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Faith

Faith

Short StoriesLiterary Fiction
Pages
160
Language
Japanese

Synopsis

In "Faith," Sayaka Murata turns her deadpan eye on belief itself — religious, commercial, and financial. Her narrator has always been the rational one, unmoved by trends, spiritual claims, or too-good-to-be-true schemes, until a friend proposes they profit from other people's craving to believe by founding a cult.

Characteristically unsettling, the story asks whether faith and fraud can really be told apart, and whether a person who cannot believe in anything is the sanest one in the room or simply the loneliest.

Prose complexity
7/10

Vibe

DarkSatiricalThought-ProvokingReflective

Genres

Short Stories Literary Fiction Satire Contemporary Literature

About the author

S
Sayaka Murata

Sayaka Murata (村田沙耶香) is a Japanese novelist and short-story writer, born on 14 August 1979 in Inzai, Chiba Prefecture. She worked part-time as a convenience store clerk in Tokyo for eighteen years, until 2017, and drew on that experience for the novel that made her name internationally. Her fiction returns to nonconformity, gender roles, reproduction and sexuality, often pushing everyday social expectation to a disquieting extreme. She won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 2003 for her de...