Societal Decline In Murata, Ishiguro, and Ma

Written on 6/04/2026, but the website template does not allow me to change the date.

Recently, I read the novels Convenience Store Woman by Suyaka Murata, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Severance by Ling Ma back-to-back, and they left me grappling with this question: when our most sacred parts can be sold, is there anything that we hold sacred, invaluable, priceless?

I hope this next train of thought isn’t too disjointed… bear with me…

I never thought that reading about the entanglement between colonization and slavery would connect with these narratives, but they have. They both dealt with the greedy mindset that colonizes the most sacred parts of life, including the mind, the body, culture, values, and spirituality. In Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire, he says colonization and slavery happened because of “the adventurer, the pirate, the wholesale grocer and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force.” Tragically, we’re still led by these figures, only now it’s the venture capitalist, the developer, the marketing strategist, social media influencer, tech bros… types of people who orbit the novels, revealing the long-standing drive of appetite and force, with an update.

Although the novels are very different, they show a society that has created a problem in which the essence of being human: our bodies, our mind, and traditions have been enslaved by the decadent needs of the privileged. Together, these novels hold a mirror up to our civilization, reflecting our drawn-out decline.