In a world where the human population is shrinking, funerals have become something else entirely. The dead are honored by being eaten, and the mourners then pair off to make new life. Everyone agrees it’s a beautiful tradition. Almost everyone. Life Ceremony is the first collection of Sayaka Murata’s short fiction to appear in English. It gathers twelve stories that take the ordinary rules of society, from what we eat to whom we love and how we grieve, and twist them just far enough to show how strange they were all along. A woman prepares dishes from an imaginary homeland for her fiancé’s parents. Another forages for wild greens among Tokyo’s sidewalks, trying to feel at home in the city. A young woman discovers that the self she shows the world may be the only self she has. Sometimes tender, sometimes grotesque, often darkly funny, these stories explore family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality. Whether they take place in today’s Japan, the near future, or a slightly skewed alternate reality is left for the reader to decide. Together they ask a question that runs through all of Murata’s work: what does it actually mean to be “normal,” and who gets to decide?