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The weird workings of a sick little mind

Sayaka Murata is a literary troll. She burst onto the world stage in 2018 when her novel Convenience Store Woman was first translated into English. The novel, the story of an introverted young woman who rejects the expectations of Japanese society, became a multimillion-copy bestseller. But it was with her second novel in English, Earthlings, that Murata revealed exactly the kind of writer she was.

As far from Convenience Store Woman as you can get, Earthlings was an ecstatically deranged little novel that centred around incest, paedophilia, murder and cannibalism. It was even the subject of an online trend where people would film themselves as they reached the novel’s final pages and we would watch as they went through every emotion from revulsion to desolation.

For her latest release, a collection of short stories called Life Ceremony, Murata mixes together the styles of her two previous works to create a fairly mixed bag of strange and