Earthlings
by Sayaka Murata
Natsuki is eleven years old and certain she is not from Earth. Her best friend is a stuffed hedgehog named Piyyut who is, in fact, an alien from the planet Popinpobopia. She is a witch. She and her cousin Yuu have made a pact to survive. Twenty years later, all of that is still true.
“If you don’t fit into the Factory, you are broken goods. And broken goods get discarded.”
What It Actually Felt Like
I found this on a list for weird girls and that was enough for me. I walked in knowing it was going to be strange, that was the whole point, and somehow I still left like “what the fuck did I just read?!” At the same time I was invested the whole time, I couldn’t put it down even when it got to be a lot.
Natsuki’s family is a specific kind of awful. Not the loud kind. The kind that never screams, it just quietly convinces you that you are the problem. Running in the background of all of it is what Murata calls the Factory, which is essentially society’s expectation that every woman will eventually lose herself into marriage, reproduction, and usefulness. Natsuki doesn’t want any of that. She can’t explain why. She just knows she doesn’t belong to it.
The first half is dark but you can handle it. The second half goes somewhere I genuinely wasn’t prepared for. Murata escalates in a way that made me set my phone down and sit for a second. It’s not for shock value. There’s a clear point being made about what happens when the world refuses to acknowledge the damage it causes and just keeps demanding that you function anyway.
What stayed with me most weren’t the extreme moments. It was the quieter ones. Natsuki as an adult, going through the motions of a life she built as camouflage. Working, existing, performing normalcy. That image felt uncomfortably familiar in a way that had nothing to do with her specific circumstances.
The Honest Part
There are stretches in the middle where the philosophical back and forths get a little repetitive. Murata is making her point and she makes it more than once. Also if you loved Convenience Store Woman and came here expecting the same deadpan quirky energy, just know these are not the same kind of book. At all.
Who This Is For
If you like fiction that makes you uncomfortable on purpose and trusts you to sit with it, this one’s yours. If you’re in a tender headspace or need your dark reads to have warmth in them, come back to this one later.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Read it. But actually read the content warnings first.
Tags literary fiction, Japanese lit, translated, content warnings: graphic content, mood: unsettling and heavy
