We are in a relationship recession. Young people aren’t coupling up, marriages are down, birth rates are falling. The population crisis is all over the news. But what if we severed the link between romance and procreation? In Vanishing World, Sayaka Murata imagines a society that has done just that. The novel is set in an alternative version of roughly present-day Japan. Research into artificial insemination progressed quickly during the Second World War in response to the large number of men leaving for the front and the resulting drop in population. At the start of the novel, Amane, the narrator, is a child. When she finds out she was conceived the old-fashioned way, she’s confused: that’s not how procreation is explained in sex ed class. News spreads through the school; one boy describes the sexual relations of a married couple as ‘incest’ and Amane tries not to be sick. She cannot understand why her mother didn’t use the ‘normal method’ to get pregnant.

Murata’s world is not completely devoid of sexual attraction, but the act of sex itself has pretty much disappeared. People are encouraged to ‘fall in love’ with fictional characters from anime cartoons and use them as masturbation aids to help cope with the ‘nuisance’ of arousal. Amane, like many of her peers, has a string of ‘lovers’ from popular shows whom she discusses in terms no different from those she uses to describe her smattering of real-world boyfriends. Each of these boyfriends – including her high school art teacher and a shy classmate infatuated with the same male anime character as Amane – is confused by her desire to have sex. ‘Even when people do fall in love,’ explains the teacher, ‘most of them deal with their libido by themselves.’ Amane has to show him where to put his penis.

In the second part of the novel, Amane is in her thirties. She and her husband, Saku, decide they will have a child by artificial insemination once she turns thirty-five. Theirs is a sexless marriage, though they each date other people (having multiple partners is normal in this society, even