The new Kafkaesque - Earthlings by Sayaka Murata

Little Natsuki is a girl that doesn’t fit anywhere. She is far away from her mother’s expectations and despised by her sister, she is not popular in school and doesn’t understand how society, family and capitalism work. She has only her cousin Yuu who is different like her, believes in her and loves her, but she can meet him only for a few days during holidays. They both know that they are extra-terrestrials and wait for their star-ship to come and take them. Until then the only thing they feel obliged to do is to stay alive.

I really don’t know what to think about Earthlings. This small, strange book with the impressive cover, leaves you with a peculiar mix of compassion, contemplation and disgust in uneven proportions. I have to admit that I read it fast, I couldn’t leave it although it was gradually creating a kind of estrangement that climaxed reaching the end. In fact, at the very beginning, I couldn’t understand if it is a young adults’ book although there were some strong, very adult moments.

To look at it otherwise. Earthlings is a book that talks about very important issues. It is about difference, about loneliness and the right to claim them. But it is also and undoubtedly a book about family abuse, harassment, trauma and even psychopathy and unorthodox ways of coping with them. It is an unexpected, absurd and very contemporary approach to women issues, to social stereotypes and their abstract impositions. Society is represented with an οstensibly naïve --almost childish-- perspective as an ugly depressing cage, a theatre of cruelty from where it takes supernatural power to exit, face your trauma and reveal your truth. Actually, there is no way out; the only loophole can be created inside your mind.

There are omnipotent and undefinable laws reigning all over life that cannot let you be who you want and if you insist being yourself the “obedient” others are allowed to harm you.

And there are three ways to cope with all this situation and survive: Stay hidden, deny it or try to fit.

It is like Kafka for millennials.

Dealing with very serious human conditions —social and psychopathological-- through science fiction and fantasy the book stays grounded leaving wide-open windows to a realistic approach. Reality here is in its cruellest, but --sadly-- exaggerations are not so far from the truth. The story is simple but captivating and creates curiosity and addiction not letting you expect the dark, splattery, horrific but finally liberating end.