Sayaka Murata’s Alien Eye | The New Yorker

Murata’s newest novel, “World 99,” revisits the Firestone premise: this time, cute, alpaca-like house pets are co-opted to give birth to human babies. In a 2022 interview for Wired, Murata said that her plan had been to relieve women of the burden of pregnancy. “But it just got more and more hellish,” she said. “I didn’t solve anything.”

On a rainy morning this past January, Murata and I met near Tokyo’s Suidobashi Station and took a series of trains to Tsukuba, a university town in Ibaraki Prefecture, to visit Ginny Tapley Takemori. Murata was carrying a number of heavy-looking tote bags, one of which turned out to contain the thousand-page galley proofs of “World 99.” Her revisions were due in two days. (She works only outside her apartment, in cafés, in restaurants, or at her publishers’, and likes to carry her drafts and writing materials with her.) With us was Naoko Selland—an associate professor at Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, a legal interpreter, and a longtime Murata fan.

Takemori lives in a Japanese-style house with elaborate tile roofing, built using components from a decommissioned temple. For lunch, she had made a salad with edible flowers and a chicken stew with a corn crust. Takemori, who grew up in East Africa and England, and has lived in Japan for the past twenty years, said that she had learned to cook from her mother. Murata’s own memories of being taught to cook were tinged with anxiety. She remembered her father sometimes sitting down at the dinner table and not eating. Why? “There aren’t any chopsticks.” Her mother would bring the chopsticks. These days, Murata rarely cooks. She keeps a vase on top of her rice cooker.

In 2011, Takemori had been given a list of stories and asked to pick one to translate, for a bilingual anthology to benefit the victims of that year’s earthquake-tsunami-nuclear disaster. She chose Murata’s “Lover on the Breeze,” in which a little girl develops first romantic and then sexual feelings for the curtain on her bedroom window. (It’s an unhappy love triangle, narrated by the curtain.) Takemori later translated another story, “A Clean Marriage,” for Granta, which brought her Facebook messages from readers wanting more. Next came the commission to translate “Convenience Store Woman.”

Takemori said that Murata, in “World 99,” had “dived far deeper than ever before” into the issues that recur in her work. “Themes become like old friends,” she observed. The setting is based on Murata’s home town: the Chiba New Town development, one of several planned communities founded near Tokyo during the postwar boom.

Murata was born in 1979, and her childhood was largely defined by gender roles. She has early memories of relatives commenting on her “easy birth hips.” Still, she didn’t envy her older brother, who, to her, seemed under pressure to get into an élite university. (Her brother, age fifty-one, works in finance. Like Murata, he doesn’t have children.)

In elementary school, Murata was introverted and quick to tears, sometimes hiding in the bathroom and crying until she threw up. Writing became her obsession around age ten. She called it a church, and still talks about the process as a holy world governed by a light-filled entity she calls “the god of novels.” When Murata was about twelve, her mother got her a word processor—a Fujitsu OASYS—which Murata believed was connected directly to the god of novels, who decided which novels got published. She would look for the novels she wrote in bookstores. “I thought they might have been chosen,” she said.

Murata’s father was a district-court judge. “The law was his Holy Bible,” Murata said. “It didn’t matter whether the person was right or not—it mattered what the law said.” Murata also became fixated on the idea of “justice.”

When I asked about her early influences, Murata rattled off a long list of titles and creators of children’s novels, manga, and anime, including a show from the early nineties, “Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water” (from a concept by Hayao Miyazaki, inspired by Jules Verne), featuring a mysterious dark-skinned heroine. After watching an episode in which Nadia experiences racial discrimination, Murata wrote a story about “a protagonist suffering from racism.” “The idea of racism had been installed in me,” she said. Later stories involved discrimination against a disabled character and against a drug addict. In junior high school, Murata felt “disgusted” by these works, and threw them out. She was constantly doubting herself. In the end, she said, “I doubted justice itself.”

Murata described junior high, when she was bullied, as particularly difficult. She had gotten through it by writing up to ten hours a day. “As a child, many people told me to die. Maybe I was dead,” Murata said matter-of-factly. “I survived through the power of the novel.”

The following day, I headed to the Tokyo offices of Bungeishunju, the publisher of “Convenience Store Woman.” On the same floor as the conference room where Murata and I were meeting, an employee in the rights department, Saho Baldwin, showed me a room with a bed, a desk, and a shower, where writers can isolate themselves from distractions, in a process known as kanzume, or “canning.” Murata emerged from an identical room next door, pulling a wheeled suitcase; she had the room reserved till midnight, to work on “World 99.”

High school, she told me, had been a pleasant surprise. She had new classmates, and made friends. On the writing front, she discovered the concept of buntai—literary style—and realized that that was what she wanted. She mentioned two writers: Amy Yamada, whose “Classroom for the Abandoned Dead” (1988) was one of the first Japanese novels about school bullying, and Yukio Mishima. It had been painful for Murata to accept that you couldn’t jump into somebody else’s style. You had to find your own, starting from zero.

Hiroshi Arai, the head of foreign rights at Bungeishunju, stopped by to give me a crash course on the Japanese literary marketplace. Arai described Murata’s career trajectory as “very typical” for a writer of “pure literature” (as opposed to “entertainment literature” and manga, which brings in the vast majority of publishing revenue).

Murata made her début in 2003, when the magazine Gunzo—one of five big literary magazines, each of which is associated with a book publisher—recognized her novella “Breastfeeding,” about a student who breastfeeds her private tutor. It was published first in the magazine, and then expanded into a book under the corresponding imprint, a process that was repeated for new works with other publishers. Because writers’ rates tend to be uniform in Japan, most literary writers don’t use agents or form exclusive relationships with publishers. Some consider it a sign of prestige to work, as Murata has, with multiple publishers.

It’s hard to make a living from “pure literature” alone. Murata, who has a horror of being told how or what to write, preferred to keep working part time in a convenience store, as she had been since her student days at Tokyo’s Tamagawa University. (She obtained a degree in art curation.) When the store closed, she was transferred to a new location; this happened several times. The work gave her a sense of connectedness, and a routine. She typically got up at 2 a.m. and wrote until six, before working her shift from eight to one. Then she would write in a cafeteria until it was time to go home.

After she won the Akutagawa Prize, in 2016—one of the judges was her high-school hero Amy Yamada—Murata was occasionally recognized by customers in the convenience store. One man began following her around and writing her letters. Sensing her co-workers’ discomfort, Murata quit. Some time later, the manager called: “Murata-san, you can come back! He found a new target.” Her stalker had become obsessed with a woman who worked nearby. Unreassured by the news, Murata didn’t return.

“I loved it,” she told me, in English, about the convenience store. I commented that it was sad that writing can take you away from things you love. “It’s sad!” she exclaimed in English, in exactly the same tone as I had said it.

Murata’s first convenience store was in Arakicho, not far from her parents’ current apartment, where she lived well into her thirties. She now lives in a studio apartment nearby. When I asked why she hadn’t moved out sooner, she cited financial concerns. “I took advantage of their existence,” she said, of her parents.

“They were probably happy,” I blurted, apparently unable to tolerate this level of unsentimentality. Murata looked pensive. “I don’t think that my mother was that happy,” she said. She thought that her father, a traditional person, might have expected her to take care of him when he was old. “So he seemed to be happy,” she said.

Later, I met with Makoto Kawamura, a former MTV producer whose first feature film, an adaptation of “Vanishing World,” will première in the fall. Kawamura told me that the novel had shaken him to the core. He saw it less as science fiction than as “a mirror,” reflecting social realities like “a declining birthrate, disinterest in dating and marriage, sexlessness, and romantic relationships with anime characters,” all trending subjects in Japan. While writing the screenplay, he had thought about “1984,” and also “Brave New World,” “Never Let Me Go,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Yet fundamentally he thinks that Murata’s novel “isn’t a dystopia,” because Amane never resists the government, or believes in a transcendent or ahistorical “right.” She wants to love whatever order she lives in.