Sayaka Murata never quite learned to be human. She tried—painfully, diligently. As a child in Chiba, a suburban prefecture east of Tokyo, she studied her peers the way an alien might, watching for signs, learning their codes, trying to mask the strange internal world that set her apart. It didn’t work. At school, she was bullied and isolated. At home, she retreated into writing, convinced she was meant to live by a different logic entirely.
The conviction never left her. Over the past two decades, Murata has become one of Japan’s most provocative literary voices, a writer whose odd, deadpan style and speculative sensibilities have drawn comparisons to everyone from Michel Foucault to Tolstoy. Her breakout novel, Convenience Store Woman, was her tenth book—and the first to be translated into English. It follows Keiko, a woman in her mid-thirties who finds solace and structure in a dead-end job at a Smile Mart. She doesn’t want a relationship, doesn’t want a better job, doesn’t want to change. She just wants to be left alone to work the register.
The novel, a bestseller in Japan and abroad, tapped into something raw and deeply under-discussed—particularly among women. Its deadpan strangeness hit a nerve. Keiko’s refusal to follow social scripts—no sex, no career ambitions, no romantic aspirations—wasn’t framed as tragedy. It was framed as freedom.
Murata didn’t set out to write a manifesto. In fact, she’s wary of politics entirely. “I do not want any human thoughts to soil my aquarium,” she once told the New Yorker, referencing the sterile glass cube she imagines as the place where her stories unfold—clean, sanitized, separate from the messy emotional entanglements of real life.
But whether she intends to or not, her fiction speaks loudly about the quiet violence of normalcy. In Earthlings, a woman believes she’s an alien trapped on Earth. In Life Ceremony, funerals become occasions to eat the dead. In Vanishing World, sex has become taboo, and children are raised collectively by the state in a large-scale system of artificial insemination and enforced joy.
Her stories are often grotesque, sometimes funny, occasionally horrifying—but they’re never random. The surrealism is always structured, the dystopias always just a few logical steps removed from our own. “Normal,” one of her characters observes, “is a type of madness, isn’t it?”
Sayaka Murata’s daily writing routine
Murata has been writing since she was ten years old, when her mother bought her a word processor and she became convinced it was connected to “the god of novels.” As an adult, she worked in convenience stores for nearly 20 years—not because she had to, but because she liked the order and rhythm it gave her life.
For a long time, her schedule was punishingly regimented. She would wake up at 2 a.m., write until 6, then work the morning shift at the conbini. Afterward, she’d go to a café and write again, returning home only in time for dinner. “It was comforting,” she told the New York Times. “The store had a manual. I knew how to follow it.”
Even after Convenience Store Woman won the Akutagawa Prize and propelled her into literary fame, Murata didn’t immediately quit. The structure suited her. It gave her writing momentum, and a sense of belonging she struggled to find elsewhere. When she eventually left, it wasn’t by choice—she was being followed by a man who had started leaving her letters at work. Only then did she step away.
Today, Murata still writes every day, usually in cafés or publisher offices. She avoids working at home, afraid she’ll get “sucked into [her] dreamworld.” The routine is strict: same cafés, same hours, same meals. She works longhand or with printed galley proofs, editing by hand with a pen. When deadlines approach, she checks herself into isolation rooms provided by her publisher—tiny kanzume units with a bed, a desk, and no distractions.
The predictability of her schedule acts as ballast. Murata has described herself as having no fixed personality. She shifts to match whatever room she’s in. But in the act of writing, she becomes someone else entirely—“novelist Murata,” who dissects “human Murata” on the lab table and places fragments of her experience into a clean aquarium, where the stories can come alive on their own.
Murata rarely shows her work to anyone besides her editor. She writes without feedback, sometimes without food, chasing the rhythm of a story until it clicks into place. Her characters don’t come from outlines. They emerge, wriggling and alive, from the aquarium she’s built. “They move,” she says. “They surprise me.”
Though her writing is deeply idiosyncratic, Murata’s habits are surprisingly consistent. The cafés she frequents are within walking distance of her small apartment. She still lives in the neighborhood where she went to college, and where she worked her first convenience store job. Her world, as she once said, has shrunk to a single route within a one-mile radius—and that’s exactly how she likes it.
For Murata, the writing life is a kind of faith. It saved her as a teenager, gave her purpose when she felt like an alien among humans. She writes not to express herself but to observe—coldly, precisely, and with immense imaginative clarity—how strange the world really is.
No Comments