Murata Sayaka
Murata Sayaka 村田沙耶香
Murata Sayaka (村田沙耶香) is a Japanese essayist and novelist who questions taboos, common sense, in her writing. She began writing as an elementary school student, trading stories with her friends and including them as characters. However, even then she associated real literature with awards and recognition, and reserved her best writing for those who would be more critical of her work. Murata has admitted to looking back at her writing from that era with a certain disgust because of how it reflected her rigid ideas about “correctness”. She cites the importance of reexamining one’s values as a central theme in her work, though the subjects of her stories vary widely, from the grotesque and shocking to the mundane. One example of the latter is her 2016 novel Convenience Store Woman, which won the Akutagawa Prize.
Translated Titles by Murata Sayaka
Keiko Furukura had always been considered a strange child, and her parents always worried how she would get on in the real world, so when she takes on a job in a convenience store while at university, they are delighted for her. Eighteen years later, at age 36, she is still in the same job, has never had a boyfriend, and has only few friends. She feels comfortable in her life, but is aware that she is not living up to society's expectations and causing her family to worry about her. When a similarly alienated but cynical and bitter young man comes to work in the store, he will upset Keiko's contented stasis--but will it be for the better? Sayaka Murata brilliantly captures the atmosphere of the familiar convenience store that is so much part of life in Japan. With some laugh-out-loud moments prompted by the disconnect between Keiko's thoughts and those of the people around her, she provides a sharp look at Japanese society and the pressure to conform, as well as penetrating insights into the female mind.
As a child, Natsuki doesn't fit into her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut who has explained to her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, her cousin Yuu confides to Natsuki that he is an extraterrestrial, and Natsuki starts to wonder if she might be an alien too. Later, as a married woman, Natsuki feels forced to fit in to a society she deems a "baby factory" but wonders if there is more to the world than the mundane reality everyone else seems to accept. The answers are out there, and Natsuki has the power to find them. Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Murata's status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe
Nakagami Kenji
Nakagami Kenji 中上健次
Nakagami Kenji (中上健次, 1946-1992) was a Japanese novelist and essayist known for being a descendant of the burakumin, a group historically treated as untouchable within Japanese society. He centered his stories on these individuals, who were cut off from the outside world and often lived harsh lives. The Cape, the story for which Nakagami received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, takes place in a fictional village in the Kumano region (modern-day Wakayama and Mie prefectures) where he was raised. It was the first of an acclaimed trilogy of stories, based in part on Nakagami’s own life, about a man who wrestles with the nature of his complex, transgressive ties to his relatives. Nakagami achieved notoriety both within and outside literary circles. He traveled widely, regularly living abroad for extended periods of time and incorporating his experiences into his writings for popular audiences. He drew inspiration for his essays and some of his fiction from subjects such as true crime, music (particularly jazz and reggae), and the traditional arts of Korea. Several of his works were made into films, including Fire Festival (1985), which was based on his own script. He died of kidney cancer at the age of 46, while many of his serialized works remained incomplete.
Translated Titles by Nakagami Kenji
The Cape and Other Stories from the Japanese Ghetto
Born into the burakumin—Japan's class of outcasts—Kenji Nakagami depicts the lives of his people in sensual language and stark detail. The Cape is a breakthrough novella about a burakumin community, their troubled memories, and complex family histories.
Seven short stories that draw on the history of Kumano, Nakagami’s birthplace, and describe the turbulent lives of its people.
Yu Miri
Yu Miri 柳美里
Yu Miri (柳美里) is a Japanese-born playwright and novelist of Korean descent, part of a demographic known as Zainichi (short for zainichi Kankokujin 在日韓国人, literally “Koreans residing in Japan”). She composes her works in Japanese, which is her native language. While widely known as a recipient of many awards for her writing, she is also famous for operating the bookstore and café Full House (named after her first novel) in the city of Minamisōma, within the former 20-kilometer hazard area surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Yu attributes the ease with which she moved there both to her ancestry and her travels; her parents cut ties with their family and homeland to escape the Korean War and emigrate to Japan, and while traveling as a writer, she often poses the question “Could I live here?” to herself. Prior to relocating to the area in 2015, she hosted a radio program in which she spoke with 600 locals affected by the tsunami and nuclear disaster. Today, she continues to collect the stories of those who suffer and those who help the suffering to incorporate into her writing.
Translated Titles by Yu Miri
A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach.
The story of a 14-year-old-boy raised by his detached, repulsive father in the poor, crime-ridden Japanese port city of Yokohama. Like his father, Kazu is also obsessed with money but is cold and indifferent toward his own feelings and possesses an uncontrollable and violent temper. One night, taunted by his father, Kazu calmly kills him and hides his body in a secret vault in the basement. With his father "missing," he tries to take over his father's business and resume his "normal" life. But as his world and his alibi slowly start to crumble around him, Kazu becomes painfully aware of the consequences of his actions.