Sakaya Murata sits perfectly upright out of her chair, with a gently curling bob and a neat smile that twitches at the corners of her mouth in time to the translations of her answers. When she’s sharing her detailed responses, her hands flash between statements, only coming to rest while she waits for her words to reach the non-Japanese speaking majority of the audience.
This evening, she’s at Central Library to talk about her work as part of the Manchester Literature Festival and because her novel, Vanishing World, has just been released in English. For many anglophone readers, her name is familiar because of Convenience Store Woman, her first novel translated into English and the winner of the prestigious Akutagawa prize. In that book, the story follows Keiko, a woman who cannot fit herself in with humanity until she becomes a cog in the handbook-ordered world of a Tokyo convenience store. This approach works until she reaches her 30s without a mate or career ladder, then the expectations of those around her start to unravel her carefully arranged life.
Social norms, especially those tied to family and procreation, are recurring themes in Murata’s work. “The pain and struggle that women have is almost a curse,” she says. In her typically visceral way, she expands further: “The theme keeps coming back. I’ve always felt like the world is beating me with women being responsible for procreation. This feeling never leaves me, it’s like pus oozing out.”
In Vanishing World, Murata sought to find a utopian solution to the female burden of childbirth, but as she wrote she found herself creating a dystopia.
“I asked myself, how would procreation look in the future in the next 10,000 years? If I was God, would procreation be about love and family or would I use some technology? I asked which I would choose and I started building a world focused on love and family values, but procreation without love.”
So, sex between a married couple is considered incest, while love with an animated character is de rigeur. Amane, the central character, has multiple fictional lovers alongside her celibate marriage. Technology renders direct human sexual exchange obsolete and distasteful.
As someone who felt alien in the world as a child, Murata inverts normality to explore parallel realities. Her inversions question our blind acceptance of societal expectations and normalise what is considered abnormal. To arrive at these creations, her writing process begins with drawn portraits. Portraits then maps followed by character history and details until the world feels complete enough to start writing and scenes emerge.
“I feel like there’s a glass fish tank,” she explains. “So I put all my ideas, drawings, words in that fish tank. And one day it sort of clicks. And then I know that the story is complete. And still even in that stage it’s not controllable, but it sort of makes sense to me.”
Murata describes this process as a kind of fermentation, an apt metaphor. That visceral bacterial transmutation of the fresh and familiar into something tangy, foaming, and strange, echoing the way her writing converts the expected and ordinary. Fermentation is also a process that happens at the edges of human control, a feeling echoed by Murata herself.
For Murata, her writing surfaces from somewhere beyond the conscious. In Vanishing World, Amane’s final decision surprised readers and novelist alike. When she wrote that section, Murata realised that it was the end and rewrote the rest of the story to arrive there. For many people, Amane’s choice was difficult to accept, a sentiment shared by Murata herself.
Shocks like that are part of her violently challenging approach to writing. “I enjoy the process even when it doesn’t make sense. I want to feel like I’m being bruised and hit when I write.” At this stage, her statement is quietly checked by the translator in a politely disguised moment of disbelief.
Murata describes writing as dissecting herself and her human experiences.
“I feel like there’s me as a person and me as a writer and novelist. The human person me is lying in a lab on a slab, and the novelist me is there, but I can’t control myself.” From this extraction, human Murata emerges bruised and bleeding.
Her work carries risks to both the reader and the author, although the reader only receives collateral damage. Following the advice of a teacher she includes “a knife” in every novel. The blade faces the author, but is scalpel-sharp. “Keep your blade in your direction,” she says. “You might stab yourself and it might slice through. Then the blade might stab somebody who is standing behind you.” And that is what reading her books can feel like. You feel that tug of anxiety or discomfort. A slicing away of normality that leaves you questioning the blind acceptance of your actions and choices.
At the end, I squeeze past the crowds of people rushing over with books to be signed and walk on to Manchester Academy to watch Men I Trust. I find myself swaying in a light-splattered crowd, wondering how normal it is to be drifting from side to side in unison, and how many people are simply acting out the handbook of being human.
Main image: Sayaka Murata (C) Bungeishunju Ltd
