While still at Columbia, he completed the first draft of his first novel, "All I Asking for Is My Body". A story ("I'll Crack Your Head Kotsun") that became the first chapter of the novel was published in the "Arizona Quarterly" in 1959. It was reprinted in 1968 in "The Spell of Hawaii", an Hawaii literary anthology. "All I Asking for" was not particularly well received when it was first published in 1975, but it won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation in 1980, and when it was reissued by the University of Hawaiʻi in 1988 it received critical acclaim. Murayama received the Hawai'i Award for Literature in 1991. It has remained in print ever since, and has become a cult classic. The novel, including the title, is written in modified Pidgin and is considered dialectically authentic while still readable by non-Pidgin readers.