Sakaya Murata

Sayaka Murata was born in Inzai, a small city to the east of Tokyo in Chiba Prefecture, in 1979. She began writing fiction as a 10-year-old. When she was an adolescent, her family moved from Inzai to Tokyo, where she attended Kashiwa High School and Tamagawa University. From 1999 until 2017, Murata worked part-time at a convenience store while also writing fiction. In 2003, her first novel, Breastfeeding, won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers (Gunzo is a famous Japanese literary magazine that has published work by authors such as Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburo Oe). As of 2019, Murata has published a dozen novels, including her domestic and global bestseller Convenience Store Woman (2016), about an oddball named Keiko Fukuruka who finds happiness as a celibate part-time convenience-store worker despite social pressure to seek romance and a higher-status job. In 2016, Convenience Store Woman won the Akutagawa Prize, a prestigious Japanese literary award given out twice a year by the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature. In 2018, Convenience Store Woman because Murata’s first novel to be translated into English (by translator Ginny Tapley Takemori); it subsequently became a Los Angeles Times bestseller and was awarded Best Book of the Month by Amazon.