Hello my little ghouls,
Nice of you to join me again. I don’t know about you but I absolutely love this time of year because I feel it’s the perfect time to snuggle up with a good book. I know I’m not alone in thinking that at this time of year and the approach to All Hallow’s Eve, you can’t go wrong with a book that has a creepiness to it, or is just outright horror!
That’s why I recently settled down to read Earthlings by Sayaka Murata (author of the highly successful Convenience Store Woman) And this definitely has similar themes to those in Convenience Store Woman but it’s a lot more detailed and a lot more warped. It’s a classic example of a book cover being misleading. I mean look at the front…A cute little hedgehog? Yes please.
It’s one of those books, that’s hard to talk about, because it sounds crazy and also because the amount of things the book covers are disturbing. We’re talking rape, child abuse, incest, murder and cannibalism. It’s not the darkest thing I’ve read, but it’s definitely up there as one of my most uncomfortable reads.
That aside, it is really easy to fall into this story. Told from the perspective of Natsuki, who has always felt like an outsider, she tends to feel as though she doesn’t belong with her family and believes she must be a witch or an alien. It’s only her cousin Yuu who seems to understand her, and she only gets to see him once a year during the Summer, on the family trip to Nagano. However a series of events, mean the pair may never see each other again and so they make one last promise to each other, to survive, no matter what.
Natsuki, now fully grown and in an asexual marriage, enjoys a quiet life. But her family and society have other ideas, they wonder why she hasn’t had a child yet and Natsuki feels a familiar pressure weighing on her. In the hope that some time visiting Nagano might help, she sets off to the hills with her husband in tow and about reunited with her cousin Yuu. And it’s here that things get even weirder. Which is saying something, because there’s A LOT of weird and uncomfortable stuff before this.
It’s like reading a bad dream, a sense of unease and nausea fill you, but you keep on reading because in spite of some Natsuki’s faults and bad decisions, there’s also something loveable about her too. It’s a book that looks at the pressures of society and expectation of women to be mothers. It’s a book about people who choose to not walk the path set out for them in life. It’s about the victims who go ignored or don’t react the right way. It’s a lot and it’s hard but it’s worth it!
Dark, disturbing but insanely well written. Uncomfortable to read? Yes. But worth reading? Hell yes!
I’d love to know if anyone else has read this and what your thoughts are, so please comment below.
Stay spooky!
👻LWG👻
☽ SpookyGee ☾ 