A review by kimchifairy
Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata

Refreshing and peculiar, if a little repetitive. There are essentially two kinds of story here: a deviant, counter-normative individual battles either against the norms of a world roughly resembling our own, or those of a world in which our norms (usually concerning sex, food, death or some combination) have been grotesquely inverted. This makes for a lot of arresting images - a woman inserting a bottle of a stranger's semen into herself after eating the corpse of her dead coworker is pretty typical - but they do rather lose their power once the general conceit has been well established.