When the novel opens, she’s in elementary school, observing that her timid father and tyrannical mother favor her anxious older sister and that together they form “a close-knit threesome” without her.
If Convenience Store Woman flirts with a science-fiction-inflected critique of conformity, Earthlings strains the bounds of realism to test foundational taboos of human society-not to mention the reader’s stomach-while never straying from Murata’s signature emotionally flat prose.Įarthlings is narrated by another young Japanese woman disenchanted by her society’s twin demands of citizens, to get busy pursuing a career and “manufacturing children.” But Natsuki Sasamoto is more of a self-anointed outsider than Keiko. In Earthlings, her second novel to appear in English (also translated by Takemori), her petri dish is far more outlandish and grotesque. Is this narrator pathological? Or does the problem lie in a society in which humans are mere parts in a standardized baby-making, money-making machine? Murata is experimenting, not moralizing, and she lets that question propel her story. As Keiko conforms to new expectations in her own strange and robotic way, Murata’s hyper-realistic depiction of Japan becomes ever more dystopian. People start to ask questions about her nonexistent love life and her “dead-end job,” and she tries carving out a different existence. For her, it’s a curious utopia-until she enters her mid-30s.
The thoroughly scripted interactions required in the store allow her to pass as “a normal cog in society” for half her life. Keiko Furukura is a part-time employee at a Smile Mart in Tokyo, and she is an unsettling blend of gung-ho about her job and coolly detached from the larger world she inhabits. Following its success, Murata had quit the line of work she shared with the first-person narrator of that slim volume. “I can test things that are not possible in the real world.” Her tenth novel, Convenience Store Woman, had by then sold almost 600,000 copies in Japan, and was her first to be translated into English (by Ginny Tapley Takemori). “I want to use the form of the novel to conduct experiments,” the Japanese writer Sayaka Murata explained as she emerged into the international literary spotlight in 2018.
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