“The Ceremony of Life” is a collection of short stories by Sayaka Murata, for which her prose is highly regarded in Japan. Cute and shocking at the same time, they take the reader by surprise and remain in the memory for a long time. Intertwining the funny and the terrible, Murata turns the moral norms and traditions of society inside out to show the inner world of his heroes: outcasts and loners. Determining whether the story is set in modern Japan, in the past, or in an alternate reality can sometimes be difficult, as the characters often seem strangely normal in a frighteningly unusual world. In its strange and wonderful tales of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, community and individuality, Murata asks first of all the question of what it means to be a person in our world.