THE ALIEN EYE

Sayaka Murata sees the ordinary world as science fiction.

- ELIF BATUMAN

One Sunday morning in May, 2023, I arrived at a literary agent’s Manhattan apartment, bearing a lemon tart, to attend a brunch in honor of the author Sayaka Murata.

I rang the doorbell. There was a long pause before anyone answered, and a longer pause before I was buzzed in. When I reached the top of the stairs, the agent, Nicole Aragi, with whom I was previously unacquainted, came to the door wearing orange plush tiger slippers.

“Elif, the brunch was yesterday,” she said. “But come in and have a cup of tea.” Aragi and her partner, the editor John Freeman, who has published Murata in both Granta and Freeman’s, ended up inviting me to join them on an afternoon outing they had planned with Murata to the Museum of Modern Art. Casting a wistful look at the lemon tart, I left the apartment and, having time on my hands, went to the midtown branch of Kinokuniya, the Japanese bookstore chain. The store had a big display of Murata’s English-language books, all translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori and published by Grove Press: the story collection “Life Ceremony,” from 2022; the darkly comic novel “Earthlings,” from 2020; and, of course, “Convenience Store Woman,” which won Japan’s prestigious Akutagawa Prize and, in 2018, became Murata’s first book to be translated into English. It has sold more than two million copies worldwide.

The book’s narrator, Keiko, is a misfit in her family and at school; she first experiences a sense of belonging at eighteen, when she gets a part-time job at a convenience store. At thirty-six, she’s still in the same job, and an identity that once seemed normal now strikes everyone as sad and weird. It’s a classic novelistic premise. It’s essentially “Don Quixote”: where Quixote lives by the code of knightly romances, Keiko lives by the convenience-store employee manual.