The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies in her home country, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction—many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual—and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It’s almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action…
A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.
From Grove Press:
In Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata has written a bewitching portrayal of contemporary Japan, taking a sharp and timely look at the pressure to conform. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, this “smart and sly novel” (Publishers Weekly) has the reading world talking this summer.
As The New Yorker‘s Katy Waldman writes:
“The novel borrows from Gothic romance, in its pairing of the human and the alluringly, dangerously not. It is a love story, in other words, about a misfit and a store. Keiko’s self-renunciations reveal the book to be a kind of grim post-capitalist reverie” Waldman continues:
[S]he is an anti-Bartleby, abandoning any shred of identity outside of her work.”
“It may make readers anxious, but the book itself is tranquil—dreamy, even—rooting for its employee-store romance from the bottom of its synthetic heart.”
Fresh Air’s literary critic-at-large John Powers also delighted in Convenience Store Woman. “[O]ne pleasure of this book is her detailed portrait of how [a Japanese convenience store] actually works,” Powers begins; however, he continues,
“[T]he book’s true brilliance lies in Murata’s way of subverting our expectations.”
Readers curious about this book’s author, who herself worked in a convenience store for almost 20 years, will enjoy the recent Sayaka Murata profile featured in the New York Times. In her interview for the profile with Motoko Rich, Murata said of the novel,
“I wanted to illustrate how odd the people who believe they are ordinary or normal are.”
Among other accolades, Convenience Store Woman has been named an Indies Introduce Title, an Indie Next Pick, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month (Literature and Fiction). Recent reviews from Barnes & Noble (“Keiko’s affectless, rather chilly approach lends itself to exquisitely deadpan comedy”) and The Huffington Post (“Through the eyes of perceptive, dispassionate Keiko, the ways in which we’re all commodified and reduced to our functions become clear”) have made illuminating commentary on this hit title as well.
About the Author: Sayaka Murata is one of Japan’s most exciting contemporary writers. She still works part time in a convenience store, which was the inspiration to write Convenience Store Woman, her English-language debut and winner of one of Japan’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Akutagawa Prize. She was named a Freeman’s “Future of New Writing” author, and her work has appeared in Granta and elsewhere. In 2016, Vogue Japan selected her as a Woman of the Year.