I really enjoy memoirs of unordinary lives, or from a perspective that I did not expect or know anything about. I found this to be really interesting and sweet and totally unexpected. I enjoyed it and the peek into a life totally unlike my own.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata is set in Japan, and follows the life of Keiko Furukura who is 36 years old and has worked at the same convenience store for eighteen years so far, and feels no impulse to change. She’s comfortable there and it’s a safe space – she knows how it operates, what is expected of her, and she’s been there so long that she has a store of responses that sit various situations so she can avoid awkward interactions.

If you’ve been to Japan you’ll know their convenience stores are quite integral. We have 7-11s and similar in other parts of the world but in a konbini (コンビニ) we have a different level of quality all together. Aside from the seasonal items and limited edition specials, you also get very cheap yet high quality fresh-ground coffee, snacks such as sandwiches, gyoza, onigiri and then evena black label premium range, and then there’s also free wifi, free and clean restrooms, and a clean seating area for you to rest or work. It may be menial work but their level of quality and convenience vastly outweighs any other I’ve come across.

This book explores the general view of society in Japan, and how there are only the few main ways one is expected to act and seek to accomplish in life. And how it feels to be on the outside of these norms, feeling that pressure to conform but remaining outside of the scope of normal. As someone who has been diagnosed as having Asperger’s, I was really able to identify with Furukura. Others may see the relentless analysing as exhausting however it’s simply how some environments or situations read. And safe is good. In Japan there may be the expectation to live for your job and while, yes, take pride in your work, somehow this doesn’t stretch to convenience store work.

Really, we should be congratulating those who do any job well. If Furukura feels safe in that job, is happy getting up each day, and earns enough to live the life she wants… that should be enough for her parents and those around her.

It took a while to get into the idiosyncratic rhythm of the writing and although it reminded me of a more offbeat High Fidelity I never quite understood the appeal (essential to the plot) of Shiraha, the least developed character.

There is a trend in fiction right now (Motherhood, The Pisces, My Year of Rest and Relaxation) that features women who don't fit society's norms and instead of discovering a path to self-improvement, embrace a form of radical self-acceptance. What I love about this trend is how unique each character's desires and circumstances are within this larger trend and Convenience Store Woman's Keiko is unlike any other. As a child confused by the rules of society, Keiko learns to love the regulated sameness of working in a convenience store. In an effort to placate her sister and friends she forms a relationship with a co-worker to fool everyone into believing she is normal. Murata's spare, straightforward prose conveys Keiko's simple, logical attitude perfectly.

Very unusual story of Keiko, a young woman who works in a convenience store. It seems that she is neurodivergent and finds a certain comfort and order in working at the store. She ends up meeting a new employee at the store who reminds me of the men's rights activists online who always complain about how society messes with them. That character really disturbed me and I felt bad for Keiko who actually puts up with him.

2.5 stars, really, but I feel bad for rating a book I didn't even finish so low.

I don't know if there's something lost in translation, or if it's just me, but I did not find this book amusing. The main character is affectless and the people around her are vaguely drawn caricatures.

Published in Japan in 2016; published in translation by Grove Press on June 12, 2018

As a child, Keiko Furukura decided to teach another child some manners by braining him with a shovel, a decision she regarded as perfectly reasonable. She was thereafter viewed as a strange and troublesome child. Realizing that her straightforward approach to life kept getting her into trouble, she learned to mimic the behavior of other kids and to follow instructions, never speaking or acting on her own initiative. The conformist strategy worked for her, as it does for many people.

Convenience Store Woman follows Keiko’s life from college, when she takes a part-time job in a Smile Mart, until Keiko is in her late 30s. The convenience store job suits her because a convenience store “is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated.” In other words, conform or leave. Keiko adapts perfectly to the convenience store lifestyle, faithfully following her trainer’s instructions about shouting greetings to customers, looking them in the eye, smiling, asking if they want anything else, bagging purchases and making change. Thanks to the scripted work and clear expectations, Keiko finally feels comfortable interacting with others. It is her first time as “a normal cog in society.” She is so happy that she is still working there eighteen years later.

Keiko draws her malleable personality from her co-workers, taking a bit from each one until she has amalgamized a personality of her own, albeit one that changes as a function of employee turnover. She believes she has been “infected” by their speech patterns and vocabulary, causing her own speech patterns and word choices to change as new co-workers replace the old ones. Even her gestures change as she absorbs the behavior of new workers. Keiko has no desire to look for a better job because this job has allowed her to master the art of pretending to be a person.

The story has several themes. One is socially-enforced normalization. Being a convenience store worker is fine for a college student, but as time goes on, Keiko doesn’t fit in with society’s expectations because she lacks the ambition to find a better job or to pursue marriage. On the few occasions she socializes, she is ostracized or criticized because she doesn’t fit society’s vision of how a maturing woman should live her life. Living a fiction of normalcy isn’t easy, particularly for a woman; to justify her low-end job as a middle-age woman, Keiko contrives excuses and finds a relationship partner, even if the platonic and rather unpleasant relationship is one of convenience.

The culture of gossip is another theme. Keiko is happiest when she is talking with co-workers about essential convenience store issues, like whether the store can make its sales goal for deep-fried chicken skewers. When co-workers realize Keio is having contact with a fired worker in her free time, they can’t stop grilling her about her relationship. They also feel compelled to lecture the ex-worker and Keiko about their respective failings. In Japan as everywhere, people want to meddle when they should mind their own damn business.

Perhaps the overriding theme is the importance of being true to one’s nature, regardless of society’s expectations. Keiko’s sister is distressed about having to cope with the fact that Keiko is not “normal,” but Keiko is content just the way she is. Her life has definition. The convenience store speaks to her in a voice that only she can hear. She knows exactly what the convenience store needs. Being a convenience store worker makes her happy, while the prospect of looking for a better job or getting married and having sex are antithetical to Keiko’s ability to live a fulfilling life.

That, I think, is the great lesson of Convenience Store Woman: when someone is happy and content to live in a way that doesn’t harm others, whether the person has a “normal” life isn’t the business of anyone else. Being happy and harmless is just fine, and trying to change a person who isn't hurting anyone because they don't "fit in" is an act of cruelty. Convenience Store Woman teaches that profound lesson in an allegorical story that is both appealing and deceptive in its simplicity.

RECOMMENDED

I loved this and its hilarious portrayal of an incel (not the main character)! It reminds me of Moshfegh in a way but completely unique. Looking forward to reading more from this author. The plot was absolutely fabulous.

My rating is 3.5

This is a quirky story about a woman named Keiko who has found her life's calling in a Convenience Store. Everyone around her finds her strange, but Keiko doesn't understand. She doesn't find fault in thinking differently and being okay with just the minimum in life. It is difficult for Keiko to master relationships of any kind. As I was reading, I began to understand Keiko and wanted others to just leave her be. What's so wrong with living an unconventional life and being okay with it?

I felt this was a really interesting book and one i would have to go back to at a future date. I thought the cultural story that Murata was telling not too far from a western one and was still recognizable. The way she told the tale was really interesting and it was really interesting learning about Japanese convenience store culture. It took me a while to decide how i felt about it after finishing it but it was definitely a book id recommend.

Convenience Store Woman is reminiscent of Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. The novel by Sayaka Murata portrays the moving narrative of a woman, Keiko, who has always felt at odds with who she is. Misunderstood by her family, she finds ease in the routinely existence of a convenience store worker, where organizing shelves, labeling products and greeting customers makes Keiko feels that at least there, she belongs.
But Keiko can't ignore the unforgiving patriarchal society she lives in, and when a new worker joins the store she begins to think that perhaps normalcy can be found beyond the glaring lights of the convenience store.
Murata's story brings readers closer to a woman who defies society rules in her own way, who merely wants an opportunity to live life the way she wants to live it. Convenience Store Woman is without a doubt one of this year's must-reads.

Unsettling. I can wrap up the review for Sayaka Murata’s “The Convenience Store Woman” in that one word. But first, a big thank you to NetGalley and publisher Grove Atlantic for this ARC.

The convenience store woman of the title is Keiko Furukura, a slightly eccentric woman in her mid-30s, who has been working at the Smile Mart for over 16 years. She is diligent and focused and seems to love her job at the store. As the book progresses, we see how she gets into a pact of convenience with Shiraha, who works at the store for a brief while, and allows him to live with her for mutual benefits. The rest of the story is about how that pans out for both of them.

The first thing you know by this point is that Keiko is not a “normal” woman. She holds the same job for an inordinately long time, and in a convenience store of all places, which is unheard of. She is single and shows no intention of even going on a date and she displays very Asperger’s Syndrome-like behaviour. These and other quirks are more than enough to classify her as “abnormal” by everyone including her parents who are always trying to “cure” her. Keiko struggles to understand why things like hitting a boy in the head or even thinking of taking a knife to a child to keep him quiet is a matter of consternation to people.

“When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why. I found that arrogant and infuriating, not to mention a pain in the neck. Sometimes I even wanted to hit them with a shovel to shut them up, like I did that time in elementary school.”

Obviously, Keiko is someone we never warm up to but we do understand her problem of being an outcast in society. Not just because she has odd tendencies like beating up people to keep them quiet but simply because she stands out in the homogenized mass of married people. Shiraha is Keiko’s male counterpart, an oddball and a deeply distressed one at that. His one wish is to get away from all the people who question him and pressurize him for answers.

To me, Keiko and Shiraha are the symbols of the growing class of people who are making conscious choices to stay away from the otherwise deadening regularity of life. They are highly individualistic people who seem alien because they stay on the fringes of society and are happy to do so. Keiko is genuinely puzzled when she is endlessly questioned on her lack of a “proper job” and a husband.

“I can’t go on like this? You mean I shouldn’t be living the way I am now? Why do you say that?”

And she reasons it out to herself

“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of. So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.”

Sayaka Murata brilliantly captures the angst of these misfits and also provides an overview of Japanese society, which has been riddled with problems of celibacy and disinterest in having children in recent years. Although, not everyone can empathize with the slightly extreme proclivities that Keiko and Shiraha have, we can certainly identify with their feeling of frustration at being questioned repeatedly over their choices and of desperately trying to keep themselves from being subsumed by the heaving mass of a monochromatic society.

The characterization in this book is highly masterful in that you alternate between sympathy, empathy, disgust and other emotions for both protagonists. This swirl of feelings and the soul of the novel is entirely retained by Ginny Tapley Takemori’s beautiful translation. So effectively that it left me unsettled even as I turned the last page.

I received this book as an advance copy from NetGalley.

This book is about a woman who is potentially a psychopath who finds that she is best able to imitate humanity by aligning her entire life with the convenience store she works in. This could have been a look at Japanese culture, psychopathy, what repetitive jobs do to people but instead it was an afterthought of a book that merely brushes at these topics without actually doing the exploration that books are supposed to do. I gave it 2 stars because it was a quick read and I got through it but I consider this book to be a load of waster potential.

Daily life in Japan has never seemed stranger than in the compelling English-language debut from Sayaka Murata which draws a portrait of alienation in a society that already seems to exist somewhere just over the border from familiarity. The novel exposes the rather shocking life and interior world of Keiko Fukukura, a girl born without social awareness in a place tightly bound by its rules. Thus the child Keiko enters a world of mystifying norms of conduct. When a teacher shows signs of hysteria one day in class, what could possibly be wrong or unhelpful, she wonders, about calming the woman’s mood by pulling down her skirt and knickers? And, after all, it works.

For all Keiko’s confusion, she gradually comes to understand her oddity and responds by withdrawing from involvement with others, managing to complete a solitary education to university level. And then, miraculously, she finds her niche. An impulse decision sees her applying for part-time work in a convenience store, one of those mini-supermarkets ubiquitous in urban Japan, stocked not only with food but a mass of other daily necessities.

Here, Keiko is drilled in how to greet her customers (‘Irasshaimase! Good morning! accompanied by a compulsory smile), how to stock the shelves with products determined by season, weather and time of day, and how to conduct herself generally. This will be her world for the next eighteen years, ruled by snack food innovations, terms of address, sartorial style, employment conventions, cleanliness standards, and the music of store life – cash registers, customers, footfall.

A model employee, Keiko learns a great deal more from her environment. Observing her peers, she trains herself to mimic the pitch of their voices and emulate their fashion taste, earning approval by buying clothes from the same stores. Functioning well at work, she also holds up the acquaintanceship of a few girlfriends, to whom she lies about her health to explain away her continued lowly work status.

But she can’t explain away to these young women, all busy planning their marriages and families, her lack of a partner. Enter Shiraha, a tall, creepy, unmotivated new employee who joins the store’s work force but is quickly sacked. Meeting again by chance, Keiko and Shiraha begin a conversation about their twin exclusion from norms, which results in a major act of pragmatism: she accepts his offer to cohabit, a sexless bargain in which Keiko gets social acceptability, while freeloading Shiraha gets free board and lodging.

But it doesn’t last. Encouraged by Shiraha to quit the convenience store and search for a better-paid job to support the pair of them, Keiko eventually realizes that the price of seeming ordinary is too high. She doesn’t need Shiraha but she does need a convenience store. Without its music in her head, she has lost her attunement to any kind of life, normal or ab-.

Simultaneously disturbing and enthralling, Murata’s short work, a bestseller in her own country, speaks volumes about society and the role of the outcast. Whether comic or tragic, dreamy or realistic, the parable is leant sharper relief by the very particular conformism and rule-bound expectations of the author’s own culture, where sexless marriages are apparently a norm and the birthrate is dropping like a stone. Read it and become acquainted not only with degrees of separation, but of acceptance of identity, no matter the cost.

It took me a while to figure out where the author was going with this book. In the end, I really enjoyed the way this novel challenged preconceived notions about how individuals fit into a society. This is really a meditation on the meaning of work and how we tend to mindlessly let others define ourselves.

Title: Convenience Store Woman
Author: Sayaka Murata
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 3 out of 5

Growing up, Keiko was a strange child. She didn’t react like everyone else—two students fighting, and everyone wants them to stop? Bashing one of them in the head is the solution, right?—and she never understands why her reactions are so wrong. So she learned to mimic everyone around her, creating a nice, normal persona with nice, normal reactions.

For 18 years now, she’s worked part-time at a convenience store. She’s never had a boyfriend. She has only a few friends—who don’t know she’s playing a part. Her family doesn’t understand her. But the routine of the convenience store gives her structure, and the employee handbook gives her rules to follow—she knows the part she must play to look like everyone else.

When she meets a fellow convenience store worker who also doesn’t seem to know how to react, she decides to take action to make everyone finally believe she’s normal once and for all. But will change be for the better?

I’ve been fascinated with Japanese culture since the first time I read Shogun. That’s why I picked this up. However, this book ended up being pretty meh for me. I like feeling a connection with the characters, and I just didn’t get a sense of connection at all. I felt sorry for Keiko, but she felt so distant that I couldn’t really care. (Part of this may be due to the novel being a translation, part to the fact that Keiko may be on the spectrum, so she just isn’t easy to relate to.)

Sayaka Murata is an award-winning Japanese writer. Convenience Store Woman is her newest translated work.

(Galley provided by Grove in exchange for an honest review.)

Modern fiction is teeming with characters who don't fit comfortably into the world they inhabit. I grew up enthralled by self-absorbed male outsiders like Holden Caulfield in the beats. But over the years, I've come to find greater depth and variation in stories about women the world routinely ignores, be it the wry spinsters and Barbara Pym's fiction or the poor, defiantly unconventional Sula who gives her name to Toni Morrison's great early novel. You can add to this list the heroines of two first-rate new novels, one from Denmark, the other from Japan, by literary stars in their home countries. Although different in style, both books are brief and often hilarious. And because they're tinted with autobiography, both are exceedingly smart about single women past the first flush of youth.

"Mirror, Shoulder, Signal" is the latest novel by the Danish writer Dorthe Nors, who possesses a rare gift. She treats heavy, dark matters with a very light touch. Her heroine is Sonja, who grew up in the Jutland boondocks but moved to Copenhagen in search of a grander life. Now in her 40s, she's alone. Her boyfriend has dumped her. She suffers from vertigo. And she spends her life translating gory crime novels that everyone but her seems to love.

Fearing that she's becoming a solitary weirdo, she decides to enroll in a local driving school, where - metaphor alert - she has trouble shifting gears for herself. At first, Sonja's story seems like a nifty social comedy. She has amusing scenes with her angry, foul-mouthed female driving teacher, who spouts the lane-changing mantra, mirror, shoulder, signal, and with the new-age massage therapist that she visits after being stressed out by those behind-the-wheel lessons.

But the novel soon deepens, carrying us into Sonja's more stinging emotions. These involve her love of the Jutland countryside and her painful estrangement from her married sister. All the while, Sonja casts a skeptical eye on orderly, prosperous Copenhagen, where, lurking beneath its comforts, one keeps finding dissatisfaction. Unable to shift, the fretful Sonja finds herself caught in a no woman's land, eager to escape loneliness, yet incapable of reaching the people she yearns to reach.

So what, if anything, should she do? That's the question the novel proposes. And one suspects that Nors, a single woman born in Jutland who once translated crime novels, knows just how thorny any answer must be.

A similar form of alienation gets deliciously perverse treatment in "Convenience Store Woman," a massive bestseller that won its author, Sayaka Murata, Japan's biggest literary prize. Its narrator, Keiko, has been written off as a misfit ever since, as a little girl, she found a dead bird in the park and suggested that the family grill it as yakitori. She yearns to know the secret of acting just like everyone else. And at 18, she discovers it when she's mysteriously drawn to a soon-to-open convenience store called the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, and she applies for a job.

In Japan, convenience stores are tiny wonderlands and almost the quintessence of the mainstream, equal parts 7-Eleven, McDonald's and Starbucks. Working at Smile Mart, Keiko learns the official rules and rituals of being a good convenience store woman. What to do and how to talk is spelled out for you. She becomes a model employee who mimics the style of her favorite co-workers, and so she works there happily for 18 years. Then the store hires a male employee who's an even bigger misfit than she is, and things start to change.

Now, Murata herself spent years as a convenience store employee. And one pleasure of this book is her detailed portrait of how such a place actually works. Yet the book's true brilliance lies in Murata's way of subverting our expectations.

It's not simply that Keiko finds liberation, even happiness, by becoming a cog in the capitalist machine, an unsettling idea when you think about it. Murata also makes us see how the family members who find her love of the store's rituals strange are themselves trapped within a set of rules - dress this way, don't talk like that, get married and have kids. But unlike her, they - and maybe we - don't know it.

Near the end of "Mirror, Shoulder, Signal," Sonja meets an old woman who talks about how one survives while not fitting into the slot that society has for you. You live with it, she says, and you find your ways. With bracing good humor, Nors and Murata celebrate the quiet heroism of women who accept the cost of being themselves.

Keiko Fururu is very logical and literal and blunt and that makes her interactions with others difficult. Her family thinks something is wrong with her, that she isn't normal. It is to the point that her sister will give her ways to respond to things to fit in better. While at university, Keiko gets a job working at a convenience store. A Japanese convenience store sounds a bit bigger than a 7-Eleven in the US, but not a full sized grocery store. Keiko knows what to do each day and what is expected of her. She doesn't have to rely on her "outsider" awkward social skills but just follows the company dialogue and employee manual. This makes her an exemplary employee and she feels normal. It was interesting to follow along and read how Keiko related to others and situations and I truly enjoyed what I felt was a happy ending.

Convenience Store Woman tells the story of our quirky, by her culture’s standards, main protagonist. To her being a Convenient Store Woman is who she is. To others, she is not normal and she slowly sees her little bit of social “life” slipping away. I had lots of feelings about this book, some even anger. But to me that’s the point of a book— to feel.

I went into this story expecting to experience Keiko's views on being a misfit. Don't get me wrong. I love misfits. I have/am a misfit. I respect misfits who retain a sense of themselves and refuse to blend in with al the sheep. I wanted to like Keiko even though a readily discovered she is a misfit in sheep's clothing. She was content to live her life as a convenience store worker and her life outside that was only to ready herself for the next day. She had no hopes, no ambition, no emotion, Like I said, I wanted to like her but when her lack of emotion leads her to think that a knife would be an efficient means of quieting a child then I too must see her not as a misfit but as a deviant. You look at the school shootings, bombings and other such acts and they all seem to have at least one thing in common - a lack of empathy and a detachment of emotion. The author didn't play around with this trait much other than a couple of childhood instances and this thought concerning her sister's child but she did incorporate it into the story and thus I don't see how one can so easily dismiss Keiko as simply quirky.


Keiko knows she is "uncured" but she doesn't know what is wrong with her. In an attempt to appear cured, she allows a homeless verbally abusive man to live in her home. While I enjoyed her comparisons of this man to a pet, this was one of the few real chuckles the novel allows. I kept waiting and expecting this book to show more, to grow into something sustainable and it never really did. The end comes full circle with the beginning with no more closure or hope than Keiko started with.


This wasn't an awful book. I see real intelligence on the author's part. She makes some wonderful statements about the condition of her society. Unfortunately they are mostly hidden in the angry rhetoric spewed by the incredibly dislikable Shiraha.

This story is a fast read to it's credit. I think in it's current format, anything longer and I would have stopped reading. I realize I (once again) appear to have read an entirely different book than most people. I just ultimately found Convenience Store Woman to be depressing.