The back of my dress is not dry when I meet Sayaka. The Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden is a 116-year-old park that becomes dense with crowds during the sakura blossom due to the oppressively humid summer day in Tokyo. We are the only ones foolish enough to go out at noon today. I feel even hotter, but she seems unaffected, apart from a gentle glisten across her forehead. The sheen may be a source of pride for Murata. She doesn't know if her body works the way other humans do.
She says she couldn't sweat in high school. I feel like my body and I don't know who I am with. The author of more than a dozen novels and story collections writes often from this place. Many of her female characters feel out of place. Convenience Store Woman, a novel narrated by a contentedly unambitious Smilemart worker who achieved greater fulfillment performing her duties as an employee than aspiring to marriage or motherhood, was published by Murata. Since that year, when Convenience Store Woman was a national bestseller, it has sold 1.5 million copies around the world. Earthlings is a novel about a woman who believes she is an alien and that she is actually a human. In July, Murata published Life Ceremony, a new story collection in which she invents grotesque social rituals to expose the absurdity of the corporeal norm.
She isn't likely to use either term, but her fiction might be described as speculative feminist. The worlds she invents are future looking without adhering to the tropes of science fiction, and her scenarios horrify without leaving the daylit quotidian spaces of home and office. She invents strange social experiments that take place in seemingly familiar worlds. There are domestic arrangements that distort the image of marriage, childbirth, and family life. Her tricks are entertaining and fun. I find myself laughing out loud while reading her books, but then I wonder if I actually read that book. She is sometimes gross but not often. Her speculations are a provocative form of scientific inquiry, probing incredulously at the convention of her species. She wants to know why humans live this way.
The woman in front of me is the author of several scenes of sensuality cannibalism. She is small with long hair. She likes to laugh a lot. I think of Piyyut, the stuffed alien-hedgehog talisman in Earthlings, when I see her eyes.
Murata has been troubled by an effort to be an ordinary earthling since she was a child.
A nickname first bestowed on her affectionately by friends, but one that she fears borders on caricature, is the nickname "Crazy Sayaka". Her editors warn her not to say weird things in public but strange comments always flow out. During our conversation, Murata catches herself when she says something. She looks sideways as if she's checking with someone, but then she smiles and says it anyways. She talks about being in love with one of her imaginary friends, and looking for her own clitoris. A sense of relief washes over me when listening to Murata. I feel my body relax in her presence as if it has found a momentary refuge from the crush of humankind's collective delusions.
In her 2020 essay, she wrote that she has been troubled by an intense effort to be an ordinary earthling. She was lonely and sensitive and often interrupted her kindergarten class with crying fits when she was young. Her father was away at work and her mother was caring for her and her older brother. Murata wants to become a good person.
She was aware that her weakness made her stand out. She felt pressured to keep up the pretense. She hid in the bathroom of her school and cried until she vomited. She wrote that an alien came through her bedroom window when she was a child. She was taken to a place where she didn't have to perform. Over the years, she made more and more imaginary friends. Is that number thirty? I keep repeating. She says she couldn't keep all of them. That was how much I loved it. Since she was a child, these beings have been watching her, playing games with her and holding her hand while she sleeps.
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