[1][3] In 1976 Murata received her first award for fiction when her story "Suichū no koe" ("Voice under Water"), about a woman attempting to help protect children after the loss of her own child, won the Kyushu Art Festival Literary Prize.
In the first half of 1987 her novella "Nabe no naka" ("In the Pot"), about a grandmother who entertains her visiting grandchildren with stories about their relatives, won the 97th Akutagawa Prize.
[2] Akira Kurosawa wrote a screenplay based on "Nabe no naka", which he later filmed and released under the title Rhapsody in August.
[2] After winning the Akutagawa Prize, Murata continued publishing novellas and full-length novels, including her 1990 work Shiroi yama (白い山, White Mountain), which won the 29th Women's Literature Prize;[6] the 1994 novel Warabi no kō (蕨野行), which was later adapted into the 2003 Hideo Onchi film Warabi no kō;[7] the story Bōchō (望潮, Fiddler Crabs), which won the 29th Kawabata Yasunari Literature Prize; and the 1998 novel Ryūhi gyotenka (龍秘御天歌), which won a 49th MEXT Arts Award in the literature category.
[13] Around the time of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Murata was diagnosed with uterine cancer and sought radiation treatment, an experience she later used as the basis of her novel Yakeno made (焼野まで).