If you’re tired of reading the news that seems to assure us that the future for humanity looks very bleak, you must pick up Vanishing World from the incomparable imagination of Sayaka Murata to expand your mind and find solace in the fact that there are alternative ways of living: we just need to make them so. Murata is now well-known for challenging the tropes of normativity, particularly ideologies around gender roles, and this book adds to her oeuvre as a much-needed antidote to the pervasive regressive ideals of the heteronormative family unit, straight sex, romantic love, and motherhood.

In Murata’s Vanishing World, marriage is stripped of the prerequisite of romance, and has instead become a convenient mode of companionship that enables reproduction achieved via artificial insemination. Romantic interests and (less frequently) sex are pursued exclusively outside marriage, with either real-life humans or characters from anime and other forms of popular culture. But in this regime, our narrator Amane is herself an outsider, conceived by parents who were in love and engaged in the taboo of marital sex to have a child. Have her parents’ outmoded values messed her up beyond repair? In her own marriage, she and her husband decide to move to Experiment City: Paradise-Eden, a new kind of society where reproduction has become social as eligible inhabitants are artificially inseminated annually in a mass medical event; experimental but increasingly successful technology also enables men to carry babies to term in artificial uteruses. The babies born become the children of the entire community, and motherhood, fatherhood and the nuclear family are abandoned in favour of a collective parenting model. Every adult who lives in the city is a mother, including the fathers and those who have not given birth, and the children belong to and are raised by the whole community.

This wild and imaginative version of the future might sound like paradise to you or it might resemble a hellscape you don’t wish to inhabit, and for Amane this reality provides all sorts of ethical conundrums of its own, but Murata’s radical vision is a provocation to interrogate every single thing that is ever presented to us as ‘normal’. Brilliant: an urgent project for our times.