A Dystopian Novel That Challenges Taboos and Refuses Judgment

“I want to use the form of the novel to conduct experiments,” the Japanese writer Sayaka Murata as she emerged into the international literary spotlight in 2018. “I can test things that are not possible in the real world.” Her tenth novel, , had by then sold almost 600,000 copies in Japan, and was her first to be translated into English (by Ginny Tapley Takemori). Following its success, Murata had quit the line of work she shared with the first-person narrator of that slim volume. Keiko Furukura is a part-time employee at a Smile Mart in Tokyo, and she is an unsettling blend of gung-ho about her job and coolly detached from the larger world she inhabits. The thoroughly scripted interactions required in the store allow her to pass as “a normal