fortemente conturbante, e non per il finale.
vorrei sapere chi è il demente che l'ha etichettato come fantasy ( )

To be completely honest, I'm not sure if I like this book, because it made me feel oddly calm about really disturbing things and I'm questioning my sanity. But I would blame it on the writing style (which I thought was soooo good), that made me sympathize with literal murderers, because they sounded so reasonable in the narration. This book didn't alter my moral compass, that's certain. I still know what is right and wrong in this world, but in this book everything was turned upside down. And that's why I think this is a five star book. Because it was gross and cruel and really disturbing, but it made so much sense.
It took the approach of: What do we value and normalize in this society and what if there was someone who truly did not want to conform to that?
And the reason this works is because that actually happens in real life and even the examples in this book are not unrealistic. They are just exaggerated.
And I also want to add that this book is kind of about asexual and aromantic people and I love it for that. Even if it doesn't openly suggest that and at some parts even denies it, I think it was written for aro and ace people and noone can change my mind about this. :) ( )

Yikes.

What in the heck did I just read?

The jacket cover is technically correct, but hats off to the marketing folks that wrote the sales pitch, picked the cover quotes, piqued my interest, and got me to read this strange book. No, strange is not a strong enough word though. Bizarre? Odd? Whack?

Whatever ... it just wasn't good; I didn't like it. So many strange choices by the characters, misunderstandings, and topics that went way out into left field. I understand there are a LOT of cultural differences between the US and Japan, and that this was translated from Japanese so I added a star to the rating to account for those differences. But honestly this felt like a book about three people who need serious therapy.

I don't know what else to say. Just ... yikes. ( )

Don’t be fooled by the cute hamster on the front page, this was the most disorientating thing I’ve read in a long time. ( )

Edited to add: some great discussion of this book in the Newest Literary Fiction group (Dec 2020 group read) has helped me with the ending, which I can see now as a metaphor either for the self-destructive tendencies of trauma victims (pessimistic take) or for breaking down one’s dysfunctional beliefs/behavior patterns and being born-again, so to speak, with a new way of seeing your place in the world (optimistic take).
——————-

Earthlings is a novel of abuse, alienation, and horror wrapped up in a deceivingly cute package. The whimsical tone is a stark contrast to the content which creates some interesting dissonance and some laugh-out-loud moments of black comedy sprinkled throughout the disturbing story (but there's still no excuse for the misleading blurb the book advertises itself with: "Immensely charming" says John Freeman from LitHub, er, no).

Natsuki is eleven years old at the novel's opening. She suffers constant degrading emotional abuse from her mother and sister and then sexual abuse from a popular teacher. She attempts to cope by imagining she has magical powers conferred onto her by a cute stuffed animal who is from another planet. Once a year at a family gathering she meets up with her cousin Yuu, who suffers abuse from his own mother and copes by imagining he is actually from another planet. They truly share a tragic fraternity, and the examination of their childhood experiences is excellent.

"Yuu, have you ever thought that your life doesn't belong to you?"

For a moment he couldn't get his words out, but then he said in a small voice, "Children's lives never belong to them. The grown-ups own us. If your mom abandons you, you won't be able to eat, and you can't go anywhere without help from a grown-up. It's the same for all children." He reached out a hand to cut a flower from the bed. "That's why we have to try hard to survive until we've grown up ourselves."

The novel then moves a couple of decades ahead and loses some of its power. Natsuki marries a man she meets online for convenience and a separate togetherness; both severely damaged people, they find a sympathetic friend in one another while struggling to deal with "the Factory", what they call family and society's rigid insistence on everyone becoming productive working and reproducing cogs in the machine:

Everyone believed in the Factory. Everyone was brainwashed by the Factory and did as they were told. They all used their reproductive organs for the Factory and did their jobs for the sake of the Factory. My husband and I were people they'd failed to brainwash, and anyone who remained unbrainwashed had to keep up the act in order to avoid being eliminated by the Factory.

This critique of adulthood in the novel has all the nuance and insight of an angsty teenager vowing never to be anything like their perfectly normal mom and dad, though I tend to think of Japanese society being considerably more heavy on the push to conformity than my own, so perhaps it bites harder for that.

Natuski's break with reality however is even more complete now than as a child, she has come to believe she is from an alien planet herself, and a horrifying scene of butchery and murder from her childhood that took place shortly after the novel jumped ahead in time explains her continued mental slide. Her husband comes to adopt her reality as well. They then meet with Yuu at the family's old gathering place, and while at first he's naturally skeptical of Natsuki's alternate reality she shares with him, his apparent dissatisfaction with life leads him to adopt their worldview, concluding in a final bizarre and surreal scene of human slaughter, cannibalism, and then mutual voluntary cannibalism as the three characters literally consume parts of each other's bodies that is difficult to make sense of. What Murata was going for with this ending, I'm not sure to be honest. Maybe it makes more sense in a Japanese cultural context?

The part of the novel focused on Natsuki's childhood I thought was excellent, the part focused on her adulthood I got less from, so I probably would have enjoyed this novel more if it had remained a story of childhood and powerlessness in a sometimes brutal world of adults. However, it is certainly memorable. ( )