Until recently, Sayaka Murata, who won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa prize, worked in a convenience store. She had toiled in them for half her life, writing most of her 11 novels and two nonfiction books in her time off. Even after becoming a bestselling author (Konbini Ningen, or Convenience Store Woman, sold 1.4m copies and has been translated into 30 languages), she con