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Paper short abstract

Murata Sayaka’s World 99 imagines a society in which reproduction is outsourced to a non-human species called “Pyokorun”. This paper situates Murata’s vision within a lineage from Aldous Huxley’s ectogenesis to feminist and posthuman reworkings of reproduction.

Paper long abstract

Murata Sayaka’s recent novel World 99 depicts a society in which human reproduction has been entirely outsourced to a pet-like non-human species called “Pyokorun.” This radical displacement of reproduction from the human body raises fundamental questions about gender, agency, and the legacy of eugenic thinking in modernity. This paper proposes to situate World 99 within a longer transnational literary genealogy of reproductive imagination, tracing a line from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century feminist and post-humanist reconfigurations of reproduction.

In Brave New World, ectogenesis functions as a central technology of social control, enabling the state to manage population, stratify bodies, and eliminate maternal bonds. While this vision is often read as a critique of industrial rationality and eugenics, later feminist and speculative writers reworked artificial reproduction in more ambivalent ways. Authors such as Marge Piercy and Shulamith Firestone reimagined ectogenesis as a potential means of liberating women from the biological burdens historically imposed on them, while writers like Margaret Atwood emphasized the persistent entanglement of reproduction with power, coercion, and violence. In these texts, reproduction becomes neither purely oppressive nor emancipatory, but a contested site where biopolitics, gender norms, and technological imaginaries intersect.

Murata’s World 99 extends this lineage by pushing reproductive displacement beyond technology and into interspecies delegation. Unlike Huxley’s mechanized wombs, “Pyokorun” reproduction is neither industrial nor overtly political; it is naturalized, domesticated, and affectively neutral. This apparent neutrality, however, conceals a profound reorganization of human subjectivity, in which responsibility for the continuation of the species is externalized and ethical questions surrounding birth, kinship, and care are radically deflected.

By reading World 99 alongside earlier Anglophone texts, this paper argues that Murata’s novel marks a shift from the governance of reproduction to its abdication. What emerges is not a utopia of reproductive freedom, but a posthuman condition in which reproduction no longer belongs to the human at all. This shift illuminates the transformation of eugenic logic from explicit population management into more diffuse forms of biopolitical disavowal, and invites us to rethink the relationship between feminism, posthumanism, and the future of reproduction.