📝 Sayaka Murata’s Writing Routine

Welcome to Famous Writing Routines, where we explore the daily habits, writing process, and work routines of some of the most renowned authors throughout history.

Sayaka Murata never quite learned to be human. She tried—painfully, diligently. As a child in Chiba, a suburban prefecture east of Tokyo, she studied her peers the way an alien might, watching for signs, learning their codes, trying to mask the strange internal world that set her apart. It didn’t work. At school, she was bullied and isolated. At home, she retreated into writing, convinced she was meant to live by a different logic entirely.

The conviction never left her. Over the past two decades, Murata has become one of Japan’s most provocative literary voices, a writer whose odd, deadpan style and speculative sensibilities have drawn comparisons to everyone from Michel Foucault to Tolstoy.

Her breakout novel, Convenience Store Woman, was her tenth book—and the first to be translated into English. It follows Keiko, a woman in her mid-thirties who finds solace and structure in a dead-end job at a Smile Mart. She doesn’t want a relationship, doesn’t want a better job, doesn’t want to change. She just wants to be left alone to work the register.

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