As a child, Natsuki copes with a cold, abusive family by believing she is not truly human. She is a magician, she decides, sent from another planet, and her plush hedgehog Piyyut is an emissary from the world of Popinpobopia. Her one refuge is her cousin Yuu, who shares her conviction that they are aliens marooned among Earthlings — people who exist, as Natsuki sees it, only to serve the great "Factory" of society by working and reproducing.
Years later, Natsuki has survived into a hollow adulthood and a marriage of convenience with a husband who feels as out of place as she does. When the two of them retreat to her grandparents' abandoned house in the mountains and reunite with Yuu, their shared refusal to become ordinary Earthlings drives them toward an ever more radical rejection of every human rule.
Sayaka Murata's Earthlings is a savage, unforgettable standalone about alienation, trauma, and conformity. Beginning in the register of a strange childhood fable, it escalates into some of the most disturbing and taboo-breaking territory in contemporary fiction — a bleakly funny, deeply unsettling attack on the pressures society places on those who cannot, or will not, fit in.