Earthlings

Praise for Earthlings Named a Most Anticipated Book by TIME, the Guardian, Vulture, Literary Hub, Bustle, and Refinery29 "Murata's unsettling, madcap 11th novel (after Convenience Store Woman) chronicles the nightmarish discontent of one girl amid the deadening conformity of modern Japanese society . . . The author's flat, deadpan prose makes the child Natsuki's narration strangely and instantly believable and later serves to reflect her relationship to Japan's societal anxiety. This eye-opening, grotesque outing isn't to be missed."--Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Societally defiant, shockingly disconnected, disturbingly satisfying . . . Murata again confronts and devastates so-called 'normal, ' 'proper' behavior to create an unflinching expose of society."--Terry Hong, Booklist "I loved this book! It easily converted me to being an alien. A radical, hilarious, heartbreaking look at the crap we have all internalized in order to fit in and survive."--Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot "Earthlings takes the mood of colorful disquiet she honed in Convenience Store Woman and pushes it further out. The boy and a girl at the heart of her latest believe they have landed on earth from outer space. Raised by separate families, treated badly, they tack toward each other in this immensely charming, strange and heart-stomping tale. The imagination of this writer grows and grows like outer space. Earthlings should be one of the main fictional events of 2020."--John Freeman, Literary Hub "From the author of 2018's comic gem about a Japanese misfit, Convenience Store Woman, a new novel featuring a young woman who is convinced she is an alien."--Guardian "This is one that should be on everyone's wish list."--Japan Times "In 2020, we finally get our hands on Sayaka Murata's newest novel . . . A new statement by Murata that finding your own freedom is a struggle against family and society which takes sacrifice."--Books and Bao Praise for Convenience Store Woman "Keiko, a defiantly oddball 36-year-old woman, has worked in a dead-end job as a convenience store cashier in Tokyo for half her life. She lives alone and has never been in a romantic relationship, or even had sex. And she is perfectly happy with all of it . . . Written in plain-spoken prose, the slim volume focuses on a character who in many ways personifies a demographic panic in Japan."--Motoko Rich, New York Times (profile) "A small, elegant and deadpan novel . . . Casts a fluorescent spell . . . A thrifty and offbeat exploration of what we must each leave behind to participate in the world."--Dwight Garner, New York Times "Alienation gets deliciously perverse treatment in Convenience Store Woman . . . The book's true brilliance lies in Murata's way of subverting our expectations . . . With bracing good humor . . . Murata celebrate[s] the quiet heroism of women who accept the cost of being themselves."--John Powers, NPR's Fresh Air "The novel borrows from Gothic romance, in its pairing of the human and the alluringly, dangerously not. It is a love story, in other words, about a misfit and a store . . . Keiko's self-renunciations reveal the book to be a kind of grim post-capitalist reverie: she is an anti-Bartleby, abandoning any shred of identity outside of her work . . . Tranquil--dreamy, even--rooting for its employee-store romance from the bottom of its synthetic heart."--Katy Waldman, New Yorker "An exhilaratingly weird and funny Japanese novel about a long-term convenience store employee. Unsettling and totally unpredictable--my copy is now heavily underlined."--Sally Rooney, Guardian "As intoxicating as a sake mojito . . . A literary prize-winner that's also a page-turner."--John Powers, Vogue "It's the novel's cumulative, idiosyncratic poetry that lingers, attaining a weird, fluorescent kind of beauty all of i

Sayaka Murata is the author of many books, including Convenience Store Woman, winner of the Akutagawa Prize. Murata has been named a Freeman's "Future of New Writing" author, and a Vogue Japan Woman of the Year.Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated works by more than a dozen Japanese writers, including Ryu Murakami. She lives at the foot of a mountain in Eastern Japan.