“Ihave had relationships with humans, but I’ve also loved a lot of people in stories,” Sayaka Murata, the Japanese author of the bestsellerConvenience Store Woman, confides a few minutes into our interview. “I’ve been told by my doctor not to talk about this too much, but ever since I was a child, I’ve had 30 or 40 imaginary friends who live on a different star or planet with whom I have shared love and sexual experiences.”
It is 7pm in Tokyo, mid-morning in London. Sitting upright at a desk in an empty publisher’s office, the 45-year-old author – wearing a cream silk blouse and with a neatly curled bob – might be reading the news rather than discussing imaginary friends. For context, her latest novel to be translated into English, Vanishing World, depicts a future in which people no longer have sex and the main character carries 40 “lovers” – plastic anime key rings – in her black Prada pouch. Our conversation is made possible thanks to the skilful translation of Bethan Jones, who relates Murata’s long, thoughtful and utterly unpredictable answers. As video calls go, the experience is so otherworldly the three of us might be beaming in from different planets.
Murata is the author of 12 novels, although most readers outside Japan will know her for Convenience Store Woman, her 10th, and the first to be translated into English, in 2018. A convenience store orkonbiniseems an unlikely setting for a global cult hit, yet this eerily unsettling novel about 36-year-old Keiko Furukura, who has worked in the Smile Mart since she graduated and has never had a romantic relationship, has sold more than 2m copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. It won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa prize in 2016, when Vogue Japan named Murata a woman of the year. The book’s success helped spark therecent boomin Japanese fiction in translation, paving the way for predominantly female writers including Mieko Kawakami (Breasts and Eggs),Asako Yuzuki(author of last year’s bestseller, Butter) and Hiromi Kawakami (Under the Eye of the Big Bird, shortlisted for this year’s International Booker prize). “I never imagined that so many people would read it in Japan, let alone in other countries,” Murata says now. “It explores some quite unique aspects of Japanese culture.”
Reading Murata’s novels is not unlike finding yourself in a 24-hour store in an unknown city: everything is both familiar and exotic, orderly yet disquietingly unnatural and out of time. All the absurdities and cruelties of a sexist, consumerist society are revealed to be as artificial as candy under fluorescent lighting. Then there is the disorienting queasiness of her moral lens, like a security camera in the corner, recording everything without judgment. “What a lot of hassle,” Keiko reflects, watching her sister try to soothe her baby, before glancing at a cake knife. “If it was just a matter of keeping him quiet, it would be easy enough.”
Yet readers all over the world have identified with her endearingly offbeat heroine, who has been interpreted as being neurodivergent or autistic, although that wasn’t the author’s intention. “It feels like a lot of people see her as a friend,” Murata says. “She manages to express a part of themselves.”
She describes Convenience Store Woman as her “least triggering” novel. “There are no scenes of cruelty, there’s no sex, Keiko doesn’t kill anyone.” The rest of Murata’s work is darker and weirder, continually questioning social norms. Why is it more barbaric to eat a dead body than to burn it? Is the family the only way to bring up children? Wouldn’t marriage be simpler without love? “What about the real world? Where the hell is that anyway?” a character asks in the title story of her most recent collection, Life Ceremony.
Vanishing World was published in Japanese in 2015, before Convenience Store Woman, and is her third novel to be translated into English (all by Ginny Tapley Takemori), afterEarthlingsin 2020, about a girl who believes she is an alien. It poses another darkly comic thought experiment – what’s the point of sex when you could just have IVF? In Murata’s pristine speculative future, love is disappearing and “primitive copulation” is considered dirty. “The very idea of a married couple having sex, it’s horrifying!” one character exclaims. “The human race has advanced,” we are told. Men can give birth from synthetic wombs and children are raised collectively. Everyone is a “mother”.
Murata herself considers marriage to be “a kind of hostage situation” and motherhood “a curse” that would put an end to her life as a writer. Much of her writing involves imaginative attempts to resolve the biological fatalism of being female with humanity’s need to procreate. Her outlandish near-future fictional worlds are all rooted in the reality of Japan’s declining birth and marriage rates, an increase in young people choosing celibacy, not to mention deeply entrenchedmisogyny.
For many, Murata has become a left-field feminist icon. “Feminism is desperately needed in Japanese society today,” she says, describing “a hell soup” in which fathers have beengiven lenient sentencesfor raping their daughters and feminists receive death threats. “Some say that the worlds I write about are dystopian, but a lot of people think that actually reality is worse.”
Vanishing World grew out of a short story, A Clean Marriage, published in English inGranta magazine in 2014, about a couple who choose a “Clean Breeder” contraption in order to conceive because they prefer not to have sex – although they do with other people. Many readers responded saying it portrayed their ideal relationship.
InJapan, thanks largely to the popularity of manga and anime, what Murata calls “ficto-sexual” attachments or relationships are not so unusual, she says. For a long time she couldn’t imagine having sex with another human being. “I’ve often felt love, obsession, desire, friendship, a kind of faith, or almost a prayer-like relationship with these men – and they’ve always been men, so it’s a heterosexual relationship – who live inside stories,” she explains. A lot of her friends have experienced similar feelings, she says. “With Vanishing World I was trying to create a place where it might be easier for people who find it difficult to live in this world.”
Murata has always found it difficult to live in this world. As a child, all she wanted was to be normal. “I wanted to blend in. I wanted not to be a foreign object,” she says. “Now, I think that is frightening.” Since she started writing 20 years ago, all her work has been an attempt to answer the question: “what is normal and what is abnormal?” she says. “But the more I’ve experimented with it, the more unstable the boundary has become. I started to think that normality itself is a kind of insanity.”
Murata grew up in a small city in Chiba, a prefecture east of Tokyo, in the 1980s. Her parents had an arranged marriage and very traditional values. Her father was a judge, her mother, now 79, a housewife. It was not a happy childhood. “It looked good from the outside,” she says, “but now I think that I was starved of love, and that my brain was numbed and anaesthetised. But I was able to play the role of a normal girl. To this day, I think that my ability to get angry broke as a way of protecting myself.” Unsurprisingly, mothers don’t come out well in her fiction. In Vanishing World, Amane feels “the sticky fingerprints” of her mother’s soul all over the house and “an intense urge” to throw up after eating her cooking.
From a very young age, Murata never thought of her body as her own. “The grownups would always talk about whether Sayaka had childbearing hips,” she recalls. “It was almost like they were keeping an eye on my uterus, which was something that existed not for me, but for them, for the relatives.” No matter how much she tried to resolve the conflict of motherhood in her fiction, she has never escaped “this idea of being expected to reproduce for the good of the village”.
She found erotic magazines hidden in her older brother’s bedroom. “It was all over the place,” she says of the culture at that time; even the manga comics aimed at young girls involved the characters being forced to take their clothes off. “So I didn’t think of sexual love as something that I could choose for myself,” she says. “I always thought of my body as a tool for men to relieve their sexual desires.” Looking back, she endured “a lot of unpleasant sexual experiences”, including rape, some of which she was unable to recognise for what they were. “I hadn’t realised that I was abused, that I was a victim, or that I was crushed by the way that my mum spoke to me,” she says. “I’ve survived, I think, by forgetting.” She also survived by writing stories. From the age of 10, writing became the one place where she could express all these feelings.
As a student at Tokyo’s Tamagawa University, studying for a degree in art curation (combining art, music, literature and theatre), she started work at a convenience store. She then worked in a succession of similarkonbinis, like Keiko, for another 18 years. There she was able to forget her gender for the first time. Unlike her only other job as a waitress, where she was told to wear makeup and behave in a certain way, in the convenience store men and women wore the same uniform and did the same job. “No one said anything if you showed up one day with no makeup,” she says. “It was almost like I wasn’t a woman, I was just a convenience store worker. I was just a kindly vending machine.”
She would wake at 2am and write until 6am before starting her shift, then she would go to a cafe when it finished at lunchtime and write all afternoon. To begin with, it never occurred to her to write about the store itself. But then she realised that this too was a vanishing world, with self-service tills replacing workers. “Suddenly I thought: I need to write about this now, the role that it plays in society, the functions it fulfils. I need to capture this moment.”
Murata only gave up working in the store in 2017, but her routine hasn’t changed much since. She still lives in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, where she moved as a student. To escape the storytelling in her head and her “incredibly messy” apartment, she prefers to work in cafes. She needs to hear the sound of people around her, and often moves from one cafe to another. Sometimes, she goes for a walk in the nearby Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, before taking the tube home. “It’s a very boring routine.”
Murata still occasionally finds it a struggle to be what she calls an “ordinary earthling”. She suffers from bouts of dysautonomia and vertigo. After becoming fixated on killing an established male editor she calls Z-san, who she felt was a bully who abused his power, she ended up in hospital. She wrote about the ordeal, in an untranslated essay published in Shinchō magazine in 2022, titled The Commonplace Urge to Kill.
She certainly doesn’t think of herself as an internationally famous novelist. She was once taught to think of writing as sheet music, with readers playing the notes. “But the music isn’t mine,” she says. “I’m happy if there are a lot of people performing this music and that gives me the motivation to keep writing.”
Is she happy more generally? “Hai!” she replies so emphatically it doesn’t need translating. “Yes, I am very happy. I am surrounded by things I love and I am now able to talk about things that I had kept hidden. I can say I am blessed.” Then she says thank you and goodbye in English, and that it would be lovely to meet in the real world one day. Where the hell is that anyway?
Vanishing World is published by Granta on 24 April (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy atguardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply