This talk takes a crip/queer approach to engage with representations of women by Japanese writer Sayaka Murata (b. 1979), who achieved international fame with the English publication of Convenience Store Woman (Konbini ningen) in 2018, paving the way for new opportunities for other Japanese women writers in translation.

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I begin with a brief outline of recent Japanese works in English translation by Murata, Natsuko Imamura, Emi Yagi, and others that portray noticeably “eccentric” female characters, sometimes in a humorous and/or charming way. For example, I introduce Murata’s depiction of the female protagonist of Convenience, whose dislike of mainstream society and its gender roles—her desire to exist only as a worker within the controlled space of the convenience store—clearly suggests a queer/feminist critique of heteronormative expectations.

I argue that queer and feminist readings are productively expanded by engaging with questions concerning neurodiversity, mental illness, trauma, and so on from a crip/Mad studies approach. While avoiding a medicalizing framework that seeks to “diagnose” fictional characters, I explore ethical questions that surface in Murata’s work precisely because of the impossibility of pinning down such answers. Specifically, in her later work Earthlings (Chikyūjin), Murata depicts a complex narrative of sexual violence and resistance against gender/sexual norms in a world of child-like fantasy, seemingly mixed with themes of mental illness and trauma, which ends in scenes of cannibalism. I argue for readings that recognize both madness operating as queer/feminist critique and realities of crip/mad existence.

I end by reflecting upon mental illness, psychiatric institutions, and sexual violence depicted in other East Asian novels such as Cho Nam-Joo’s Kim Ji-young, Born 1982, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, and Lin Yi-han’s Fang Si-Qi’s First Love Paradise, considering broader implications of reading such novels for East Asian and global feminist discourses.

Biography:

Grace En-Yi Ting (she/they) is an assistant professor of gender studies at the University of Hong Kong specializing in queer feminist approaches to Japanese studies, particularly women writers and girls’ culture. Her recent work engages with frameworks of Global Asias by reorienting Japanese literature through transnational flows of queer/feminist texts and politics circulating between Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Asian America. In addition, she has written book reviews for Asymptote, World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, and The Japan Times. As a literary translator, in 2026, she was selected to work on a hybrid translation from Japanese/Chinese to English under “Literature from Taiwan” for the ALTA Emerging Translator program.

This event is part of the Ito Center's LGBTQ Studies Speaker Series. 

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