One Sunday morning in May, 2023, I arrived at a literary agent’s Manhattan apartment, bearing a lemon tart, to attend a brunch in honor of the author Sayaka Murata.
I rang the doorbell. There was a long pause before anyone answered, and a longer pause before I was buzzed in. When I reached the top of the stairs, the agent, Nicole Aragi, with whom I was previously unacquainted, came to the door wearing orange plush tiger slippers.
“Elif, the brunch was yesterday,” she said. “But come in and have a cup of tea.” Aragi and her partner, the editor John Freeman, who has published Murata in both Granta and Freeman’s, ended up inviting me to join them on an afternoon outing they had planned with Murata to the Museum of Modern Art. Casting a wistful look at the lemon tart, I left the apartment and, having time on my hands, went to the midtown branch of Kinokuniya, the Japanese bookstore chain. The store had a big display of Murata’s English-language books, all translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and published by Grove Press: the story collection “Life Ceremony,” from 2022; the darkly comic novel “Earthlings,” from 2020; and, of course, “Convenience store Woman,” which won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize and, in 2018, became Murata’s first book to be translated into English. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide.
The book’s narrator, Keiko, is a misfit in her family and at school; she first experiences a sense of belonging at eighteen, when she gets a part-time job at a convenience store. At thirty-six, she’s still in the same job, and an identity that once seemed normal now strikes everyone as sad and weird. It’s a classic novelistic premise. It’s essentially “Don Quixote”: where Quixote lives by the code of knightly romances, Keiko lives by the convenience-store employee manual.
Sensing, with panic, that she is no longer passing as a legible human, Keiko adopts a radical plan. She invites an ex-co-worker, Shiraha—a grievance-spouting incel, recently fired for stalking a female customer—to live with her. While he’s taking a shower, she calls her sister and announces, “There’s a man in my home now.” After a pause, the sister bursts into effusive congratulations. “It’s the first time you’ve ever said anything of the sort to me,” she gushes. “Does that by any chance mean you’re already thinking about getting married?”
It was a translation, into literature, of a painful and half-articulated life experience of my own: specifically, the dawning realization, in my mid-thirties, that it isn’t actually O.K. to be an unattached woman who cares too much about work. It makes other people anxious. That’s the point in the book when I swore undying loyalty to Sayaka Murata, whoever she was. Also: who was she? The publicity copy called the novel “the English-language debut of an exciting young voice,” but surely this hadn’t been a first book? In fact, Murata had written nine other books, while working in a convenience store. When “Convenience store Woman” came out, she was thirty-six.
That afternoon, standing outside the museum entrance, I saw her approach, with Aragi and Freeman. I headed over to confront the eternal problem of how to physically relate in a normal way to another human being. Murata was wearing a cool vintage-looking beige-and-green dress, with forest-green tights. In novelistic terms, the writer she most reminded me of was Tolstoy—the Tolstoy whose novella “Kholstomer” is narrated by a horse who struggles to understand the idea of private property. If I were meeting Tolstoy for the first time, I reminded myself, I wouldn’t hug him or compliment his outfit.
I had been studying Japanese for a few months, yet I couldn’t seem to say anything except “The apple is on the table.” Murata’s English was somewhat more advanced, but our conversation quickly stalled at the level of how we were both, basically, doing fine. A Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit—“To See Takes Time”—was too crowded to enter, and we wound up touring the permanent collection. I followed Murata at a distance, pausing, when she did, in front of a sculpture. It looked like a track-and-field hurdle, with two metal legs and a horizontal wooden bar; impaled on the wooden bar was a large rock.
“I love it,” Murata said, her face shining.
The wall text identified it as a 1962 work by the Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi: “Stone of Spiritual Understanding.”
“It’s Isamu Noguchi!” I announced.
“Yes,” said Murata, who apparently hadn’t yet learned how to say “duh” in English.
Noguchi’s sculpture, I later found out, was inspired by the eighteenth-century Chinese novel “Dream of the Red Chamber.” In his recollection of the book, a sentient stone overhears two philosophers “discussing this new thing that happened to be called earth,” and decides to pay it a visit—a premise reminiscent of Murata’s novel “Earthlings.”
In May, 2024, I reconnected with Murata in Turin, at Italy’s largest book fair, where she was presenting “Parti e Omicidi”—the Italian translation of her 2014 novella, “Satsujin Shussan.” (Takemori, who hopes to translate it into English someday, suggested the possible title “Breeders and Killers.”)
The novella is set in an alternative reality where artificial insemination has replaced sex as the default means for procreation. To offset the population drop caused by “the absence of unwanted pregnancies,” the government institutes a “breed to kill” system: a person who bears ten children is entitled to kill one person. Thanks to artificial wombs, anyone can bear a child, and homicide is now viewed as “wrong” only insofar as it decreases the population. The narrator, Ikuko, starts out as a “breed to kill” skeptic. By the final pages, she is enthusiastically stabbing a work acquaintance to death.
After I spent twenty minutes wandering through the giant former Fiat factory—once Europe’s largest car-manufacturing plant—where the Turin book fair takes place, I located Murata’s sold-out event. Crowds of young people stood outside, clutching worn copies of “La Ragazza del Convenience store.”
Midway through the event, the writer and journalist Irene Graziosi, who was interviewing Murata, made the kind of striking literary observation that sounds obvious the minute it’s spoken: Murata’s characters are never angry, not even when they suffer or feel despair. And yet the anger was there somewhere, hovering. “Sometimes,” Graziosi said, “I feel as if I have to project it myself.”
Murata, sitting very upright, began her answer, in which I occasionally made out the assonant phrase kodomo no koro (“as a child”).
As I waited for the translation, I thought of Murata’s story “Transmogrification,” in which young people feel confused by “angry scenes in old TV dramas and films”: “Why do they have to open their eyes and mouth wide and shout?” I thought, too, of Tolstoy’s horse Kholstomer, when he learns, kodomo no koro, that he is somebody’s property: “I was quite in the dark as to what they meant by the words ‘his colt,’ from which I perceived that people considered that there was some connection between me and the head groom.” The Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky used that passage to illustrate “defamiliarization”—a “formal technique” for making the reader see the world as if for the first time—which he considered to be the essence of literary creation. It occurred to me now that defamiliarization, a pivotal technique in Murata’s work, presupposes a certain suspension of anger.
When the interpreter translated Murata’s answer into Italian, I found that it was less about formal techniques than about Murata’s own cognitive reality. As a child, she said, she had had a “bad experience,” leading to a problem with her throat that made her temporarily unable to express herself, or to communicate anger. Later, she found that she had lost access to anger altogether. Probably, Murata concluded, her novels worked unconsciously to transpose that missing anger into a new form; she thanked Graziosi for putting this into words. The audience broke into applause. Someone sitting near me shouted, “Brava!”
At dinner that evening, Murata seemed to know more English than she had a year earlier. She said that she was nearing the end of a new novel, “World 99,” her first serialized work, which had been coming out in installments in the literary magazine Subaru since 2020.
“Wow, how long is it?” I asked.
“Very, very long,” Murata replied.
I was curious about what books had been important to her when she was a student. Murata named Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” and Osamu Dazai’s “No Longer Human”: two nineteen-forties novels about alienated outsiders, guys who can’t manage “normal life” or show appropriate filial emotions. Both ultimately cause a human death. One ends up in prison, the other in a madhouse.
Already, in childhood, Dazai’s narrator worries about being detected as a fake and expelled from humanity—just like Murata’s Keiko. When she read the novel in college, Murata told me, she thought, It’s me.
On April 15th, Grove will publish Takemori’s translation of Murata’s 2015 novel, “Vanishing World.” Murata wrote it immediately after “Breeders and Killers,” returning to, and expanding on, a world where artificial insemination is the norm.
The narrator, Amane, is raised by her mother in Chiba Prefecture, in a small house decorated completely in red—the color of love. Over and over, the mother repeats how much she and Amane’s father loved each other before conceiving a baby together, and how someday the same thing will happen to Amane. Once she starts school, Amane learns that her mother’s views are now considered archaic. (“You were born after your mom and dad did it, weren’t you? That’s incest,” a classmate says, pretend-puking.) In current society, people still fall in love, sometimes with each other and sometimes with fictional characters from manga or anime, but sex is increasingly rare.
Nauseated by her mother’s prophecy, Amane vows to keep her desires in line with norms. As a small child, she falls in love with a seven-thousand-year-old boy warrior from an animated TV show. By junior high, she is “dating” other animated characters, and the occasional human boy. She carries the fictional boyfriends around with her, in the form of pictures and merchandise, in a drawstring purse. Her perfectly conventional life plan is to enter someday into a sexless marriage, have a child through artificial insemination, and live with her “family,” while continuing to date real or fictional boyfriends.
But by the time Amane is a married woman in her thirties, keeping her fictional lovers in a Prada pouch and living (chastely) with her husband in Tokyo, she realizes that marriage has become unfashionable—even potentially illegal. In Chiba Prefecture, now known as Experiment City, the family has been replaced by the “Paradise-Eden System.” Children, conceived through mass inseminations every December 24th, are collectively raised in a Center, and are known as Kodomo-chan. (Kodomo means “child,” and chan is a diminutive form of address.)
On an impulse, Amane and her husband move to Experiment City. First, following the city’s rules, they must dissolve their marriage. Once there, they report to a park to perform their civic duty, showering affection on hordes of nearly identical Kodomo-chans who shout “Mother!” at every adult, and run up to be cuddled. Amane, disconcerted, jokes that it’s “like a cat cafe.” Her ex laughs happily: yes, it’s truly a “large-scale baby cafe”!
In a climactic scene, Amane watches her ex-husband become the first man to successfully give birth (by C-section) to a human baby: a milestone in the technology of artificial uteruses. The doctor holds up the bloody infant. Amane’s ex—the Mother—lies there, beatific and exhausted, his penis dangling alongside his cut-open external womb, like a mashup of the Pietà and the Virgin Birth. Amane feels the new tableau searing her retinas, rewiring emotions she had believed to be “instinctive and physiological,” such as the unique powerful love she had imagined feeling for “her own” biological child. Gazing at rows of newborn Kodomo-chans, she understands that they are all truly her children, and feels overwhelmed by the “obligatory rightness of the spectacle of interconnected life.”
I’m not going to lie; I found a lot of this hard to read. The scene when Amane manages to love the Kodomo-chans felt uncomfortably resonant with the last line of “1984” (“He loved Big Brother”). For all Murata’s engagement with doublethink, groupthink, and memory holes, though, I resisted the comparison to “1984”: a novel about, among other things, a man who subverts totalitarianism by having sex with a younger woman, waking up “with the word ‘Shakespeare’ on his lips.” Instinctively, I grouped Murata with more radical and less nostalgic thinkers: people like Michel Foucault, who showed that so many supposedly biological or universal phenomena—madness, sex, criminality, medicine—are socially constructed. Or like Shulamith Firestone, whose “Dialectic of Sex” explains human history in terms of a biological class inequality between women, who do reproductive labor, and men, who don’t. Firestone, who saw sexism as the source of all oppression, maintained that a new era of human freedom would begin when technologies of “artificial reproduction” enabled children to “be born to both sexes equally.” Children, perhaps raised in non-family groups of like-minded individuals, would be loved not as we love property (because it’s ours, because we earned it) but because of who they are. What, I wondered, would Shulamith Firestone have made of Experiment City, where so many of her proposed reforms had been implemented, with such grotesque results?
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.
For Kawamura, Murata was offering a corrective to “a worldwide trend, especially on social media,” of believing totally in the self-evident rightness of current norms. I recalled blood-soaked Ikuko, in the last scene of “Breeders and Killers”: “Even if in a hundred years all this were to be considered pure madness, right now, in this precise moment, I want to be part of today’s normal world.”
I also found myself thinking of Viktor Shklovsky, the critic who wrote about defamiliarization. In his book “Third Factory,” published in 1926, after Lenin had died and Stalin had taken over, a main metaphor is that the writer is like a flaxseed being “processed” in a factory, and the factory is time. “The time cannot be mistaken; the time cannot have wronged me,” Shklovsky wrote.
Murata, too, has spoken of being “placed in the world, especially in Japanese society, as a tool or as material for writing novels.” Like Shklovsky—and unlike the heroes of most English-language dystopian novels—she doesn’t experience her placement as a nightmare to be escaped. If “the world is experimenting by putting me in the Japanese context,” as she once phrased it, she herself wants to learn the results. At the end of Murata’s novel “Earthlings,” the central characters vow to live as though they “just crash-landed on this planet,” and Murata herself shares something of their resolve: to “see everything with the alien eye.”
Although Japan has a venerable history of prose narratives—“The Tale of Genji” was written in the eleventh century—the tradition of the modern Japanese novel began during the Meiji Restoration, in the late nineteenth century, when Western novels began to be translated into Japanese. Because Japanese grammar includes numerous indicators of the relationship between the addresser and the addressee, omniscient narration posed a particular problem for translators. Some critics have linked these features of Japanese grammar to the Meiji-era development of the “I-novel,” in which the protagonist shares autobiographical circumstances, and sometimes a name, with the author. (Dazai’s “No Longer Human,” a touchstone for Murata, is written in this tradition.) When I brought up the I-novel to Murata and her editors, they were adamant that she didn’t write them. Murata told me that, notwithstanding her great admiration for people who could “sublimate their experience to fiction,” she herself had to start from “a clean, sanitized aquarium.”
More than once, Murata drew me a diagram illustrating her writing process. It showed a standing figure (“novelist Murata”) at a table in a lab; lying on the table was an identical figure, cut into pieces (“human Murata”). Various boxes contained body parts and organs. At the top of the page was a glass cube: the clean, sanitized aquarium. The way it worked, Murata explained, was that novelist Murata dissected human Murata. Aspects of human Murata “crystallized” in the aquarium, where new characters came to life and interacted. The characters, the story itself, were living. “They wriggle, they move, they surprise me,” Murata said.
Murata seemed ready to concede that anything I saw in her books was probably there, because the basement of the lab was connected to “a big unconscious world.” But there was, it seemed, little use in asking her about it. At one point, she tapped the figure of novelist Murata with her pen, as if to say, “You’re talking to that person.” I had the terrifying thought that maybe the one who knew the answer was the other Murata—the one lying in pieces on the table.
On another day, we went to a place where Murata likes to write: Kanda Brazil, an old-school Japanese coffeehouse with a smoking section and a long menu of single-origin coffees. While we waited for a friend of hers, the writer Kanako Nishi, to join us, I decided to ask again about a subject I had been puzzling over for some days: Murata’s relationship with aliens.
In interviews, Murata had described an incident, when she was about eight, in which an alien came through her bedroom window and took her to a distant planet, where she felt welcome and safe. Since that time, she had accumulated about thirty more alien friends and often visited them.
In an earlier conversation, Murata had told me that she was O.K. talking on a general level about the aliens, but she preferred not to get into specifics. Once, the sight of some online comments about her relationship with “fictional characters” had nearly caused her to pass out. The framing of these beings as “imaginary,” she explained, was “life-threatening,” because they had helped her, since childhood, to “coexist with suicidal thoughts.”
Murata had said that, shortly after her 2003 literary début, an older editor assigned to work with her had advised her to “stop writing novels.” This had precipitated a frightening period of paralysis and dissociation, during which Murata fluctuated between suicidal and homicidal thoughts. She eventually recovered, with psychiatric treatment. The psychiatrist had advised her not to specifically describe the aliens. Murata singled only one out for mention, referring to him as “A,” for whom she felt love and sexual desire.
From an early age, she has had a tendency to fall in love with nonhuman entities. “Fictosexuality is very strong in me,” she said. I had never heard the term, but I immediately thought of Amane, in “Vanishing World,” who by adulthood has forty animated lovers. At the time Murata wrote “Vanishing World,” she hadn’t heard the word “fictosexuality,” either.
In the coffee shop, I asked her about a 2022 New York Times article I had encountered on fictosexuality in Japan. It described a woman in her twenties who had married, in an unofficial ceremony, Kunihiro Horikawa, a fictional character from the Touken Ranbu game franchise; he often joined her and her parents for dinner, in the form of a tiny acrylic figure next to her rice bowl. At the mention of the acrylic figure, Murata became enthusiastic and started rummaging in one of her bags. “I usually have one with me,” she said. One of her favorites was of Figaro, a youthful-looking two-thousand-year-old doctor from a mobile game called Promise of Wizard. For some time, she had done her best to date men, but had given up with relief in her mid-twenties, when she realized that it was O.K. to just be with “A” or with Figaro.
In “Vanishing World,” Amane draws a contrast between “love with real people,” which tends to feel like “following a manual,” and “love with nonreal people,” which always starts “with figuring something out.” The fictosexual love scenes express a pure sensual pleasure that is rare in Murata’s work, occasionally reminding me of Céline Sciamma’s film “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,” in which the two female leads invent new modes of erotic union. (“Do all lovers feel they’re inventing something?” one of them murmurs, before rubbing a hallucinogen into the other’s armpit.) Murata, like Sciamma, is remaking the traditional love story, transcending the constraints dictated not by gender but by embodied corporeality itself.
“For me, the sex drive is not always about sex,” Murata said. It was visual and emotional, she said, not necessarily physical. I brought up the philosopher Herbert Marcuse and his notion that, in a truly non-repressive society, “genital supremacy” would fall away, and the whole body would become re-sexualized as an instrument of pleasure.
“It took me an extremely long time to know it, but I feel it is right for me not to have a special drive from the vagina,” Murata said.
We were joined by Nishi, who had written a short story called “VIO,” translated by Allison Markin Powell, that I was eager to discuss. In it, a bar worker, Lina, redeems a coupon for laser hair removal in her “VIO area” (a real term in Japan): “The V is for the front . . . the I is for down there, and the O is, well, you know.” The beautician puts white stickers on Lina’s moles, explaining that the laser will burn only dark things. Imagining this melanin-targeting technology being turned into a weapon, Lina begins obsessively researching historical massacres. Hitherto, when she typed “ge,” her phone suggested “gel nails”; now it suggests “genocide.”
I had always experienced Murata’s work as being, on some level, about genocide: the way “society” and its microcosms close ranks against foreign elements; the blind, insectlike concern with reproduction and one’s own genetic material.
“My life would be way easier if I had never met her,” Nishi remarked. Murata’s books made her question all her beliefs, even her love for her child: what exactly made it so strong?
Murata declined to draw any connections between her novels and real-world events.
“So you don’t experience your own novels as political at all?” I asked. The moment the words left my mouth, I understood that she was going to bring up the aquarium.
“I do not want any human thoughts to soil my aquarium.”
“I do not want . . . any human thoughts . . . to soil my aquarium,” I repeated, jotting the line in my notebook.
On our last day together, Murata took me to visit Chiba New Town: the place where she, and implicitly many of her protagonists, grew up. (On the train, I found myself thinking of Mirai New Town, the setting of “Earthlings.” The protagonist, Natsuki, likens the town to a human-breeding factory—each home is a nest containing a “breeding pair” and their young—and realizes that someday she, too, will become a reproductive tool of society. Later, during a harrowing scene of sexual abuse by a teacher, Natsuki comprehends that she is already one of society’s tools.) In Murata’s more speculative novels, Chiba Prefecture tends to be the site of institutions of reproductive control, like the hospital in which Amane’s ex-husband gives birth.
Murata and I—accompanied by Selland, the interpreter, and Baldwin, from Bungeishunju—emerged from the Chiba New Town train station onto a large, strikingly charmless plaza, surrounded by apartment buildings and shopping centers. There, we met Takemori and her husband, who had driven up from Tsukuba. Everyone wanted to see Experiment City.
Our first stop was lunch at Saizeriya, an Italian-style chain restaurant. It was in a giant shopping mall, on a floor devoted to children, near a department store (“Kids Republic”), a hair salon, and a display of giant, dead-looking teddy bears. Murata placed her go-to order: sautéed spinach with bacon, and focaccia. The best thing I can say about my own choice, the penne arrabbiata, is that a generous portion cost approximately two dollars and thirty cents.
Afterward, we walked twenty minutes to Murata’s former middle school: a long, squat two-story building. I felt a leaden sickness in the pit of my stomach, just as if I were standing outside my own middle school.
“I hated middle school,” Murata said. “There was a girl who was bullying all the students, one by one. I was also a target.” Led by the bully, the whole class would ignore the target, except to say things like “You deserve to die.” At home, Murata says, she didn’t find the “affection which would have allowed me to recover.” Somehow, she got hold of a manual with instructions for suicide. The manual recommended death by freezing. Murata made a countdown calendar to a date when she could carry out the plan, deep in the mountains.
By that time, she had already lost the capacity for anger. (It had been “damaged,” she said, as a result of dynamics within her family.) She viewed the bully in a spirit of scientific inquiry, wanting to understand her behavior. She followed her home, and “researched her relationship with her mother.” She didn’t find a reason. “I didn’t see her being punched by her father or harassed by her parents.”
Murata now blamed herself for having looked for a story about a “sad perpetrator.” “I had a mind-set like the mass media,” she said. “I find that terrifying.” I wasn’t sure what she meant. What was wrong with wanting a reason—or with expecting that reason to be sad? “I was trying to invent her life, for the sake of my mind. That’s brutal violence.”
We kept walking. I felt rattled. What had Murata done that counted as brutal violence? She had created, and tried to verify, a sad story about a lonely or mistreated child. What if I was doing the same thing here, researching her childhood? To what extent was she protesting not just the story she had made up about the bully but the story she surely knew that people made up about her?
We came to a residential area with compact trees and small prefabricated houses. One of them had a nameplate that said “Murata.” Murata unlocked the door.
Built in accordance with Japanese postwar aspirations, the house had two floors and three bedrooms, yet felt cramped and overstuffed. Nobody had lived there for a long time. Numerous aspects of the décor were pointed out to me as “very Showa.” (The Showa period lasted from 1926 to 1989; I often heard it used to refer to the postwar period, in particular.) Glass boxes contained blank-faced dolls in kimonos. In the kitchen, an appliance resembling a tombstone turned out to be a Showa toaster. A lone toothbrush stood in a cup near the sink. Murata said it was possible that her parents still sometimes stayed here.
Upstairs, Murata’s brother’s old room was full of sound equipment. On a shelf, Takemori noticed most of Murata’s published works. Murata wasn’t sure how they had gotten there. Her début, she explained, had involved “a sad mother-daughter relationship,” and she had worried that reading it would kill her mother. “So I told my mother, first, it has nothing to do with you. And, second, it’s better for you not to read it.” Since that time, her mother has not read any of her books.
We came to her parents’ bedroom. Murata said, in English, “When I was a child, I sleep between my parents, kawanoji.” Kawa, the character for “river,” is drawn as three vertical lines, and is used to describe two parents and a child sharing a bed. It was a traditional tatami room. Every morning, they folded up the bedding and stored it in the closet. Murata showed us the closet. Standing in the empty bedroom, I realized that what had initially seemed like a key question about Murata’s life—where exactly her parents fit into the picture of her childhood unhappiness—had come to feel less important. The unhappiness spoke for itself. (I did later ask a close friend of Murata’s, the novelist Mariko Asabuki, to tell me about Murata’s parents. “I have heard both funny and horrific stories,” she replied. “I think there are things that Sayaka would like to write when her family passes away.” In the meantime, she added, “there is nothing that I, as her friend, can say.”)
In Murata’s bedroom, we saw the curtain that had inspired “Lover on the Breeze.” Against the wall stood the narrow desk where Murata had written her early novels.
“This is a very Art Nouveau, middle-class, Showa-style lamp,” Selland remarked, about a flower-shaped glass fixture that hung over the room’s twin beds.
“It was probably my mother’s dream to have a cute girl who lives under this light,” Murata said.
“What does it feel like, being here?” I asked.
She seemed to consider this. “It hasn’t changed,” she said finally.
Before heading back to Tokyo, we returned to the mall near the train station. Over tea, I asked Murata about her acceptance speech at the Akutagawa Prize ceremony. According to Kanako Nishi, Murata had said something like “Even if my work betrays humanity in the future, I will write it.” Murata explained: “Everyone seemed to be happy and everyone was smiling,” and she had wanted them to know that someday she would betray them. She had also spoken those words for herself, she added—so that she could “write cheerfully,” in clear view of the consequences: “I may be excluded from human beings.”
The sentence gave me a jolt. Was that the fear lurking at the back of every writer’s mind? How calmly she put it into words. I felt that she wasn’t bluffing.
Readers sometimes tell Murata that her novels changed their lives, or saved them. Murata feels moved, but she tries to push those feelings away. She has to write “for the sake of the novel,” she said, not “for the sake of human beings.” I asked what she makes of her recent popularity. It was one of the few times I saw her look truly flummoxed. “People are out of their minds,” she said. ♦
