"In her teens and twenties, she tried embracing conventional notions of womanhood just to avoid what she calls 'social harassment' before abandoning it in disgust."

"'I pretended to act the way I thought a cute woman should act, with an excess of femininity, but it was a horrible experience. I felt like I’d lost my will,' she says. In a relationship with a convenience store manager 15 years her senior, she found she was expected to cook morning and evening and do his washing. 'It felt like being physically and mentally exploited. I mean, I hate food and cooking – I keep a vase on top of my cooker,' she says, laughing.... Murata says she starts with her characters and doesn’t know the ending of her novels until she writes them. That might explain why Earthlings turns from whimsy to surrealist horror."

From "Sayaka Murata: 'I acted how I thought a cute woman should act - it was horrible" (The Guardian). I've finished the book now, so I'd like to discuss the ending. I'll put the spoilers — which are extreme — after the jump. Please consider reading the book — "Earthlings" — before reading more of this post.  Or skip the next section — the indented part — and the stop reading when I give the next big spoiler alert. And don't read the tags.

Its final act puts the three main characters – Natsuki, her first love, Yuu, and her fake husband - together in the mountainous Nagano countryside where their rejection of the “factory” [society as it is] becomes complete. Convinced they are aliens at war with the factory’s emissaries, they resort to murder and cannibalism. Munching on an “Earthling”, Natsuki finally recovers the sense of taste she lost as a result of the abuse [sexual abuse by a teacher]. 

“I felt as though I was eating for the first time in twenty-three years.” 

Murata says she didn’t set out to write a shocking book but her subconscious invaded the pages. “The people who know me through Convenience Store Woman are disappointed. But I was a cult writer before that success. People are saying the old Murata has returned.”

"Convenience Store Woman" was, apparently, the story of Murata's own life. From the Guardian article: 

Until recently, Sayaka Murata... worked in a convenience store.... “I was so used to the rhythm of working that I found it hard to hang around all day writing,” she explains....  

Japan’s 55,000 nearly identical convenience stores are considered stop-gap employers for job-hoppers, students, housewives and immigrants, “all losers”, says one of the characters in [Convenience Store Woman] contemptuously. But [the main character in the novel], who is 36, a virgin and uninterested in the bourgeois lives of her married peers, excels at the pliant, robotic service demanded by the industry’s manuals. So unsettled is she by invasive questions about her lack of a husband and children that she takes in a lazy, abusive lodger just to deflect them....

Murata is also single and returns home in the evenings to her laptop and a menagerie of what she calls “imaginary friends”. She, too, struggled to meet her family’s expectations, growing up in a conservative home outside Tokyo (her father was a district court judge) “lonely and terribly shy”.... 

In "Earthlings," the "fake husband" is someone the character found through a website called "surinuke.com." Google translate tells me that "surinuke" means "sliding through." From the text of the novel:

As its name suggested, this was a site where people seeking to evade society’s gaze for some reason, such as marriage, suicide, or debts, could appeal for information or find collaborators. I went to the MARRIAGE page and checked the category for NO SEX • NO CHILDREN • REGISTERED MARRIAGE to search for a partner. 

Thirty-year-old male, Tokyo resident, urgently seeks marriage partner to escape family surveillance. Businesslike arrangement with all housework shared, separate finances, and separate bedrooms preferred. Absolutely no sexual activity, and preferably no physical contact beyond a handshake. Someone who refrains from showing bare skin in shared spaces preferred. 

Quite a few men checked the box for NO SEX, but this one had caught my eye for having stipulated especially detailed rules. I’d be marrying a complete stranger on the verbal promise of no sex, so the less anxiety a potential partner provoked in me the better. I immediately sent him a message, and after meeting two or three times in a café, we came to a mutual agreement and tied the knot. 

Would you call that a "fake husband"? You've done the legal formalities, but the law may make this arrangement subject to annulment. Anyway, the legal question is the least interesting part of this. What's most interesting is the preference for locking in freedom from sex and the need to do this in a partnership because of the social and family pressure.

I see an article from 4 years ago: "In sexless Japan, almost half of single young men and women are virgins: survey" (Japan Times). And, from last year, "Japan, the Sexless Society?" (Japan Powered)("Sexless relationships become a problem when it isn’t a mutual agreement between the people in the relationship.... People are choosing not to have sex for their own reasons").

STOP HERE TO AVOID A BIG SPOILER.

Here's a sample of the horror humor as the 3 main characters are cannibalizing their 2 murder victims. It's a meal of "Earthling," that is, human beings. The characters themselves have decided they are aliens. One of the 3 characters volunteers his own body as the next source of food for the group. 

A complication is that they've made a vow to each other, a vow that is the opposite of a marriage vow: "We swore to live as completely separate entities from each other, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, that we would not love, cherish, or worship, nor stand by each other, and would live life for ourselves as long as we lived." 

Living this vow, they've been analyzing whether whatever they do is "rational" — rational from a non-Earthling point of view. The rational thinking is outrageous and you'll like the book more if you think this is really funny — that is, if you love deadpan humor — deadpan in 2 ways, given that we've got some dead human frying in a pan:

He gently slid the spilled Earthling stir-fry back onto my husband’s plate and said, “You’re right, we did make the pledge. Well, how about this? How about we all taste a little bit of each other and then decide to eat each other in the order of how good we taste? If something is unpalatable, we probably wouldn’t be able to finish eating it. And there’s no need to cut off a finger or whatever in order to taste each other. We can just take a nibble.” 

“Yes, that’s fair! I think that’s very rational,” I agreed. 

My husband appeared satisfied with this suggestion. “Okay. Yes, that’s best. If I taste the best, be sure to eat me all up, okay?” First of all, my husband and I took a bite each out of Yuu, me from his shoulder and my husband from his arm, testing the flavor on our tongues. He tasted slightly salty.