Contemporary Authors

• Shiroiro no machi no, sono hone no taion no Asahi Shinbun Shuppan (Tokyo, Japan), 2012

1. Convenience store woman LCCN 2017051049 Type of material Book Personal name Murata, Sayaka, 1979- author. Uniform title Conbini ningen. English Main title Convenience store woman / Sayaka Murata ; translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Edition First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition. Published/Produced New York : Grove Press, [2018] Description 163 pages ; 18 cm ISBN 9780802128256 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PL873.U73 C6613 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Shiroiro no machi no, sono hone no taion no LCCN 2013470615 Type of material Book Personal name Murata, Sayaka, 1979- author. Main title Shiroiro no machi no, sono hone no taion no / Murata Sayaka. Published/Produced Tōkyō : Asahi Shinbun Shuppan, 2012. Description 271 pages : illustration ; 19 cm ISBN 9784022510112 4022510110 Links Japanese record available for display. http://www.bk1.jp/trcno/12048535/?partnerid=oclc&siteid=oclc CALL NUMBER PL873.U73 S55 2012 Japan Copy 1 Request in Asian Reading Room (Jefferson, LJ150)

• Jyunyū (Breastfeeding) - 2005 Kodansha, Tokyo, Japan
• Gin iro no uta (Silver Song) - 2009 Shinchosha, Tokyo, Japan
• Mausu (Mouse) - 2008 Kodansha, Tokyo, Japan
• Hoshi ga sū mizu (Water for the Stars) - 2010 Kodansha, Tokyo, Japan
• Hakobune (Ark) - 2011 Shueisha, Tokyo, Japan
• Tadaima tobira - 2012 Shinchosha, Tokyo, Japan
• Satsujin shussan - 2014 Kodansha, Tokyo, Japan
• Shōmetsu sekai (Dwindling World) - 2015 Kawade Shobo Shinsha, Tokyo, Japan
• Konbini ningen (Convenience Store People) - 2016 Bungeishunju, Tokyo, Japan

• Grove Atlantic - https://groveatlantic.com/author/sayaka-murata/

  Sayaka Murata
  Sayaka Murata is one of Japan’s most exciting contemporary writers. She still works part time in a convenience store, which was the inspiration to write Convenience Store Woman, her English-language debut and winner of one of Japan’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Akutagawa Prize. She was named a Freeman’s “Future of New Writing” author, and her work has appeared in Granta and elsewhere. In 2016, Vogue Japan selected her as a Woman of the Year.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayaka_Murata

  Sayaka Murata
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  Sayaka Murata
  Native name 村田沙耶香
  Born August 14, 1979 (age 38)
  Occupation Novelist, convenience store clerk
  Language Japanese
  Alma mater Tamagawa University
  Genre Fiction
  Notable works
  Gin iro no uta (ギンイロノウタ)
  Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (しろいろの街の、その骨の体温の)
  Konbini ningen (コンビニ人間)
  Notable awards
  Akutagawa Prize
  Mishima Yukio Prize
  Noma Literary New Face Prize
  Gunzo Prize for New Writers
  Sayaka Murata (村田沙耶香 Murata Sayaka) is a Japanese writer. Her first novel, Jyunyū (Breastfeeding), won the 2003 Gunzo Prize for New Writers.[1] In 2013 she won the Mishima Yukio Prize for Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, Of Body Heat, of Whitening City).[2] In 2016 her 10th novel, Konbini ningen (Convenience Store People), won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize,[3] and she was named one of Vogue Japan's Women of the Year.[4] Konbini ningen has sold over 600,000 copies in Japan, and in 2018 it became her first book to be translated into English, under the title Convenience Store Woman.[5]

  Contents
  1 Biography
  2 Writing style
  3 Recognition
  4 Bibliography
  4.1 Books in Japanese
  4.2 Selected Work in Translation
  5 References
  6 External Links
  Biography
  Murata was born in Inzai, Chiba Prefecture, Japan in 1979. As a child she often read science fiction and mystery novels borrowed from her brother and mother, and her mother bought her a word processor after she attempted to write a novel by hand in the fourth grade of elementary school.[6] After Murata completed middle school in Inzai, her family moved to Tokyo, where she graduated from Kashiwa High School (attached to Nishogakusha University) and attended Tamagawa University.[7]

  Kashiwa High School
  Throughout her writing career Murata has worked part-time as a convenience store clerk in Tokyo.[8]

  Writing style
  Murata's writing explores the different consequences of nonconformity in society for men and women, particularly with regard to gender roles, parenthood, and sex.[9] Many of the themes and character backstories in her writing come from her daily observations as a part-time convenience store worker.[8] Societal acceptance of sexlessness in various forms, including asexuality, involuntary celibacy, and voluntary celibacy, especially within marriage, recurs as a theme in several of her works, such as the novels Shōmetsu sekai (Dwindling World) and Konbini ningen (Convenience Store People), and the short story "A Clean Marriage."[10][11] Murata is also known for her frank depictions of adolescent sexuality in work such as Gin iro no uta (Silver Song)[12] and Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, of Body Heat, of Whitening City).[13]

  Recognition
  Year Prize Title Notes
  2003 Gunzo Prize for New Writers[1] Jyunyū (授乳) Won
  2009 Mishima Yukio Prize[2] Gin iro no uta (ギンイロノウタ) Nominated
  2009 Noma Literary New Face Prize[14] Gin iro no uta (ギンイロノウタ) Won
  2010 Mishima Yukio Prize[2] Mizu ga sū hoshi (星が吸う水) Nominated
  2012 Mishima Yukio Prize[2] Tadaima tobira (タダイマトビラ) Nominated
  2013 Mishima Yukio Prize[2] Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (しろいろの街の、その骨の体温の) Won
  2014 Sense of Gender Awards[15] Satsujin shussan (殺人出産) Won
  2016 Akutagawa Prize[3] Konbini ningen (コンビニ人間) Won
  Bibliography
  Books in Japanese
  Jyunyū (Breastfeeding) Kodansha, 2005, ISBN 9784062127943
  Gin iro no uta (Silver Song), Shinchosha, 2009, ISBN 9784103100713
  Mausu (Mouse), Kodansha, 2008, ISBN 9784062145893
  Hoshi ga sū mizu (Water for the Stars), Kodansha, 2010, ISBN 9784062160971
  Hakobune (Ark), Shueisha, 2011, ISBN 9784087714289
  Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, Of Body Heat, of Whitening City), Asahi Shimbun, 2012, ISBN 9784022510112
  Tadaima tobira, Shinchosha, 2012, ISBN 9784103100720
  Satsujin shussan, Kodansha, 2014, ISBN 9784062190466
  Shōmetsu sekai (Dwindling World), Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2015, ISBN 9784309024325
  Konbini ningen (Convenience Store People), Bungeishunju, 2016, ISBN 9784163906188
  Selected Work in Translation
  "A Clean Marriage," English translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori, Granta 127, April 24, 2014.[16]
  Convenience Store Woman, English translation of Konbini ningen by Ginny Tapley Takemori, Grove Atlantic, 2018, ISBN 9780802128256[17]

• Japan Times - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/07/30/national/media-national/sayaka-murata-art-neutrality/#.W0uCDNIzo2w

  QUOTED: "What the media loves about Murata is that she has accomplished something extraordinary while holding down such an average job. But the novel itself is really about how extraordinary people have to become average in order to survive."

  Sayaka Murata and the art of neutrality
  BY PHILIP BRASOR
  SPECIAL TO THE JAPAN TIMES

  JUL 30, 2016 ARTICLE HISTORY PRINT SHARE
  When 36-year-old Sayaka Murata recently won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature, the media latched onto the author’s background rather than the novel itself. Murata continues to work part-time as a convenience store clerk, and gains inspiration for characters and plots from her work environment. Her novel is called “Konbini Ningen,” which means “Convenience Store People.”

  What the media loves about Murata is that she has accomplished something extraordinary while holding down such an average job. But the novel itself is really about how extraordinary people have to become average in order to survive.

  The protagonist, Keiko Furukura, has always been viewed as “strange” by others, including her family, who once thought she required treatment. She doesn’t react to circumstances the way “normal” people do, but she recognizes her differences and tries her best to fit in. In order to become a “regular person,” she begins working at a convenience store. There, she studies and copies other people. Convenience stores are the perfect place for this sort of project because they are run according to a job manual issued by management. Working there, she feels she has “become part of the machine of the world.” In truth, she is still the same person, but now “disguised as a member of society.”

  “Konbini Ningen” takes on special significance in light of the recent controversy surrounding the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s approach to education and how it wants to socialize young people.

  The education ministry plans to promote morals (dōtoku) into a fully fledged scholastic subject for elementary schools by 2018, and for junior high schools by 2019. Morals has always been taught in school, but it was not graded, and thus not strictly administered by the ministry. The Asahi Shimbun was alarmed by the policy, saying that “evaluating” a student’s grasp of morals is a difficult endeavor, and that an understanding of it tends to be subjective. The ministry, however, has insisted that a child’s acquisition of morals will not be “scored” by means of a weighted grading system, but rather explained through “written evaluations.”

  A central concern is the emphasis on a “love of country and one’s home town.” Is it appropriate for a teacher to evaluate a child’s sense and scale of patriotism? The ministry believes that there are many factors that contribute to morals education. But since it will become a standard school subject, textbooks and materials will have to be approved by the government, which makes it likely that patriotism and other facets of moral determination will adhere to a fixed ideology.

  Even more problematic was the LDP’s recent monthlong campaign to root out public school teachers who violate strictures of neutrality by advocating for certain political positions in the classroom.

  On June 15, the ruling party posted a notice on its website asking people who observed such violations to report them by naming the teacher, the nature of the violation and where it happened, etc. The person doing the reporting is required to submit their own name, but that doesn’t mean that people will not use the site to pursue vendettas or rat on educators they don’t like.

  The reaction of the Asahi Shimbun was, again, alarm, and the LDP removed the solicitation from its website on July 19, without comment. Nevertheless, it will likely have an effect. The Asahi wondered exactly what that effect will be.

  Shinji Fukushima, in his regular column for the newspaper, stated that the effect will be similar to the one enforced by tonari-gumi (neighborhood associations) during World War II. These associations were formed so that households could monitor one another for purposes of national defense. If anyone in the community complained about the war or expressed doubt over the way it was being prosecuted, that person would be reported to the authorities. Consequently, no one said anything, regardless of how they felt. Fukushima says the LDP hasn’t explained how the reports of violations will be evaluated and by whom. Without transparency and due process, they may as well be the war-era kenpei (military police).

  On a J-Wave radio talk show that aired July 22, education expert Daisuke Hayashi pointed out that, in principle, the LDP insists that “all political opinions must be represented” if any one is advocated in school, and that includes nominally conservative or right-wing views.

  “It’s true that teaching about politics should be neutral,” he said, but when the LDP monitors teachers, it has a damping effect on any discussion about politics. The ministry has never explained what “neutral” means. As a result, local boards of education put pressure on schools where mock elections are carried out — used to teach students the purpose of voting — afraid that the ministry will complain about them.

  Regardless of the intentions, the effect of these directives is that politics becomes a touchy topic, and students end up naturally averse to political discussion. This explains why so many young people complained recently when a member of the student activist group SEALDs appeared at the recent Fuji Rock Festival, despite the fact that politics have always had a place in popular music.

  This timidity mirrors the fear in the press about appearing to cover political issues from a “biased” point of view. As it stands, except for the Asahi and Tokyo Shimbun, the mainstream media have not objected to the government’s education policies. Like intimidated teachers and school administrators, they’d rather not be seen as rocking the boat, but when you think about it, everybody has a bit of Keiko Furukura in them.

  In such an environment, however, it’s safer to work in a convenience store, where everything is predictable, than it is to assert one’s differences, take chances and be extraordinary.

• New York Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/books/japanese-novelist-sayaka-murata-convenience-store-woman.html

  QUOTED: "Keiko doesn’t care—or maybe she doesn’t realize—when she is being made fun of by others. ... She did not want to have sex at all and that was fine with her, and she chose that life. I really admire her character."
  "I wanted to illustrate how odd the people who believe they are ordinary or normal are. ... They are the so-called normal people, but when you switch the direction of the camera, it is they who appear strange or odd."

  For Japanese Novelist Sayaka Murata, Odd Is the New Normal
  Image
  Sayaka Murata in a Tokyo convenience store similar to the one where the main character in her novel works.CreditKentaro Takahashi for The New York Times
  By Motoko Rich
  June 11, 2018

  6
  TOKYO — Keiko, a defiantly oddball 36-year-old woman, has worked in a dead-end job as a convenience store cashier in Tokyo for half her life. She lives alone and has never been in a romantic relationship, or even had sex. And she is perfectly happy with all of it.

  Her creator, Japanese novelist Sayaka Murata, thinks that makes Keiko a true hero.

  “Keiko doesn’t care — or maybe she doesn’t realize — when she is being made fun of by others,” said Ms. Murata, 38, of the narrator of “Convenience Store Woman,” her 10th novel and first to be translated into English. “She did not want to have sex at all and that was fine with her, and she chose that life. I really admire her character.”

  “Convenience Store Woman,” which won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize for literature two years ago and has sold close to 600,000 copies here, will go on sale this month in the United States. Written in plain-spoken prose, the slim volume focuses on a character who in many ways personifies a demographic panic in Japan.

  Japanese media is filled with stories about declining marriage and low birthrates, as well as references to ominous surveys about young people who are virgins or have forsaken dating and sex, a narrative that the Western press finds particularly alluring when writing about Japan.

  In the novel, Keiko’s friends and family are mortified on her behalf, urging her to find a man and settle down or move to a more professionally fulfilling job. Keiko observes their anxiety with head-cocked bemusement. “Here was everyone taking it for granted that I must be miserable when I wasn’t,” she thinks, after a reunion with a group of married high school classmates who seem appalled by her nonexistent love life.

  Image
  Japanese convenience stores are a unique institution: Customers can pay their electric, gas and tax bills as well as purchase tickets to museums or concerts, or buy a button-down shirt, socks and underwear if they don’t have time to go home or do their laundry.CreditKentaro Takahashi for The New York Times
  Ms. Murata said she wanted to write from the perspective of someone who defied conventional thinking, particularly in a conformist society where people are expected to fulfill preordained roles.

  “I wanted to illustrate how odd the people who believe they are ordinary or normal are,” said Ms. Murata during an interview in a smoky subterranean cafe in Jimbocho, Tokyo’s book district, where she sometimes comes to write. “They are the so-called normal people, but when you switch the direction of the camera, it is they who appear strange or odd.”

  With relatively few contemporary Japanese novelists translated into English, Grove Press, the American publisher, is hoping to capture a niche audience of readers who have enjoyed other works by Japanese authors like Banana Yoshimoto, whose novel “Kitchen” was also published by Grove in the early 1990s.

  Peter Blackstock, a senior editor at Grove, said he was particularly attracted to “Convenience Store Woman” because of its portrayal of a working-class employee. “There is so little that we see that deals with people working in jobs where they are not going to be promoted or where they’re not on a managerial track,” Mr. Blackstock said. “That resonates no matter where you are.”

  Ms. Murata, the daughter of a judge and a homemaker who still lives with her parents, wrote from experience: She herself worked at several convenience stores over a period of close to 18 years, starting while she was still a college student.

  Japanese convenience stores are a unique institution, with several ubiquitous chains blanketing the country. The stores sell basic sundries like candy and soft drinks and microwaveable lunchboxes, but also serve as a kind of central clearing house for so many activities of daily life: Customers can pay their electric, gas and tax bills as well as purchase tickets to museums or concerts, or buy a button-down shirt, socks and underwear if they don’t have time to go home or do their laundry.

  Although convenience stores have come under criticism in Japan for mistreatment of workers, Keiko sees the store as a kind of utopia whose strict rules and established routines give her life shape and meaning. She cherishes the store’s instruction manual, without which, she says, “I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person.”

  Image

  CreditAlessandra Montalto/The New York Times
  Ms. Murata, who in person does not come across as someone who has any trouble with basic human interaction, nevertheless relates to Keiko.

  “For me, when I was working as a college student, I was a very shy girl,” she said. “But at the stores, I was instructed to raise my voice and talk in a loud friendly voice, so I became that kind of active and lively person in that circumstance.”

  Over the years, she chose to stay on the job because the shifts helped discipline her writing schedule.

  She would wake up at 2 in the morning and write until 6, starting her shift at the convenience store at 8 a.m. After finishing at 1 p.m., she would go to a cafe and write until going home for dinner. She liked writing with the sounds of people around her; even when writing at home, she said she opens the windows to let in the street sounds.

  Five years ago, her novel “Of Bones, of Body Heat, of the White-Colored City” won the Yukio Mishima Prize for literature, but it wasn’t until last year that she decided to quit the part-time gig and focus on writing full time.

  Her writing life started early: A science fiction fan as a child, she started crafting her own stories when she was 10 years old.

  The stories never turned out as she originally imagined. “The characters in the stories would develop by themselves, almost automatically,” she said. “They led me beyond into the world.”

  She hid her writing, she said, either out of embarrassment, or because she did not want her friends to praise it with platitudes. “I didn’t want their compliments just because they were my friends,” she said.

  In college, she joined a small private class led by Akio Miyahara, a novelist who had won the Akutagawa Prize. Most of the others in the class were office workers pursuing a hobby.

  Mr. Miyahara, 85, recalls that Ms. Murata was one of very few women, and the youngest in the class.

  “It was like a chick jumped in the roosters’ hut,” Mr. Miyahara said. Her stories, he recalled, touched on themes of sexuality and misfits. At times, he said, he found her work “hard to understand.”

  Image

  “I wanted to illustrate how odd the people who believe they are ordinary or normal are,” says Ms. Murata.CreditKentaro Takahashi for The New York Times
  Sexuality and sexless relationships are a recurring preoccupation for Ms. Murata. In a “A Clean Marriage,” a short story published in the British literary journal Granta, she wrote about a married couple who lived “like brother and sister, without being a slave to sex” but conceived a child at a futuristic fertility clinic.

  Ms. Murata says that she is interested in people — particularly women — who don’t want to have sex; she wants to reassure them that there is nothing wrong with that.

  Too often, she said, “under the conventional conservative way of having sex, the woman is just treated as a tool or object.” Instead, she wants women to experience “true intentional sex, because that is beautiful.”

  In “Convenience Store Woman,” Keiko eventually invites a male co-worker to move in with her as a roommate — he sleeps in the bathroom — but allows friends and her sister to assume that the two are romantically involved. Keiko, on the other hand, regards him as a pet, even describing meals as “feeding time.”

  “She has a very keen eye for the grotesque, for one thing that can be both funny and horrifying,” said Ginny Tapley Takemori, who translated the novel into English.

  After quitting the convenience store job, Ms. Murata said she found it more difficult to keep to a schedule. But she now grabs stretches of writing time in her publisher’s office or in cafes.

  Her next novel, she said, features another woman who is not unlike Keiko. “She doesn’t fit in,” said Ms. Murata. And that’s just fine.

  Correction: July 4, 2018
  An earlier version of this article misstated the year in which Sayaka Murata’s “Of Bones, of Body Heat, of the White-Colored City,” won the Yukio Mishima Prize. It was five years ago (in 2013), not four. And it was only last year (in 2017) that Ms. Murata quit her part-time job at a convenience store to pursue writing full time.

  Hisako Ueno contributed reporting and Erica Yokoyama contributed research.

  Follow Motoko Rich on Twitter: @motokorich.

  Follow New York Times Books on Facebook and Twitter (@nytimesbooks), sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.

• Financial Times - https://www.ft.com/content/b38bd728-68aa-11e8-b6eb-4acfcfb08c11

  QUOTED: "People think she is having a hard time, but she is so pure, she doesn’t care at all. She has no doubts. I wish I could live like her, and not think about others."

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  https://www.ft.com/content/b38bd728-68aa-11e8-b6eb-4acfcfb08c11

  Sayaka Murata: ‘My parents don’t want to read my books’

  Japan’s most radical new literary voice on taking aim at her country’s taboos

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  Leo Lewis JUNE 8, 2018 Print this page33
  Sayaka Murata is seated on a plum-velvet banquette in what must rank as Tokyo’s most intentionally elegant restaurant. She is straight-backed, speaks with a sing-song cadence and is dressed in the prim blouse and cardigan of an off-duty Mary Poppins. With precision, the former convenience store worker and now Japan’s most exciting new novelist places her Prosecco on the only spare bit of table and embarks on a train of thought that contains the word “sex” five times.

  Just to her right, where a pair of aunt-types are taking afternoon tea, there is a faint wince. To her left, the chatter between two businesswomen trails off. Our waiter, hovering nearby, takes a half step backwards.

  “My parents say they don’t want to read my books because of all the sexual descriptions in there,” says Murata, acknowledging that her comfort levels on the subject are not universally shared. “My brother says he finds it difficult to recommend [the books] to his friends. My friends are just really surprised that I — someone so dopey-looking — write such extreme stuff.”

  She isn’t remotely dopey-looking. But the awkwardness of the moment is entirely of Murata’s making. There are plenty of places she could have chosen for lunch where her intense musings about teen awakening, adolescent desire and sexual politics would have floated unnoticed into the ether.

  Instead, she has chosen to unravel Japan’s dysfunctional naughty bits, the subject of her bestselling novels, in the tassel-cushioned splendour of La Maison Kioi, an ornate French-meets-mock-Tudor mansion built in 1930 as the residence of the last crown prince of Korea. A rare survivor of wartime firebombs, the creaky, wooden-floored building was repurposed in the 1950s as the Akasaka Prince Hotel — an establishment celebrated for its grace, fine dining and the demure welcome it offered the mistresses of parliamentarians.

  In the 1980s, the hotel added on a dazzling white skyscraper that leered over central Tokyo and became symbolic of Japan’s bubble era. When that tower was demolished six years ago to make way for more glass and steel, the old mansion was ludicrously hoisted up and deposited 44 metres away.

  It now thrives, after a plush, purposeful refit, as a restaurant aimed at that stratum of Japanese society that equates the smell of furniture polish with top-notch experience. “I once came here with my mother,” says Murata, vague on when or why that visit happened.

  La Maison Kioi is a temple to exactly the kind of niceties she so sweetly brutalises in her dissections of modern Japanese female psychology. This is a writer who, two years ago, at the age of 36, joined many of Japan’s greatest modern novelists as the winner of the country’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa prize. Previous winners include Shusaku Endo, Kenzaburo Oe and Ryu Murakami — writers whose work defined Japanese 20th-century literature. The novel that did it for Murata — Konbini Ningen (newly translated and published in English as Convenience Store Woman) — takes just 150 pages of prose to eviscerate three of Japanese society’s most sacred cows: marriage, the workplace and the strained concept of the “normal” life.

  A few days after lunch I asked Chiaki Ishihara, one of Japan’s pre-eminent professors of literature, what he thought of her contribution. “She writes radically and with a sense of discomfort . . . It is so new that nobody can imitate it,” he told me.

  The central character of Konbini Ningen is a woman who strives desperately to attain a life that family, co-workers and society as a whole might consider ordinary. She enters a sexless, abusive marriage, leaves the convenience store but is eventually sucked back to the deafening imprisonment of Japanese retail. The character’s happiness in the face of this is the novel’s most triumphant ambush.

  “People think she is having a hard time, but she is so pure, she doesn’t care at all. She has no doubts. I wish I could live like her, and not think about others,” says Murata, who is herself single and lives in central Tokyo.

  Though she describes herself as a positive person, every line — of her four books and of her lunchtime conversation — is charged with the sort of burning satire and societal insight that I suggest would usually come from somewhere very negative. She agrees with the qualification of “usually”, but insists it doesn’t apply to her.

  In the past, I think the word ‘lonely’ had a negative meaning. Now the sense of the word is different. There are more people who actively like solitude

  On the face of it, Murata’s literary success seems many degrees more remarkable because she herself toiled at a convenience store for nearly two decades. For some months after winning the Akutagawa prize, she famously continued to work the tills at a convenience store in central Tokyo (Murata has carefully chosen not to name her former employer). She would normally, she notes drily after another sip of Prosecco, be in uniform at this time of day, mechanically greeting every customer with the same training-manual-approved words.

  Gruelling work — and yet, as she sees it, a job that put her in a privileged position, with the population of a thousand potential novels passing before her every day. She collected backstories suggested by the timing of customers’ arrival and the contents of their shopping baskets. “All the writing took place in my spare time,” she says, “all the observation took place as I worked.”

  Shortly before meeting Murata, I had dipped into the nearest Lawson convenience store as preparation. I have lived in Japan a fair while and considered myself intimately familiar with such places. Japan’s 55,000 convenience stores punctuate the country as near identikit shrines to retail, efficiency and anticipation of customer needs. I visit one perhaps twice a day: 7-Eleven, FamilyMart, Lawson, Mini Stop — they are brilliantly calculated to part the hungry, the thirsty, the lonely, the drunk and the disorganised from their money. Their staff, like Murata, are trained to become the embodiment of the (sometimes excessive) Japanese service ethos. The stores’ 24-hour reliability in a shrinking nation of fragmenting families has given them a uniquely important position in Japan’s sociology. It is a position that, by design, is easy to overlook but which Murata has now thrust into the public consciousness.

  So do the opening pages of Konbini Ningen — five paragraphs that catalogue the maddening, relentless cacophony of convenience store activity — ring true? Hideously so. Chiming, clacking, clinking, clattering, clamouring. It is suddenly hard to imagine spending another 18 seconds in Lawson, let alone the 18 years that gave Murata her bestseller. To the first-person narrator of Murata’s story, an unmarried convenience-store worker in her thirties portrayed as having developed a kind of joyous Stockholm syndrome towards the store after 20 years behind the till, this din “caresses the eardrums”.

  About 10 minutes later, seated with Murata at the absurdly petite tables of La Maison Kioi, she reveals that she, too, may have developed a sense of comfort from constant noise. She can only write in busy cafés. “I cannot concentrate in a quiet place like a library. Other, unrelated things creep into my mind.”

  As if on cue, a waiter looking like an extra from an Agatha Christie novel arrives noiselessly at the table and takes our order from Art Deco-style paper menus. Murata has other habits that mark her out from her fellow writers. Since childhood, she has adored Japan’s ubiquitous manga comics, devouring both those primarily written for girls and the ones with more violent, science fiction or fantasy themes discarded by her elder brother. She still reads them voraciously, and lists several current favourites. She then reaches into her bag and takes out a notebook.

  LA MAISON KIOI
  Chiyoda, Tokyo
  Appetisers
  Hot potato potage x 2
  Roast chicken and onion with bacon and tomato sauce
  Mackerel poêle
  Strawberry vacherin
  Panna cotta ¥7,000
  Glass Prosecco x 4 ¥3,600
  Total (inc service) ¥11,600 (£79)
  She hesitates before opening it to reveal pages and pages of sketches — the characters that will populate her next novel and whose faces she needs to draw in order to describe in prose. The cartoons all look charming enough but she quickly confirms my suspicions that these characters will ultimately feature in something dark. “Some of the themes are similar [to Convenience Store Woman] but there will be more about sexual love in there. I wanted to write a funny book, but the main character has a very hard time as a woman. It will be a very serious novel.”

  I ask the obvious question about how much of her is in the main character of Konbini Ningen — and the other women that populate her novels. In Of Bones, of Body Heat, of Whitening City, which won the Yukio Mishima Prize in 2013, she tracks the adolescence of a girl in a rapidly growing town exactly modelled on the suburb of Chiba prefecture where Murata grew up watching concrete encroach upon everything.

  “I don’t think I am someone with plenty of ideas,” she says, “and I don’t know why I come up with these weird ways of thinking but I want to use the form of the novel to conduct experiments. In a novel, I can test things that are not possible in the real world, in the hope that something new could emerge from the chemical reaction and teach me something I could never learn from normal life. This has driven me since I was a child and now I feel it all the more strongly. I want to write something unrealistic . . . because I think I can find real truth in it.”

  We talk more about what she sees in her customers. “In my novels, I describe a lot of lonely people,” says Murata, whose work at the convenience store found her constantly selling meals to customers who would be eating alone. “In the past, I think the word ‘lonely’ had a negative meaning. Now the sense of the word is different. It depends on the person, but there are more people who actively like solitude. Eating alone. Coming to convenience stores alone . . . many of the central roles in my novels are suffering from adapting to a changing world. They are cornered and hunted by the eyes of society and treated as strange. They would be perfectly happy living alone, but society hounds them for wanting that.”

  Recommended

  Leo Lewis
  Japan’s literature of loneliness depicts solitude as a noble state
  Small, delicious appetisers start to arrive, followed by two bowls of a memorably excellent hot potato potage, over which Murata lingers delightedly. This collection of items, when combined with water glasses, Prosecco and bread, has stretched the doll’s-house table to capacity. I can see that Murata’s appreciative soup-dawdling is about to cause chaos.

  The problem is that she has just launched into a captivating analysis of Japan’s sexless marriage phenomenon — a perennial focus of domestic media attention that is entwined with concerns about the nation’s gloomy demographic destiny, as the population now shrinks at the rate of 1,000 people per day. It is also the inspiration for her 2015 novel Dwindling World, which postulates a parallel Japanese dystopia in which all procreation is performed artificially and sex between husband and wife is treated with the same abhorrence as incest. Despite these constraints, there is an awful lot of sex in the book.

  “The couple in the novel get married through online matchmaking but promise to keep it a non-sexual relationship. The thing is, when the novel was published, a young Japanese couple told me they wanted to have a marriage just like this. I have lots of friends who married through online matchmaking and some of them told me that although they liked their husband, they didn’t want sex and only had it, unwillingly, on ovulation day,” she says.

  Her spoon remains dangerously untouched on a side plate, and there is no way of catching the waiter’s eye to have my bowl and appetiser plate removed. And in any case, I’m not going to deny Murata the last inch of soup.

  “People older than me read Dwindling World and say the place sounds dreadful. People in the same generation say it sounds utopian,” she adds.

  The main courses arrive and the logjam I dreaded becomes reality. Murata and I help stack and rearrange things on the table because the plates are the size of small bicycle wheels and the waiter has no hands spare. He can see Murata is still on the soup, but presses on with the delivery anyway, creating a queue of food in front of her and forcing me to decamp a small flower arrangement to a neighbouring table. Murata, whose convenience-store life has been one of logistical perfection, has the look of someone who is quite glad I am paying.

  It is all quickly forgiven. Murata savours a superb-looking roast chicken and onion dish, while my mackerel poêle absolves all the front-of-house disarray. We have another glass each of Prosecco and allow the conversation to drift through recent news and domestic political scandal until the arrival of her strawberry vacherin and my panna cotta.

  We alight on one odd story of the day — a situation in the city of Kyoto where women who rushed on to a sumo ring to help a man who collapsed with a brain haemorrhage were told by officials to leave the ring immediately as it was sacred and off-limits to women. Murata’s writing is not overtly feminist, but her laser-targeting of the Japanese female condition makes her one of the most powerful de facto critics of Japan’s contemporary gender imbalances.

  “If I were born again, I would choose to be a woman,” she says, gathering up her bag, checking its contents and twisting around to the beautiful view from the bay window behind her after nearly two hours with her back to it. There is a darting efficiency to the bag-gathering which has the slightest feel of shelf-stacking. I wonder if she has noticed me noticing that. “The shrapnel left in my mind after having a hard time is very important to me. I was able to discover so many things by being hurt. If I led another life, I would want to lead one in which I was hurt — without that I wouldn’t be able to be the same me.”

  Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo correspondent

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• American Booksellers Association - https://www.bookweb.org/news/indies-introduce-qa-sayaka-murata-and-ginny-tapley-takemori-104717

  An Indies Introduce Q&A With Sayaka Murata and Ginny Tapley Takemori
  Posted on Thursday, Jun 21, 2018
  Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly versionSend by emailSend by email
  Convenience Store Woman (Grove Press), written by Sayaka Murata and translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is a Summer/Fall 2018 Indies Introduce debut selection and a June Indie Next List pick.

  Convenience Store Woman cover image“This strange debut is an exploration of the psyche of a woman who feels removed from the emotional threads of humanity. Once she recognizes this ‘fault’ in herself, she embraces the freedom that being quiet, and therefore left alone, can bring her,” said Ely Watson of A Room of One’s Own Bookstore in Madison, Wisconsin. “In college, she gets a job at a newly opened convenience store and quickly becomes a creature of habit reliant on the redundancy of the store’s sterile environment. The novel picks up with her having worked there for 18 years. While not ready to make any changes, she is ready to have people stop prying into her life and happiness. This novel is a strong commentary on obsessive work culture, but I recommend it more for its calculated, removed prose and its unique narrative and characters.”

  Convenience Store Woman is the winner of the Akutagawa Prize, one of Japan’s most prestigious literary awards. Murata, who still works part-time in a convenience store, was named a Freeman’s “Future of New Writing” author and in 2016, Vogue Japan selected her as a Woman of the Year.

  Ginny Tapley Takemori, a British translator based in rural Japan, has translated more than a dozen works from Japanese. She was previously an editor at Kodansha International and a Spain-based foreign rights agent.

  Here, Watson talks with both the author and translator.

  Ely Watson: How do the convenience stores you’ve worked in compare to the one in the novel?
  Sayaka Murata
  Sayaka Murata (photo by Bungeishunju Ltd)
  Sayaka Murata: I have worked in six different stores, so it’s a little difficult to give a straightforward answer to your question. The store I was working in when writing the novel had a much more homely, peaceful atmosphere than the one in the novel. The convenience store I had in mind when describing the workers’ manual was much stricter than the one in the novel, and there were more people working there, including many sent from the head office. I drew on all my experiences in different stores to create a fictional version most suited to my character, who is an orderly, ideal employee.

  EW: I love the ending of Convenience Store Woman. Is it what you planned to write all along?

  Sayaka Murata: I always write without knowing how the story will end, so my heart was in my mouth while writing as I wondered what choice Keiko would make in the end. Therefore, I was delighted to hit upon this ending as I wrote. This sense of discovery is why I write, so I was very pleased with this experience.

  EW: A theme in Convenience Store Woman is the narrator’s balance between work and life. How did you manage your time while writing the novel?

  Sayaka Murata: I was actually working in a convenience store while writing this novel, so I exploited this to set my working rhythm. I got up at 2:00 a.m. and wrote until 6:00 a.m., then worked in the store from 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., after which I spent the afternoon writing in a café until 5:00 p.m. and went to bed at 9:00 p.m. Writing progressed very well with this rhythm.

  EW: The tone of Convenience Store Woman feels very removed, in a way that complements the narrator’s own disconnect from life. Was that something you had to be conscious of during the translation process?
  Ginny Tapley Takemori
  Ginny Tapley Takemori
  Ginny Tapley Takemori: Yes, it is an important element of the narrative voice, so I had to be careful to capture this aspect in translation. It’s what makes the very detailed observations of the store — the characters, social norms, and so forth — possible, and is also behind the humor, since the disconnect between Keiko’s thoughts and the expectations of the other characters (and the reader) is what makes it so funny. Take the scene near the beginning when some children find a dead bird in the park and Keiko shows it to her mother, who sympathetically suggests burying it, only for Keiko to say, “Let’s eat it!” which almost made me spit out my coffee the first time I read it. The author emphasizes this disconnect with a deadpan tone combined with unusual juxtapositions of words, which strike the reader as surprising but are very vividly understandable. There are many instances of this through the novel, and they had to come across every bit as surprising and vivid in English to retain the humor.

  EW: What were some of the challenges or more interesting aspects of translating Convenience Store Woman?

  Ginny Tapley Takemori: There were a number of aspects unique to Japanese culture and language that are tricky to deal with in translation. One was the convenience store itself. These stores are ubiquitous throughout Japan, and no matter what chain they belong to, they are all very similar in terms of layout, what they sell, the varied services they offer, the customer service, and so forth. They are instantly recognizable to any Japanese person, but they are also unique to Japan, so how do you bring them alive in the imagination of a readership that has never been in one?

  And then there are the formulaic phrases used by store workers that have no equivalent in English: I decided to keep Irasshaimasé, which means something like, “Welcome, please come in,” since it is the one phrase that anyone who has been to Japan will have heard in every store, restaurant, and pretty much any public place. For other phrases, I came up with something roughly equivalent in English, while aiming to retain the formulaic feeling. There were a number of other translation issues that I had to make similar decisions for, but that is really what literary translation is all about: how to render a story in another language while keeping it engaging for the reader and true to the original intent of the author.

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/loitering-in-7-11-with-convenience-store-woman-author-sayaka-murata/

  QUOTED: "I wanted to write about it someday, but I thought I would write about it when I got older and quit the convenience store. Before I wrote this novel, I was writing other stuff, but it wasn’t coming along that well. Then suddenly I realized I should just try writing about the convenience store, and I finished the novel within six months. It was so quick."
  "I usually write slowly. Perhaps I could finish it quickly because of the main character. She is a bit of a strange person and has a different personality than my previous characters, and I really wanted to write about her, so the words came out faster and faster."
  "I started off writing realistic novels, and then suddenly I started writing some that were strange, like one about people who eat dead people. With Convenience Store Woman, I wanted to write a novel barely within the boundaries of normal reality. So it’s like when I tried to return to realism after writing weird novels, I produced something that became not just a realistic novel but also a bit of a strange one."

  LOITERING IN 7-11 WITH CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN AUTHOR SAYAKA MURATA
  WHY CONVENIENCE STORES ARE MICROCOSMS OF SOCIETY

  June 20, 2018 By Fran Bigman Share:
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  An editor, two fans, and an author who just wrote a novel about convenience stores walk into a 7-11 on a windy day in March. The store is in Tokyo, not far from the Imperial Palace. The author is Sayaka Murata, who became one of the most famous women writers in Japan in 2016 when her novel, Convenience Store Woman, won the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. The novel, which became Murata’s English language debut when Grove Atlantic published it last week in a translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori, details the life of Keiko Furukura, a single woman in her mid-30s who has been working at a Tokyo convenience store, or “konbini,” for half of her life—just like Murata herself.

  Murata and I have plans to sit down in a café and discuss her writing, but first, I suggest we stop by a konbini. As we enter, Murata casts a practiced eye around the 7-11. She worked here until she became so well known as an author that she had to take a job at a different chain. Her frilly beige blouse and carefully tumbled curls set her apart from the 7-11 staff, with their sensible hair and red, orange, and green uniforms, but Murata hovers as if she might be called back into duty at any moment. Until just a few months ago, Murata still worked as a convenience-store cashier, a supposedly dead-end job she had done for almost 20 years while publishing 11 novels and story collections and two works of nonfiction.

  Murata made her name by writing about women in extreme situations: in her (yet-to-be-translated) 2014 novella Breeders and Killers, any woman who contributes 10 children to the regime gets to murder any one person she chooses. Convenience Store Woman, on the other hand, is set in a fixture of Japanese life so mundane it lies almost below notice, even as it quietly reflects social changes—more elderly customers, more foreign workers. In this novel, Murata channels her signature weirdness not into the world she creates, but into her misfit protagonist. Watching her sister soothe her baby nephew, Keiko eyes a cake knife and thinks: “If it were just a matter of making him quiet, it’d be easy enough.”

  Keiko only begins to feel like she has a place in society when she becomes a cashier and takes her place in this carefully scripted world. (The 7-11 cashiers say “Irrashaimase”—”Welcome!”—for every customer who enters.) When, after a marriage of convenience, her new husband pushes her to quit and find a “real” job, Keiko must decide between what she’s supposed to want—a career, a family—and her beloved store.

  “Murata hovers as if she might be called back into duty at any moment.”
  Even when Keiko shops at a rival konbini, she can’t stop herself from rearranging the shelves and giving pep talks to staff. Like her fictional stand-in, Murata is always a clerk, never a customer. On our visit, she is drawn to the beverage area, where she methodically rotates every bottle of oolong tea until they are all facing forward. Her editor, Nanami Torishima, says, “You’re a pro!” Murata then makes a beeline for the snack aisle, where she pulls a bag of consommé-flavored potato chips aside to reveal a spring-loaded plastic stand that pushes items to the front. “Products should be like a wall. That’s what I was taught when I was working here. To make it like a beautiful wall,” she intones.

  It is morning, the quiet before the rush. “Between noon and one, we can get about 1,000 customers!” chirps Murata. The store is between seasons: it’s early March, so cherry blossom products are just starting to dot the store with pink. But winter items still line the shelves. We buy some cherry blossom iced tea and a bag of Country Ma’am, Japan’s most popular chocolate-chip cookies, in a limited-edition flavor: cream of chicken. The packaging shows both a stack of cookies and a hearty bowl of creamy stew, replete with carrots, broccoli, and mushroom. Murata takes a cautious bite, then delivers her verdict. “This is one of those products that people might buy once, and then never again.”

  In the conversation that followed, Murata and I, along with another reader, Naoko Sato, who helped translate, spoke about the inspiration to be found in convenience stores, the divide between the real and the fantastic in Murata’s work—a divide arguably blurrier in Japanese fiction than in other national literatures—and finding sacred spaces in everyday life.

  ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

  Fran Bigman: When did you first have the idea of writing a novel about working at a convenience store?

  Sayaka Murata: I wanted to write about it someday, but I thought I would write about it when I got older and quit the convenience store. Before I wrote this novel, I was writing other stuff, but it wasn’t coming along that well. Then suddenly I realized I should just try writing about the convenience store, and I finished the novel within six months. It was so quick.

  FB: Is writing that quickly unusual for you?

  SM: I usually write slowly. Perhaps I could finish it quickly because of the main character. She is a bit of a strange person and has a different personality than my previous characters, and I really wanted to write about her, so the words came out faster and faster.

  Naoko Sato: How is this novel different from your earlier work?

  SM: I started off writing realistic novels, and then suddenly I started writing some that were strange, like one about people who eat dead people. With Convenience Store Woman, I wanted to write a novel barely within the boundaries of normal reality. So it’s like when I tried to return to realism after writing weird novels, I produced something that became not just a realistic novel but also a bit of a strange one.

  FB: Does writing realistic fiction feel different from writing dystopian and speculative fiction?

  SM: It feels the same to me, because when I was writing the strange dystopian stuff, I was trying to make it mentally very realistic. I tried to write about characters’ real feelings even in a strange setting, like when I was writing Dwindling World [Murata’s yet-to-be-translated 2015 novel set in a Brave-New-World-like society in which people no longer have sex to have kids].

  FB: Do you think there is room for the mystical in our technologized world? I am thinking of your short story “A Clean Marriage,” your first work in English translation to be published outside Japan—readers can find it in Granta’s Japan issue of 2014. The story is about reproduction through a machine, but that reproduction is conducted like a spiritual rite. Your protagonist in Convenience Store Woman sees these stores as modern-day sacred spaces.

  SM: Yes, I strongly think that there is a spiritual feeling in our society. Perhaps I feel it exists in purer forms. Since we are not told what to believe like people were in previous generations, experiences like childbirth are cut off from ritual more and more. But often, many people suddenly find something and start to strongly believe in it. Like in Japan, now there are many women who love to go to shrines. Such places are not where we go with our parents any more. We go to shrines because of our personal relationships to them.

  FB: The experience of work, especially low-paid work, is not a very common theme in Japanese literature, is it?

  SM: I think there are novels about work set in companies, but perhaps it is rare to write a novel about a woman working part-time at a familiar place like a convenience store. There are some novels about company employees, but a novel about a part-time job is perhaps unusual. Working part-time at a convenience store is often considered a job that anyone, even a student, can do, so having a main character doing it at the same age as me, like 35 or 36, is a bit strange.

  FB: Keiko, your protagonist, has never known how to follow the unwritten rules of society. When she starts working at the konbini and acts according to the manual, however, she feels more comfortable. Does the structure of the konbini mean freedom for Keiko, or does it constrain her?

  SM: I think Keiko was the most natural when she was as naked as nature intended, like in kindergarten, when she was able to say what she would like to say. But when she started working at a convenience store, she became so constrained by it, and those constraints turned her into a very human creature. When she wears the mask of a cashier, she can act like a human, as if she were a human. It’s not her original self, but it enables her to meet people who accept her and don’t treat her like a weirdo. She was freed from her isolation, so in that sense, it meant freedom for Keiko.

  “When she wears the mask of a cashier, she can act like a human, as if she were a human.”
  FB: At the beginning of the novel, Keiko thinks that working at a konbini makes her “a normal cog in society,” a “normal” human being like everyone else. At the end, however, she declares to her husband, “More than a person, I’m a convenience store worker.” Does her idea of “a normal human” change over the course of the story?

  SM: Yes. At first, she started working part-time at a convenience store because she wanted to be seen as normal. But as she got older, people started to think it was strange for her to keep doing that. So she starts to pretend that she was having a relationship with a man, and then people around her treated her like a normal person again. But then, it wasn’t what she wanted anymore. Loving a convenience store became more precious of a thing to believe in than being a normal person. The convenience store became as important to her as a church. So at first becoming a normal human was her longing and her goal, but in the end she came to want something different.

  NS: Why did you depict characters who have no sexual desire? Sexual passion, sometimes uncontrollable passion, is such a strong theme in your earlier works. Is Keiko’s desire for the konbini a substitute for her desire for people?

  SM: I didn’t want to write a novel that was fleshless or bloodless. I wanted to depict the body. And the body is about many things other than sex; I wanted to write about bodies that were physically tired or in pain. Though there are no sexual bodies in Convenience Store Woman, I wrote about bodies in motion and bodies at work, so I think my appetite for writing about flesh and blood was satisfied even though I didn’t write about sex.

  FB: Could you say that the konbini is a character in its own right?

  SM: First I thought about what kind of store it should be. The store is also an imagined one. I made up a store that I like, so I can say that it is one of my characters, sure.

  NS: You mean an ideal konbini?

  SM: Yes, it is an ideal store. They do morning meetings properly; there is a clerk who is good at making pop-up ads; it is moderately crowded in the morning and at lunchtime; the clerks are eager and try to make it a better place; and there is a person who takes on a leadership role. The stores I have worked at have always lacked one of these elements, so I tried to make a perfect store that combines all of them.

  FB: How is the konbini the same as the real world, and how is it different?

  SM: I feel the passage of time at convenience stores, like they are microcosms of society. When I was a college student, there were many foreign clerks from Korea or China, but now they are from various countries like Vietnam or Myanmar.

  NS: So convenience stores have to evolve as the real world evolves?

  SM: Yes, they have to change according to the real world. They have to think ahead and respond to particular needs, like selling vegetables to suit the needs of aging society.

  FB: Can you say the konbini is a utopia, dystopia, or both?

  SM: For me and also for Keiko it is both a utopia and dystopia. It is a utopia where you can make people happy, make friends, or feel less gendered. In the sense that it welcomes various people, it may have a utopian element. But it also has a very cruel side, like excluding clerks who cannot work very well, so it is also a place of cruel reality. You get yelled at by customers even if you don’t do anything wrong, but you have to respond to that with a smile, so sometimes it may seem a scary place. But I like even that aspect of convenience stores.

  FB: Why do you like the dark side of convenience stores?

  SM: At convenience stores you see not only the beautiful aspects of people but also hear the voices of the customers in their most natural state. I don’t get upset when I get a glimpse of the true inner frustration of my customers because it is also a part of them. I guess I just like human beings.

  “At convenience stores you see not only the beautiful aspects of people but also hear the voices of the customers in their most natural state.”
  FB: Are konbini places where people don’t have to put on an act?

  SM: I heard a woman say that a neighborhood convenience store is a place you can go to without putting on any makeup. This isn’t true of other places, like family restaurants. I think konbini is a place where we can go in our most natural state.

  FB: Do you develop a relationship with regular customers at the convenience store you work at?

  SM: Regular customers often speak to me. One of the customers who buys the same coffee every day recently asked me, “How have you been?” because I was absent from work for a while because of receiving the Akutagawa Prize. When I was a college student, I often saw female clerks receiving love letters. It happens all the time at konbini. It’s happened to me.

  FB: Is there competition among co-workers at the convenience stores you’ve worked at?

  SM: We are more like friends. The best clerk wears a badge, but not many clerks aspire to be the best.

  FB: Even though the company wants a competition, maybe the workers resist?

  SM: Perhaps they want their employees to win a badge or compete to sell the most gift-with-purchase items for summer, but we are not so motivated by that system.

  FB: Do you see Convenience Store Woman as a critique of Japanese society? Is it a critique of the globalized super-capitalist world of work we all live in?

  SM: I don’t write novels to criticize, so I think it is a description. As I keep describing, the main character is tormented by the world, so it may seem critical. But as an author, I try to describe very precisely.

QUOTED: "Murata skillfully navigates the line between the book's wry and weighty concerns."
"a unique and unexpectedly revealing English language debut."

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Print Marked Items
Murata, Sayaka: CONVENIENCE
STORE WOMAN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Murata, Sayaka CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN Grove (Adult Fiction) $22.00 6, 12 ISBN: 978-0-
8021-2825-6
A sly take on modern work culture and social conformism, told through one woman's 18-year tenure as a
convenience store employee.
Keiko Furukura, a 36-year-old resident of Tokyo, is so finely attuned to the daily rhythms of Hiiromachi
Station Smile Mart--where she's worked since age 18--that she's nearly become one with the store. From the
nails she fastidiously trims to better work the cash register to her zeal in greeting customers with store
manual-approved phrases to her preternatural awareness of its subtle signals--the clink of jangling coins, the
rattle of a plastic water bottle--the store has both formed her and provided a purpose. And for someone
who's never fully grasped the rules governing social interactions, she finds a ready-made set of behaviors
and speech patterns by copying her fellow employees. But when her younger sister has a baby, questions
surrounding her atypical lifestyle intensify. Why hasn't she married and had children or pursued a more
high-flying career? Keiko recognizes society expects her to choose one or the other, though she's not quite
sure why. When Shiraha--a "dead-ender" in his mid-30s who decries the rigid gender rules structuring
society--begins working at the store, Keiko must decide how much she's willing to give up to please others
and adhere to entrenched expectations. Murata provides deceptively sharp commentary on the narrow social
slots people--particularly women--are expected to occupy and how those who deviate can inspire
bafflement, fear, or anger in others. Indeed, it's often more interesting to observe surrounding characters'
reactions to Keiko than her own, sometimes leaving the protagonist as a kind of prop. Still, Murata
skillfully navigates the line between the book's wry and weighty concerns and ensures readers will never
conceive of the "pristine aquarium" of a convenience store in quite the same way.
A unique and unexpectedly revealing English language debut.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Murata, Sayaka: CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700545/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=988adf1d.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700545

QUOTED: "This is a moving, funny, and unsettling story about how to be a 'functioning adult' in today's world."

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Convenience Store Woman
Publishers Weekly.
265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p52.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata,trans. from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Grove, $22 (176p) ISBN 978-0-8021-
2825-6
Murata's slim and stunning Akutagawa Prizewinning novel follows 36-year-old Keiko Furukura, who has
been working at the same convenience store for the last 18 years, outlasting eight managers and countless
customers and coworkers. Keiko, who has a history of strange impulses--wanting to grill and eat a dead
bird, pulling down a hysterical teacher's pants to get her to be quiet--applied to work at the Hiiromachi
Station Smile Mart on a whim. Where someone else might find the expected behavior for convenience store
workers arbitrary and strict, Keiko thrives under such clear direction, finally finding a way to be normal. In
fact, she thinks of herself as two Keikos: her real self, who has existed since she was born, and
"convenience-store-worker-me." But normalcy is not static, as Keiko discovers. The older she gets, and the
further she drifts from milestones like having a "real" job, marrying, and having children, the more her
friends and family push her towards change. She strikes a sham marriage deal with a lazy and shifty excoworker,
which, though it finally makes her "normal" in the eyes of others, throws her entire life and
psyche into turmoil. Murata's smart and sly novel, her English-language debut, is a critique of the
expectations and restrictions placed on single women in their 30s. This is a moving, funny, and unsettling
story about how to be a "functioning adult" in today's world. Agent: Kohei Hattori, the English Agency.
(June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Convenience Store Woman." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 52. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099935/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7cfb5723.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099935

QUOTED: "a dazzling English-language debut ... rich in scathingly entertaining observations on identity, perspective, and the suffocating hypocrisy of 'normal' society."

7/15/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1531675104147 3/3
Convenience Store Woman
Terry Hong
Booklist.
114.17 (May 1, 2018): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Convenience Store Woman.
By Sayaka Murata. Tr. by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
June 2018. 176p. Grove, $22 (9780802128256).
In nursery school, Keiko pragmatically suggested that the dead bird in the park could become a grilled treat
for her father. In primary school, she ended a forbidden brawl by hitting a boy on the head with a spade. She
stopped a teacher's hysterics by yanking down her skirt and knickers. Despite having "a normal family,"
Keiko "was a rather strange child" who learned quiet detachment to avoid further trouble. At 18, she is
"reborn as a convenience store worker" at a newly opened Smile Mart. Donning a uniform, learning the
manual, and mimicking her coworkers enable Keiko to become "a normal cog in society." Eighteen years
later, she remains a top-performing employee, comfortably aware that being a part-time convenience worker
"is the only way [she] can be a normal person." At 36, however, her being a single woman in a dead-end job
elicits worry and judgment from family and acquaintances. To deflect unwanted meddling, Keiko "adopts"
an arrogant wastrel with both comical and bittersweet results. The prestigious Akutagawa Prize-winning
Murata, herself a part-time "convenience store woman," makes a dazzling English-language debut in a crisp
translation by Takemori, rich in scathingly entertaining observations on identity, perspective, and the
suffocating hypocrisy of "normal" society. --Terry Hong
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hong, Terry. "Convenience Store Woman." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 60. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647364/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=783fe8f2.
Accessed 15 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A539647364

"Murata, Sayaka: CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700545/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. "Convenience Store Woman." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 52. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099935/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018. Hong, Terry. "Convenience Store Woman." Booklist, 1 May 2018, p. 60. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A539647364/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 15 July 2018.

• New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/sayaka-murata-eerie-convenience-store-woman-is-a-love-story-between-a-misfit-and-a-store
  Word count: 1252

  Sayaka Murata’s Eerie “Convenience Store Woman” Is a Love Story Between a Misfit and a Store
  By Katy WaldmanJune 21, 2018

  The author Sayaka Murata, in Tokyo, last month. In “Convenience Store Woman,” her first novel to be translated into English, a strange and alienating job suits a strange and alienated person.Photograph by Kentaro Takahashi / The New York Times / Redux
  In our dark late-capitalist hypnosis, convenience might carry a whiff of moral virtue. It suggests thrift, accommodation, helpfulness. Women—the “nice lady” behind the counter, the diligent wife—provide convenience. So do Japan’s convenience stores, which resemble Walmarts or Rite Aids, except that customers can also buy clothes and pay their gas and electric bills; in theory, these stores are staffed by pliable employees, sweetly attuned to consumer needs. You may not even notice the convenience-store worker until she is in front of you, enthusiastically bagging your purchases.

  “Convenience Store Woman,” a novel by the best-selling Japanese author Sayaka Murata, is the first of her ten novels to be translated into English. The book centers on a thirty-six-year-old woman named Keiko Furukura, an oddball who is endlessly puzzled by human behavior. She describes the condescension she experiences at the hands of men in her social circle as “fascinating.” She mimics her co-workers’ vocal inflections in order to fit in. She is blithely indifferent to sex or dating, and uninterested in leaving her dead-end job at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, a “transparent glass box” in a pristine and anonymous business district. (The author herself worked at a convenience store for nearly eighteen years.) For the most part, her manner is that of a friendly alien scientist, but, at times, she swerves toward the psychopathic. Keiko occasionally endorses utilitarian violence: as a girl, she broke up a schoolyard fight by hitting one of her classmates over the head with a spade, and could not understand why her teachers were angry—after all, they’d said they wished the fight to end. And, when her sister Mami despairs that her baby won’t stop crying, Keiko idly marvels that no one has thought to stab it with a small knife. But Keiko finds purpose and acceptance at the Smile Mart, where she receives a uniform and a manual that outlines exactly how she is supposed to conduct herself, down to the scripted phrases approved for customer interactions. “This is the only way I can be a normal person,” Keiko realizes. The novel borrows from Gothic romance, in its pairing of the human and the alluringly, dangerously not. It is a love story, in other words, about a misfit and a store.

  Or is horror the more accurate genre? Keiko’s ability to anticipate shoppers’ desires—and to efface herself—seems at once uncanny and depraved, implying a lack of soul. She believes that she can “hear the store’s voice telling what it wanted, how it wanted to be. I understood it perfectly.” What might read as “competence porn,” the rare kind that focusses on menial, hourly labor, here feels more like a portrait of candy-colored subservience, or even self-immolation. In Keiko’s case, a strange and alienating job suits a strange and alienated person. “I am one of those cogs, going round and round,” she chirps. “I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.”

  One eerie achievement of “Convenience Store Woman” is that the reader is never entirely sure how to think about Keiko. Is she monstrous? Brave and eccentric? For all the creepiness of her cheerful obedience to the manual, she is, at least, choosing a different kind of conformity than the rest of society, which insists that she marry and pursue a conventional career path. Writing in the Times, Motoko Rich suggested that Keiko embodies a demographic anxiety in Japan, which has been experiencing falling marriage rates and low birth rates for years. Articles have fretted over celibacy syndrome: an aversion, among Japanese young people, to sex and romance. The past decade has also seen a rise in hikikomori, men who withdraw from the public sphere and retreat into their homes, where they play video games, sleep, or stare at the ceiling. Keiko’s self-renunciations reveal the book to be a kind of grim post-capitalist reverie: she is an anti-Bartleby, abandoning any shred of identity outside of her work.

  Keiko’s counterpart in the novel is a man named Shiraha, an unreformed misogynist who gets fired from the Smile Mart because he refuses to carry out any of his tasks. Pressured by his own friends and family to find a girlfriend, Shiraha accepts Keiko’s offer to move in with her. He sleeps in the bathtub and lazes about. Keiko regards him as a pet and refers to his meals as “feeding time.” Shiraha is prone to gaseous lectures about the Stone Age, the legacy of which remains intact, he argues: “Strong men who bring home a good catch have women flocking around them, and they marry the prettiest girls in the village. Men who don’t join in the hunt, or who are too weak to be of any use even if they try, are despised.” Like Keiko, Shiraha yearns to escape the homogenizing pressures of Japanese society; but if her solution is to lose herself in service, his is to succumb to uselessness, entitlement, and solipsism. When he complains, about his convenience-store gig, that “this sort of work isn’t suited to men,” Keiko responds, “Shiraha, we’re in the twenty-first century! Here in the convenience store we’re not men and women. We’re all store workers.”

  Murata’s flattened prose has a bodega-after-11-p.m. quality: it feels bathed in garish, fluorescent light. If Keiko comes off as frightening and robotic, so does the entire universe in which her story unfurls. The dialogue is artificial, piped in from a winking facsimile of the real world, in which characters explicitly state what readers are meant to draw from the scenes they are reading, and new plot developments are narrated in real time: “ ‘Well done, Miss Furukura,’ the manager told me. ‘That was perfect! You kept your calm, even though it was your first time on the till. Good job, keep it up. Oh look, the next customer!’ ”

  But, for all the disturbance and oddity in “Convenience Store Woman,” the book dares the reader to interpret it as a happy story about a woman who has managed to craft her own “good life.” “I could think of the me in the (store) window as a being with meaning,” Keiko reflects, cocking an ear to the trancelike “music reverberating on the other side of the glass.” Murata does not judge her protagonist’s path to fulfillment, nor does she spend too much time contemplating what it might mean to find transcendence in such work. Instead, she admires Keiko’s quirk and lively boldness. To second-guess this woman would be to fall into her sister’s trap: Mami is “far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.” It may make readers anxious, but the book itself is tranquil—dreamy, even—rooting for its employee-store romance from the bottom of its synthetic heart.

  Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

• Medium
  https://medium.com/@zachary_houle/a-review-of-sayaka-muratas-convenience-store-woman-44aa76ee4910
  Word count: 1074

  A Review of Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman”
  A Short But Captivating Novel

  “Convenience Store Woman” Book Cover
  Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman was a huge hit in Japan, selling some 660,000 copies in the country alone. Now it arrives on western shores in an English translation, and this short, charming and delightful novel that has a simple story to tell should make it Japan’s answer to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The story is about a convenience store worker named Keiko Furukura who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome-like symptoms. She’s 36 years old and the past half of her life has been dominated by the store. She is a perfect worker, always polite and enthusiastic about her role. The problem is Japanese society puts the convenience store worker at near the bottom rung of the corporate ladder, and her family and friends worry about her — worry about her not finding a “normal” job or falling in love with a man she can marry. About halfway through the book, she meets a fellow former convenience store worker who is male and is very embittered about his lot in life. The two decide to live together and it becomes something of a relationship of convenience — no pun intended. Keiko’s family and friends are relived that’s she’s found a man, while the now unemployed young man leeches off a woman who has no higher calling in life. Will Keiko find true happiness with the man, if not a greater sense of purpose?

  That’s basically it in a nutshell, and I’m afraid to say more about an easily spoiled book. This is simple storytelling at its finest. You can easily read the entire book, front to back, in one sitting. I suspect that it is popular in Japan because of its warmth and humour, and because it speaks to the direction of Japanese society, and that outsiders really have little place within it. It’ll be seen whether American and Canadian audiences take to the book in the same way, considering the United States has an outsider in a President and, in Ontario, where I live, one can easily aspire to be Premier of the province simply by being an alleged drug trafficker. Still, the book raises some very salient points about Japanese society and whether one can truly fit in if you’re a little Sheldon Cooper-ish. It is a book about the place of the mentally ill, and what constitutes as normality.

  Much of the book’s funny bit come from the struggle of Keiko to fit in. She parrots the behaviours and fashion styles of her coworkers. She does things literally by the book. She knows how to run a convenience store and nothing else. She doesn’t know how to relate to men, so her relationship is something of a surrogate one. However, by book’s end, and without wanting to give anything big away, Keiko learns where her place is, and it doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks. That form of individualism must be appealing to the Japanese to take such a liking to this book — after all, Japan strikes me as a country of drone-like people who tirelessly try to climb the corporate ladder, so they can make more money, get married and raise a family. Anything outside of those bounds is, well, bound to be strange and alien. Convenience Store Women asks the question of whether one can be truly an individual in a society, and a mentally ill one at that in some ways, that favours people being chirpy, tireless drones who will do anything that is asked of them.

  The English translation retains the flavour of the Japanese, as there are still foreign words left inserted, but it is a sprite-y read and easy to understand. The sentences are short and simple, and the plot offers very little in the way of complications. I see this book working very well as a movie, if some things can be padded out to a feature film running length. It has an easygoing nature, and paints its heroine as, yes, an individual with obviously a touch of autism, but she’s likable. I hope that the novel can break stigmas for those who are impaired with Keiko’s otherwise unnamed ailment and show the world that the mentally ill can hold down jobs and forge friendships like any other person.

  Aside from all of that, is Convenience Store Woman a literary read? Well, it’s not pretentious if that’s what you mean by literary. This is simply a well-told short tale that feels more like a novella (it clocks in at 176 pages) and there’s not a lot of meat to it. I’m trying desperately to not merely pad out a review to some 1,000 words as I usually do because there’s not a whole lot that you can say about this book without ruining the sweet ending. Still, it is a very “populist” read in a sense that shows even the smallest of worker drones have their place in the world and can yield a lot of power in simply following the rules and being polite and mannered to make someone else’s day feel a whole lot brighter. I really was swept away by this tale and found it utterly mesmerizing. If anything, Murata joins the ranks of fellow Japanese writer Haruki Murakami even though they don’t really share the same style and she writes more from the feminine perspective. In any event, Convenience Store Woman is a thoroughly captivating read and you’ll be sad that its so short. There’s a lot more that could be said about the world that Keiko inhabits, and the book — given its brevity — is the sort of one that leaves you wanting more. There’s a lot of sweetness and magic here. Those who love contemporary Japanese literature will find lots to savour in these brief pages. I’m drooling even just thinking about this book.

  Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman will be published by Grove Press on June 12, 2018.

  Of course, if you like what you see, please recommend this piece (click on the clapping hands icon below) and share it with your followers.

• Literary Hub
  https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-sayaka-murata/
  Word count: 742

  In Praise of Sayaka Murata
  JOHN FREEMAN ON A YOUNG JAPANESE WRITER WE SHOULD ALL BE READING

  Share:
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  By John Freeman

  I think the riskiest kind of novel is the one that tries to rescue us from mundane existence—by taking a closer look at mundane existence. If the tone falls flat, than the action is simply a series of discrete encounters, recreated on the page. In the best of these novels—from the work of Haruki Murakami to Albert Camus—the writer finds a tiny gap between the simple nature of things, and how they appear to us.

  It is this second kind of novel that Sayaka Murata has written with Convenience Store Woman, winner of the Akutagawa Award in Japan and has sold some 600,000 copies. I met Murata-san in Tokyo a year or two ago at a festival. Granta, the magazine I used to edit, was publishing a story of hers in their Japan issue. I had been seeing Murata-san’s work for some years before I left my job and was thrilled by its power and strangeness.

  I had always hesitated to publish her short stories, because there was a fine difference between oddness for its own sake, and oddity that points broadly to a bigger thematic space. Finally Yuka Igarashi at Granta came across that story, a hilarious and grim tale that imagined a future in which couples who do not make love—increasingly common among Japan’s younger generation, depending on which articles you read—can go to a service that enables them to have children.

  Of course such services exist today, but in Murata-san’s story all the tension between her characters’ condition and their solution was drawn out so perfectly across 20 pages it was as if the invention itself was beside the point: the thrust of the story had to do with the ways in which couples’ box themselves into improbable solutions through problems of perception. A similar theme undergirds Murata-san’s short novel, Convenience Store Woman, which tells a swift, quietly devastating story about a woman who spends nearly 20 years behind the register.

  ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

  What is so miraculous about this novel is that whereas most people would find tragedy in that last sentence, Murata-san has found a great deal of joy and pleasure. She has created a character who thrives where barcodes exist, where social norms can be flouted, where tentative connections to the world around you are, in fact, a plus.

  I have read a great deal of Japanese fiction in the past five years as editor of Freeman’s, as a book critic and president of the National Book Critics Circle, and as the editor who began commissioning the Japan issue of Granta. The superflat style that reigns in Japan so rarely reaches behind the scrim of its poise to give you a clue as to why characters do what they do, why they are—so often—numb.

  In this context, it is easy to say that Murata-san’s novel is a major breakthrough. Convenience Store Woman is not an explosion of candor, but it manages to both be cool to the touch and have depths of warmth in presenting to us a heroine who feels at a remove from the world around her. This is a fine high wire act to walk. One of the finest I have seen in a long time from so young a writer. Our English language world of letters would be so much the poorer if we did not have it available to readers here.

  ARTICLE CONTINUES AFTER ADVERTISEMENT

  The preceding is from the new Freeman’s channel at Literary Hub, which will feature excerpts from the print editions of Freeman’s, along with supplementary writing from contributors past, present and future. The new issue of Freeman’s, a special edition featuring 29 of the best emerging writers from around the world, is available now.

  John Freeman
  John Freeman

  John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual published by Grove, and author of How to Read a Novelistand Maps, a collection of poems.

• Electric Lit
  https://electricliterature.com/how-a-japanese-novella-about-a-convenience-store-worker-became-an-international-bestseller-17fcc3d806f
  Word count: 2145

  How a Japanese Novella about a Convenience Store Worker Became an International Bestseller
  Talking to the translator of Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman” about a novel that defies expectations worldwide

  Photo by Daniel Tseng on Unsplash

  I f you’ve been looking in many bookstore windows recently, you may have seen a tiny hardcover whose sky-blue and cherry-blossom pink jacket features a rice ball made to look like a woman’s head on a plate. I recommend picking it up. Convenience Store Woman is Sayaka Murata’s eight novel, but the first to ever be translated into English. Following a hugely successful Japanese publication — Murata won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize and over 600,000 copies sold in two years — the novel went on to sell in seventeen languages in translation before finally coming out in the U.S. and U.K. last month.

  Purchase the novel
  How does a literary novel become an international sensation? Murata’s English translator Ginny Tapley Takemori sees the novel’s success as due, in part, to its “broad appeal”; it is written in everyday, approachable language, so that it might attract fans of manga and anime as well as the literary types, whereas “normally there isn’t much crossover.” And there’s also the fact of the book being knock-you-off-your feet good, sucking you wholesale into the strange brain of its narrator, Keiko Furukura, and carrying you quickly through a smartly constructed plot. But most of all, the book is “just so unexpected.” It’s shocking in Japan, but perhaps even more so to a foreign readership, defying all our stereotypes of Japanese literature and Japanese women.
  Keiko is single at 36, and happy. She is proud of her extreme proficiency at a job typically staffed part-time by students. The store gives Keiko comfort and purpose, but it goes much further than that. At times it feels like a religious temple, glowing into the night; at others the store is an extension of Keiko’s self, its needs vibrating in her very cells. In one of many exquisite passages, she reflects:
  When I can’t sleep, I think about the transparent glass box that is still stirring with life even in the darkness of the night. That pristine aquarium is still operating like clockwork…. When morning comes, once again I’m a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person.
  A single female narrator, uninterested in sex, completely focused on work that doesn’t constitute a “career,” is a departure from the norm in Japanese literature as much as it is in English. “I don’t think there’s been anyone, at least that I’ve come across, quite like Keiko,” Takemori tells me, “especially in not even missing having a relationship!” Sexuality as a woman is central to Murata’s work, and her novels often feature a lot of sex — though it isn’t necessarily pleasant. Murata is interested in the bizarre pressures society puts onto women. In her newest novel, out this summer in Japan, she is quite explicit: “She sees society as this big baby factory. When you become an adult you become part of this factory to create more humans.”
  Takemori’s pet peeve is English editions of Japanese novels featuring elegant, frail-looking Japanese women on their covers. “The image of Japanese women in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere is usually quite dutiful, sexy, a bit downtrodden by men. It’s a fantasy.” So here is Keiko: “she’s not attractive, she’s not interested in sex at all — it’s just not on her radar — and she is working to live, in a very unglamorous job. It gives a different view of Japan all together.”
  How a 1960s Japanese Novel Turned an Atheist Into a Believer (Sort Of)

  I still don't believe in God, but after reading Shusaku Endo's novel 'Silence,' I do believe in God's absence
  electricliterature.com
  The beating heart of the short, haunting novel is the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart. We enter Keiko’s world in the din of the morning rush: door chimes, advertisements ringing over the intercom, store workers yelling their greetings to customers, scanners beeping, items rustling, high heels clicking. “A convenience store,” we find, “is a world of sound.”
  In convenience stores, restaurants, and shops of all kinds in Japan, store workers call out stock phrases, practiced in unison before work each morning. The greetings are so particular and so ubiquitous that no English correlate quite fits. Takemori decided to leave “irasshaimasé” — literally “welcome” — untranslated: “I decided, well, readers aren’t stupid. They can cope with one Japanese word.” She crafted other phrases to sound as formulaic as possible: “Certainly. Right away, sir!” “Thank you for your custom!” You don’t think when you say these phrases, she tells me; you just say them.
  Literary translation is both a creative endeavor and a long and impossible series of problems needing solutions. Even if the language itself were your only concern, it isn’t possible to take something directly from one language into another, word for word, particularly between languages that function as differently as English and Japanese. But it’s not just the words that need to be carried over the gap. As Takemori puts it, a translator must recreate the novel’s “effect” — its atmosphere, voice, and impact on a reader.
  This is where academic and literary translators divide. Academics tend to prioritize a more exact translation for scholarly purposes, whereas freelance translators like Takemori are more willing to play with the original in order to capture its impact on the reader. “By trying to be too faithful to the original,” Takemori believes, “you can actually betray it.” Convenience Store Woman is often shockingly funny. “There are parts that almost had me spitting out my coffee when I first read it, they’re so funny.” An exact translation — or as close to exact as possible — would be difficult and bewildering to foreign readers, necessarily riddled with footnotes. The humor would fall flat. The utter strangeness, distance, and charm of Keiko’s voice would be lost.
  An exact translation — or as close to exact as possible — would be difficult and bewildering to foreign readers, necessarily riddled with footnotes.
  So you get creative. You make a way in English for a voice that’s doing something that hasn’t been done before, even in Japanese. It’s a daunting task. “But that’s what I love about it,” Takemori says. I ask her how she did it, how she captured both the endearing and the creepy in the novel’s atmosphere. Like any art form, of course, there isn’t an easy answer. “I just had to keep plugging away at something, you know, like this is a bit flat, it’s not shocking enough… When you finally do get it right, you know you’ve got it, and that’s a really nice feeling.”
  Reading Convenience Store Woman feels like being beamed down onto foreign planet, which turns out to be your own. Takemori confirms that the experience is the same in the original. “Sayaka Murata is shocking. Through this very strange character’s eyes, you see society in a different light. You know, what people think is normal is really not normal at all.” Keiko often sounds like a researcher, taking notes on her species:
  My speech is especially infected by everyone around me and is currently a mix of that of Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara. I think the same goes for most people. When some of Sugawara’s band members came into the store recently they all dressed and spoke just like her…. Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human, I think.
  The morning I finished reading Convenience Store Woman, I walked around for hours in a haze, my mind eerily caught within Keiko’s voice. I took some pride in my productivity that morning, tapping away at emails like a small cog in the machine. I felt an inch apart from the racing life of the city in front of me, as if behind a pane of glass. I asked Takemori if she felt something similar while living immersed in Keiko’s voice, in the process of translating. “Certainly I started looking at things in a different way, seeing little details that I hadn’t noticed about Japanese society. I’d always just taken convenience stores for granted. I hadn’t even thought about them.”
  Reading Convenience Store Woman feels like being beamed down onto foreign planet, which turns out to be your own.
  But Takemori didn’t find herself as disoriented as I did. She reflects that as a foreigner in Japan, she already lives with “a certain distanced perspective.” She will never see things the way she might have if she’d grown up in Japan like everyone around her. I remark that this might have primed her to be Keiko’s medium—an outsider translating an outsider—and she agrees. Though, laughing, she adds: “I don’t think I’m quite as much of an outsider as Keiko.”

  Sayaka Murata, the author, could easily be seen as an outsider herself. She writes from 2 a.m. until 8 when, until recently, she would go to work at a convenience store, which she found to be a useful anchor in her day before returning home to keep writing. In an interview with the New York Times, Murata credits the store as an antidote to her former shyness: “I was instructed to raise my voice and talking in a loud friendly voice, so I became that kind of active and lively person in that circumstance.” These days, she is close with a number of other prize-winning, radical young women writers, including Risa Wataya and Kanako Nishi. It’s worth mentioning them here because, though they’re celebrated in Japan, they aren’t well known elsewhere. Which brings us to the great gap in the English-speaking world’s knowledge of Japanese literature — and why it took so much and so long for one of Sayaka Murata’s novels to make it into English.
  The Tale of Genji, widely considered the world’s first novel, was written by a noblewoman and lady-in-waiting, Murasaki Shikibu, early in the 11th century. Ever since, women have had a place in Japanese literature, which quite plainly has not been the case in English. The major prizes, the Naoki and the Akutagawa, are consistently awarded to women and men in equal numbers. Meiji-era short story writer Ichiyo Higuchi became the third woman to be featured on a yen note in 2004. Today, Japan is experiencing a great boom in extremely popular young women writers. Takemori shows me a 550-page volume of writing by women, published recently by the literary magazine Waseda Bungaku, which sold out in a week.
  But most of those young women writers aren’t making it to America. Much, much less literature gets translated into English than the reverse, to begin with. But of the books that do make it into English, from all languages, the vast majority are written by men. This makes some sense in the history of Japan, Takemori explains: Japanese literature really began making it into English during the American occupation after World War II, thanks to translators like Donald Keene. The Americans in Japan during the occupation were in the military, Takemori points out, “and mostly guys!” The trend those guys began has proven doggedly persistent. Today, outside of Japan, we know of Haruki Murakami, Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki — but besides Banana Yoshimoto, we might struggle to come up with another female author’s name.
  Love After the Sex Party Circuit

  “A Strange Tale From Down by the River,” by Banana Yoshimoto, recommended by the Storyological Podcast
  electricliterature.com
  This extreme disservice to the talent and vision of Japanese women writers is something Takemori is on the campaign to change. Last November, inspired by a worldwide movement among translators to create more visibility for women writers, she and fellow translators Allison Markin Powell and Lucy North held a translation conference in Tokyo: “We were deliberately provocative in calling it Strong Women, Soft Power.” It was a smashing success, with tickets sold out in advance. “It got a lot of people talking. I think we’ll be seeing more Japanese women in translation from now on, actually.”
  I can only hope that this is true. In the meantime, may we buy out bookstores’ stocks of Convenience Store Woman, and yell Sayaka Murata’s name from the rooftops.

• National Public Radio
  https://www.npr.org/2018/06/20/621790178/2-first-rate-novels-celebrate-the-humor-and-heroism-of-unconventional-women
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  2 First-Rate Novels Celebrate The Humor And Heroism Of Unconventional Women

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  June 20, 20181:54 PM ET
  Heard on Fresh Air
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  JOHN POWERS
  Fresh Air
  Authors Dorthe Nors and Sayaka Murata use bracing good humor to subvert readers' expectations about single women in their new novels, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal and Convenience Store Woman.

  Mirror, Shoulder, Signal
  by Dorthe Nors and Misha Hoekstra

  Paperback, 188 pages purchase

  Convenience Store Woman
  by Sayaka Murata and Ginny Tapley Takemori

  Hardcover, 163 pages purchase

  Read an excerpt of Convenience Store Woman
  DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

  This is FRESH AIR. Our critic at large John Powers always keeps an eye out for new translations of foreign fiction. He's recently come across two internationally acclaimed novels - "Mirror, Shoulder, Signal" by the Danish novelist Dorthe Nors and "Convenience Store Woman" by the Japanese writer Sayaka Murata. He says they aren't only a pleasure to read, but both offer a perceptive look at the lives of women who break the cultural mold.

  JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: Modern fiction is teeming with characters who don't fit comfortably into the world they inhabit. I grew up enthralled by self-absorbed male outsiders like Holden Caulfield in the beats. But over the years, I've come to find greater depth and variation in stories about women the world routinely ignores, be it the wry spinsters and Barbara Pym's fiction or the poor, defiantly unconventional Sula who gives her name to Toni Morrison's great early novel. You can add to this list the heroines of two first-rate new novels, one from Denmark, the other from Japan, by literary stars in their home countries. Although different in style, both books are brief and often hilarious. And because they're tinted with autobiography, both are exceedingly smart about single women past the first flush of youth.

  "Mirror, Shoulder, Signal" is the latest novel by the Danish writer Dorthe Nors, who possesses a rare gift. She treats heavy, dark matters with a very light touch. Her heroine is Sonja, who grew up in the Jutland boondocks but moved to Copenhagen in search of a grander life. Now in her 40s, she's alone. Her boyfriend has dumped her. She suffers from vertigo. And she spends her life translating gory crime novels that everyone but her seems to love.

  Fearing that she's becoming a solitary weirdo, she decides to enroll in a local driving school, where - metaphor alert - she has trouble shifting gears for herself. At first, Sonja's story seems like a nifty social comedy. She has amusing scenes with her angry, foul-mouthed female driving teacher, who spouts the lane-changing mantra, mirror, shoulder, signal, and with the new-age massage therapist that she visits after being stressed out by those behind-the-wheel lessons.

  But the novel soon deepens, carrying us into Sonja's more stinging emotions. These involve her love of the Jutland countryside and her painful estrangement from her married sister. All the while, Sonja casts a skeptical eye on orderly, prosperous Copenhagen, where, lurking beneath its comforts, one keeps finding dissatisfaction. Unable to shift, the fretful Sonja finds herself caught in a no woman's land, eager to escape loneliness, yet incapable of reaching the people she yearns to reach.

  So what, if anything, should she do? That's the question the novel proposes. And one suspects that Nors, a single woman born in Jutland who once translated crime novels, knows just how thorny any answer must be.

  A similar form of alienation gets deliciously perverse treatment in "Convenience Store Woman," a massive bestseller that won its author, Sayaka Murata, Japan's biggest literary prize. Its narrator, Keiko, has been written off as a misfit ever since, as a little girl, she found a dead bird in the park and suggested that the family grill it as yakitori. She yearns to know the secret of acting just like everyone else. And at 18, she discovers it when she's mysteriously drawn to a soon-to-open convenience store called the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, and she applies for a job.

  In Japan, convenience stores are tiny wonderlands and almost the quintessence of the mainstream, equal parts 7-Eleven, McDonald's and Starbucks. Working at Smile Mart, Keiko learns the official rules and rituals of being a good convenience store woman. What to do and how to talk is spelled out for you. She becomes a model employee who mimics the style of her favorite co-workers, and so she works there happily for 18 years. Then the store hires a male employee who's an even bigger misfit than she is, and things start to change.

  Now, Murata herself spent years as a convenience store employee. And one pleasure of this book is her detailed portrait of how such a place actually works. Yet the book's true brilliance lies in Murata's way of subverting our expectations.

  It's not simply that Keiko finds liberation, even happiness, by becoming a cog in the capitalist machine, an unsettling idea when you think about it. Murata also makes us see how the family members who find her love of the store's rituals strange are themselves trapped within a set of rules - dress this way, don't talk like that, get married and have kids. But unlike her, they - and maybe we - don't know it.

  Near the end of "Mirror, Shoulder, Signal," Sonja meets an old woman who talks about how one survives while not fitting into the slot that society has for you. You live with it, she says, and you find your ways. With bracing good humor, Nors and Murata celebrate the quiet heroism of women who accept the cost of being themselves.

  DAVIES: John Powers writes about TV and film for Vogue and vogue.com. He reviewed "Mirror, Shoulder, Signal" by Dorthe Nors and "Convenience Store Woman" by Sayaka Murata. On tomorrow's show, we'll talk with Vanity Fair writer Emily Jane Fox, who spent the last year investigating Ivanka Trump and her siblings. Her book "Born Trump: Inside America's First Family" includes intimate portraits of Trump's older children, who didn't expect their father to win the 2016 election. Hope you can join us.

  (SOUNDBITE OF PAT METHENY & CHARLIE HADEN'S "OUR SPANISH LOVE SONG")

  DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our associate producer for digital media is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Terry Gross returns tomorrow. I'm Dave Davies.

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