Faith

Faith is a collection of surreal short stories by Sayaka Murata, winner of the Akutagawa Prize and author of Convenience Store Woman. The Chinese edition, translated by Dong Shuhan, was published by Shanghai Translation Publishing House in 2025; the book runs to about 158 pages and collects eight short stories. The collection takes as its central question the boundary between "normal" and "abnormal": what counts as normal, who has the right to judge normality, and whether what the majority calls "reality" is itself a kind of faith—or even a cult. In the title story, "Faith," the narrator is a realist who calculates costs the moment she opens her mouth, converting weddings, dinners, and influencer consumption into cold numbers, and is therefore seen by family and friends as a misfit. When an old classmate recruits her to "found a new religion," she even volunteers to be brainwashed so as to rejoin the ranks of normal people. "Survival" imagines a future society that grades and evaluates lives by a "survival rate"; the protagonist, whose rating is falling, simply gives up trying and chooses to become a "wild man." In "The Novel I Couldn't Finish," a writer who can't produce anything buys four clones to share the housework, socializing, and material gathering, and the five "Natsukos" gradually lose track of who the original is. The remaining stories touch on clone ethics, the death of art, and the oppression of homogeneity. Murata builds her absurd premises with calm, spare, almost expressionless prose, leaving readers uneasy after they laugh: the accepted order of life may be nothing more than a larger-scale collective hallucination. The title story was shortlisted for the novella category of the Shirley Jackson Awards in the United States, and the book was selected for Douban's 2025 Science Fiction & Fantasy Books list.