convenience store woman by sayaka murata

She devises bizarre social experiments that unfold in seemingly familiar worlds and implants unhinged fantasies inside otherwise unrebellious women. The worlds she invents are future-looking without adhering to the tropes of science fiction her scenarios horrify without leaving the daylit quotidian spaces of home and office. Though she is unlikely to use either term, Murata’s fiction might best be described as speculative-feminist. Subscribe to WIRED Illustration: Eddie Guy This article appears in the October 2022 issue. In July, Murata published Life Ceremony, a new story collection in which she concocts grotesque social rituals (in the title story, funerals are occasions to eat the dead) to expose the absurdity of the corporeal norms we’ve all become desensitized to.

Earthlings, Murata’s second novel to be translated into English, is about a woman whose alienation is literal she believes she’s an extraterrestrial disguised as a human. Convenience Store Woman was a national bestseller that year-winning Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize-and nearly every year since, and it has sold 1.5 million copies worldwide. In 2016, Murata published Convenience Store Woman, a novel narrated by a contentedly unambitious Smile Mart worker who achieves greater fulfillment performing her rote duties as an employee than aspiring to marriage or motherhood. Many of her female characters feel distant from their bodies, both in mechanics and in purpose. “Even now I feel like my body and I don’t understand each other.” Murata, the author of more than a dozen novels and story collections, writes often from this place of alienation. “In high school, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t sweat,” she says. After all, she’s not sure her body works like those of other humans. Maybe the subtle sheen is a source of pride for Murata, I think. Looking at Murata’s long, collared black dress and black tights, I feel even hotter, but she seems unaffected, apart from a gentle glisten across her forehead. Today, visitors are sparse it seems we’re the only ones foolish enough to be out at noon. It’s an oppressively humid summer day in Tokyo, the sun hidden by a thick blanket of gray, and we’re taking a stroll at the Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, a 116-year-old park that becomes dense with crowds during the sakura blossom. By the time I meet Sayaka Murata, on a recent afternoon in June, the back of my linen dress is damp.

Convenience store woman by sayaka murata