live together outside of society. They talk about how they don't have sex but now don't mind nudity (before this was triggering for Natsuki and her husband). I thought the romantic attraction discourse was quite interesting, as I believe all three characters were also coded as aro too at the start of the part of the book where they choose to live together as their own platonic unit... But then we watch these three characters almost 'degenerate', becoming animalistic... They talk a lot about sexual attraction and how they either don't experience it or they do but don't feel any need to act on it. And then they turn into cannibals. ACTUAL CANNIBALS.

Is this what supposedly happens to all ace or aro people? Is it the factory/society that tries to keep ace-spec people on track? And when these people escape society, they turn into cannibals? If so, then that is so, so offensive.

But like, also, is any of the plot at the end even real?

This book has confused me a lot and I’ve got all these tangled thoughts about it.