Sayaka Murata

Sayaka Murata is a Japanese author whose work presents one of the most original voices in contemporary fiction — a sustained, quietly radical examination of what it means to refuse the scripts society has written for you, particularly if you are a woman in Japan. For many years she worked part-time at a convenience store while writing, and that experience saturates her most celebrated novel.

Convenience Store Woman (Konbini Ningen, 2016) follows Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six-year-old woman who has worked happily in the same convenience store for eighteen years and who has no desire to do otherwise — a simple fact that her family, friends, and society find deeply alarming. It won the Akutagawa Prize and in Ginny Tapley Takemori's translation became an international phenomenon. Her subsequent novel Earthlings, darker and more disturbing in its premise, confirmed her as a writer of genuine singularity. She writes about the social violence of normalcy with a straight face that is the most devastating form of satire.