Original title:
生を祝う
Original language:
Japanese
Publication info:
Asahi Shimbun
7 December 2021
184 pages in Japanese
Genre:
Literary speculative fiction
Rights handled by New River:
Foreign rights excl. Asia
Rights sold:
China (Folio)
Korea (Marco Polo)
Taiwan (Unitas) Options in Denmark
Italy
Poland
Spain
Celebration of Life
by Li Kotomi
The reason we can embrace the joy of childbirth now is thanks to the Natal Consent Act—it protects us from giving birth to a child without their consent.
Set in Japan in 2075, Celebration of Life considers a world in which one requires the consent of a foetus before giving birth. Ayaka, in her late 20s, is pregnant and will soon have her Consent Confirmation appointment where, as dictated by the country’s Natal Consent Act, her foetus will be asked whether it wants to be born or not. Firm supporters of the Act, Ayaka and her wife Kaori look forward to their future family, confident that their foetus will consent given the smooth progress of their previous medical check-ups. However, on appointment day, their foetus unexpectedly does not consent to being born. Their plans and hopes suddenly torn to pieces, what will Ayaka and Kaori do?
Sitting alongside works of feminist speculative fiction such as Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh and Red Clocks by Leni Zumas, Celebration of Life explores the precarity of reproductive rights, the dynamics of death and life, and the hazy margins between utopia and dystopia.
About the author
Li Kotomi (1989-) is a Taiwanese author based in Japan who writes in Japanese. She made her debut in 2017 with Solo Dance, which won the Gunzō Prize for New Writers. The Night of the Shining North Star, published in 2020, was awarded the Fine Arts New Writers Award. Li was awarded the Akutagawa Prize in 2021 for The Island Where the Spider Lilies Bloom, becoming the first Taiwanese winner and the second non-native Japanese speaker to ever win Japan’s premier literary award.