A Clean Marriage

Sayaka Murata's "A Clean Marriage" follows a Tokyo couple who have built an affectionate, entirely sexless marriage and now want to conceive a child without changing what works between them. They book an appointment at a facility engineered to make reproduction efficient, hygienic, and free of desire.

In the deadpan, unsettling register familiar from Convenience Store Woman and Earthlings, Murata pushes the couple's rational solution toward a grotesque conclusion, satirizing the social scripts around sex, marriage, and the female body.