Sayaka Murata

Sayaka Murata is a Japanese novelist born in 1979 in Inzai, Chiba Prefecture. She worked for many years as a convenience store clerk while writing fiction, a detail that has become part of her literary mythology. She is one of the most internationally celebrated Japanese writers of her generation, known for fiction that examines social conformity, sexual norms, and the pressure of Japanese society on those who do not fit. Murata began publishing fiction in 2003 and has produced a substantial body of work. Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen), which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2016, is a short, deadpan comic masterpiece about a thirty-something woman who has found her place in the world working at a convenience store and refuses to fit into society's expectations of marriage and career. The novel was translated into English by Ginny Tapley Takagi and became an international bestseller. Her subsequent work Earthlings (Chikyuu Seijin, 2018) was even more radical in its examination of social and biological norms. Murata has become a major figure in international literary culture, a writer who takes the seemingly mundane — the convenience store, the social script — and finds within it something dark, comic, and deeply unsettling. She is one of the most important Japanese writers working today and a significant voice in global discussions of gender, conformity, and identity.