As I grew into adulthood I continued to fall in love with both real and nonreal people.
When I was old enough, I wanted to leave home as soon as possible, but it was hard to make a living without a proper job, and my mother didn’t seem in any hurry for me to leave. I finally managed to leave home after I finished college and found a job.
I was hired by a company that supplied construction materials, like onsite scaffolding, working in their office in an old building in Nihonbashi, central Tokyo. Once I’d got used to the work, I started wanting to have a baby, and so at age twenty-five I married a man I met at a matchmaking party.
However, our relationship didn’t last long, and we soon got divorced.
We had taken both our jobs into consideration and planned for me to be artificially inseminated on my twenty-eighth birthday. He was properly set up with a long-term lover, and our respective lovers both came to congratulate us at our wedding ceremony.
He had always liked to stroke my head. We both liked movies, so we often watched them together. He was in the habit of stroking my head while watching them, as though petting a dog, nothing untoward about it. But then one day this action suddenly became sexual. I noticed his hand beginning to move differently than usual and thought it must just be my imagination, but then he abruptly started fondling my bottom and breasts. As I struggled to my feet, his erect penis touched my knee.
I was horrified. I’d never imagined that a member of my own family would have an erection because of me. I tried to scream, but he covered my mouth with his. I felt my tongue being licked all over, and nausea welled up within me. I vomited into his mouth, and as he recoiled I pushed him away and ran into the toilet, where I threw up again and again.
I went straight to the police. They were shocked when I told them that I’d been sexually assaulted by my husband, and sheltered me. They said I had better not go back home until things had settled down, so I took refuge at Juri’s for a while, since I thought my mother would probably take my husband’s side. Juri told me I should press charges against him, but I didn’t even want to see his face again, so I didn’t go that far. I looked for a cheap studio apartment and took some time off work during the week to collect my belongings from the home we had shared. That was how I started living alone.
When we divorced, our respective families got together to discuss what had happened.
His parents gave him a good grilling as he sat hanging his head. “That’s the sort of thing people only do outside the home. I can’t believe you tried to have sex with your wife!”
My mother, meanwhile, was strangely calm. “Well, these things can happen.”
After the divorce had gone through, I didn’t really feel like falling in love again. My lovers from the other world, who had been with me since childhood, were the ones who consoled me for having been soiled.
Their existence purified me. I felt so grossed out that I couldn’t imagine being with a real person ever again.
I thought I’d stay living with them like that in my germfree room, but my vague longing to have a child didn’t go away.
I didn’t think it was possible financially to raise a child alone. When I told Juri that I was going to give up on the idea, she told me sharply, “You have to do the things in life that you want. Don’t worry, perverts wanting to commit incest with their wife are very rare. Just look around and see who you find. You don’t have to make up your mind right away, do you?”
Feeling persuaded, I went to another matchmaking party. I was thirty-one years old.
“You already failed once. Why bother again?” my other friends said, but Juri’s sharp words had given me confidence.
I went to the party with a friend who was also looking for a partner, and that’s where I met my current husband.
The party had been advertised as “Most popular! Limited to people in their thirties, standard marriage party ☆” with the following conditions: “Must be thirty-something, want a child, and want both partners to work. Must agree to equal share of housework and household budget, be willing to purchase an apartment in Tokyo, and have a minimum annual income of four million yen. Lovers and sex in the home STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.”
As the safest, best-known matchmaking party available, it was popular with newcomers, and very crowded.
Before going, you had to input details such as: Do you prefer a partner who likes cooking or cleaning? Which TV programs do you like watching in the morning? Do you want the TV to be on at mealtimes? What time do you go to sleep? Do you want to have separate bedrooms? Participants who were a greater than 95 percent match were marked with a star ☆ next to their name. My second husband was one of three men with a star.
Of the three, I felt that my husband, who was a year younger than me, was the cleanest and most likely to be comfortable to live with. To the question of whether he wanted to spend more on clothes, food, or the home, he had chosen food and wasn’t so interested in the others, and he had stated that he preferred to stay at home rather than travel for the New Year and summer vacations, which also matched my tastes.
My friend sat next to me at the party. She had twelve starred people, maybe because she’d chosen the most popular conditions, such as taking a vacation abroad every year, turning off the light when going to sleep, and no need for either partner to do any cleaning beyond switching on the Roomba, and as a result she was struggling to narrow her choices down. In that sense you could say that my husband and I were lucky.
“Hello, I’m Saku Amamiya.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Amane Sakaguchi. Saku, the new moon—that’s a nice name.”
“I was born on the day of the new moon, so it’s the simplest possible name my parents could have given me.”
“Snap—it was raining when I was born, which is how I got to be called Amane, the sound of the rain. So we’ve both got simple names.”
We had three minutes to talk together before moving onto the next candidate, so we didn’t get the chance to say much more than that, but he didn’t leave a bad impression. I couldn’t really remember anything about the other two starred people, so I wrote his number down as my first choice, and we were set up as a couple and our contacts were exchanged.
We met up for dinner when we had days off, and on our third date we decided to get married.
The deciding factor was my telling him about my first marriage. When I explained the circumstances behind my divorce, Saku frowned.
“That’s just terrible! Making sexual advances on your own family member, of all things!” He thought a moment, then said hesitantly, “If it’s not too traumatic or difficult, would you mind telling me what happened? I think it’s important that as family members we share the burden of the wound.”
As we sat there in the cafe drinking tea together, I told him everything without holding anything back.
He listened, and then felt sick and had to rush to the toilet to throw up. We went into the unisex toilet where there was enough room for a wheelchair, and I rubbed his back while he vomited.
“I’m sorry. You’re the one who was hurt, not me . . .” He apologized repeatedly, oozing sweat. “Just hearing about it makes me ill . . .The very idea of a married couple having sex, it’s horrifying!”
Seeing him apologizing for being in such a state when I was the victim, not him, made me feel that I would be okay with this man.
And so, my husband and I became family.
*
As soon as we were married, we moved into a rented apartment in Higashi Nihonbashi. My husband’s workplace was a little far away, with several train transfers, but the apartment was close to the station and sunny.
We decided that I would be artificially inseminated once I turned thirty-five, and we also started saving to buy a house.
Everything went smoothly. When I reported this to my mother, she said only half-jokingly, “A marriage that goes too smoothly gives me the creeps.”
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From Vanishing World © 2015 by Sayaka Murata. English translation © 2025 by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
