Earthlings

The narrative structure of Earthlings establishes its project of Deconstructing the Logic of Human Norms by filtering events through Natsuki’s subjective first-person perspective. From the opening pages, her worldview recasts familiar settings and social rituals into components of a system that she views from the outside. The suburban town becomes the Baby Factory, a mechanistic apparatus for procreation, and her family’s home is a “nest” for a “breeding pair.” This reframing is initially presented as a child’s fantasy, but when she revisits the idea as an adult, Natsuki still sees it as a valid interpretation that defamiliarizes and critiques societal expectations. The introduction of Planet Popinpobopia and Natsuki’s identity as a magician, facilitated by the hedgehog Piyyut, serve as the framework for this alternative logic. Piyyut represents the imaginative faculty required to survive a traumatic reality. By positioning herself and her cousin Yuu as extraterrestrials, Natsuki creates a framework that validates their alienation and provides a language to articulate their experiences outside the vocabulary of human convention. This narrative strategy builds a perspective where societal normalcy appears bizarre and threatening, laying the groundwork for the novel’s challenge to conventional morality.

At the heart of these chapters is the theme of Survival as an Act of Radical Rebellion, which is codified in the childhood marriage ceremony between Natsuki and Yuu. Their union is a direct response to the failures of the adult world and the conventional family structure, which offers Natsuki no protection. Their self-administered wedding in the family graveyard—a space of ancestry and death—is a defiant act of creating their own kinship system, complete with vows and symbolic wire rings. The most critical component of their pact is the third clause, a command to “[s]urvive, whatever it takes” (30). This pledge becomes a central thesis, transforming survival from passive endurance into an active, strategic, and ethically unbound mandate. Natsuki’s subsequent development of “magical powers,” particularly the ability to dissociate during Mr. Igasaki’s abuse, is a direct enactment of this pledge. She mentally leaves her body, viewing it as a mere “tool,” which allows her to endure a psychologically annihilating experience. This coping mechanism, framed as magic, is an extreme form of self-preservation that illustrates how rebellion against trauma can necessitate a break from consensus reality.

The novel portrays The Destructive Nature of Societal Conformity through the relentless enforcement of norms within Natsuki’s family and school. In her life, the family unit functions as a microcosm of the Baby Factory, where roles are rigidly assigned and deviation is punished. Natsuki’s older sister, Kise, whose anxieties align with a conventional understanding of femininity, receives constant parental attention and the adulation of their mother. Natsuki, who is quiet and non-compliant, is relegated to the role of scapegoat. Her mother’s reaction to her disclosure of Mr. Igasaki’s abuse exemplifies how far this construct goes: Instead of offering protection, her mother accuses Natsuki of having a “filthy mind” and beats her for violating the social script that demands a child’s purity and a teacher’s authority. This inversion of blame protects the patriarchal structure of the school and the family at the expense of the child. The adults’ violent reaction to discovering Natsuki and Yuu’s consensual sex stands in stark contrast to their willful blindness toward Mr. Igasaki’s predation. This discrepancy exposes an irrational morality that prioritizes the preservation of social appearances over the well-being of its members.

Akishina, Natsuki’s ancestral home, functions as a liminal space where the boundaries between civilization and wilderness, magic and reality, and life and death become permeable. It is both a sanctuary where Natsuki and Yuu can affirm their secret identities and a site of trauma. The rural setting, with its palpable darkness and omnipresent insects, stands in opposition to the ordered environment of the suburban Baby Factory. Within this space, Natsuki and Yuu conduct rituals—the wedding, the sexual act—that are meaningful within their private cosmology but are seen as transgressive by the adult world. The graveyard, where they marry, have sex, and where Natsuki attempts to die by suicide, becomes the nexus of these conflicting forces. It is a place that connects them to their ancestors but is also the stage for their ultimate expulsion from the family. This duality establishes Akishina in the narrative as the ground where the conflict between the individual and the collective is fought, foreshadowing their eventual break from society.

In these chapters, Natsuki’s body itself demonstrates the toll of her trauma and the physical cost of navigating this oppressive world. Natsuki’s trauma manifests physically, most notably in the sudden loss of her sense of taste after being assaulted by Mr. Igasaki. This sensory deprivation is a psychosomatic response that symbolizes her disconnection from her own body and from the world of human pleasure. Her body is repeatedly treated as an object to be corrected, disciplined, and used—her posture adjusted by her abuser, her head struck by her mother, and her body referred to as a “tool” during the assault. Her urgent desire to have sex with Yuu is framed not as a quest for pleasure but as an attempt to reclaim her body and consummate her one true bond “before my body stops being mine” (71). This act is a reclamation of agency, asserting ownership over her physical self in defiance of both her abuser and the societal machine that seeks to control her reproductive future. The narrative consistently links psychological suffering to physical sensation, or the lack thereof, establishing the body as the primary site where the violence of conformity is inscribed.