Convenience Store Woman
by Sayaka Murata
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The English-language debut of one of Japan's most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies there, 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 show more 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. show lessTags
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An isolated, probably autistic Japanese woman finds a refuge from the world by working in a convenience store. She has a small, controlled environment, takes comfort from the employee manual, the sense of shared purpose with other employees, and is sheltered from complicated social interactions. This works fabulously for a few years, but then people wonder why she continues in a dead end job, why she isn’t married, why she isn’t like them. She tries to give the impression of conforming and frequently asks her non-autistic sister for advice. For Furukura it isn’t a question of not wanting to conform (she doesn’t). She can’t
She teams up with a man who wants to be a parasite and a shut in. This is a thing in Japan where such people are called hikikomori. She lets him move into her apartment and people almost immediately become more accepting. Her sister and acquaintances can now talk to her about her relationship and possible marriage. The man is a bitter bear who goes on and on about societal pressure to conform, but sees how his living with Furukura will increase her social standing and acceptance.
Furukura ultimately chooses happiness over social acceptance and gets another convenience store job, restoring her chosen identity and environment.
Part of me wants to be that happy. I am not enjoying my job at the moment and feel trapped by work and COVID. It would be nice to go to a job that made me feel safe and comforted. At the same time, Furukura is unenviable because she has nothing but work. Maybe that’s the point. Few people actually find the thing that makes them happy, while the great mass of humanity is being told that your job, spouse, possessions, pets, and children should all be wonderful and make you happy. Maybe Furukura has it figured out and it’s the rest of us who are wrong.
This is one of the most delightful and quirky books I've read in some time. The protagonist of the novel, Keiko, is neurodivergent, 36 years old, has never had a physical relationship with anyone, has been working at the same convenience store since she was 18 and has a sister who hopes that one day Keiko will be 'cured'. Her relationship with the convenience store is everything. It regulates her sleeping patterns, the food she eats and her personal appearance. It even provides her with a script on interacting with the customers.
However, working in a convenience store is not seen as a real job and besides, at her age, Keiko should be considering marriage and children. These things mean nothing to Keiko. Instead, she spends her days show more copying mannerisms, expressions and dress styles from her coworkers to build a repertoire of social normality so that her circle of friends continue to suspect nothing.
Convenience Store Woman is told through Kekio's eyes and so we see the world as she sees it, in all its confusing glory. The writing style is, like Keiko herself, honest and to the point. I read this book as a humorous commentary, if not satire, regarding Japanese working culture. On another level, it serves as a general critique of Japanese society and those, particularly women, through no fault of their own are doomed never to fit in. For someone like Keiko, not fitting in could be perceived as real freedom. Overall, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to those who like a bit of quirk with their fiction. show less
However, working in a convenience store is not seen as a real job and besides, at her age, Keiko should be considering marriage and children. These things mean nothing to Keiko. Instead, she spends her days show more copying mannerisms, expressions and dress styles from her coworkers to build a repertoire of social normality so that her circle of friends continue to suspect nothing.
Convenience Store Woman is told through Kekio's eyes and so we see the world as she sees it, in all its confusing glory. The writing style is, like Keiko herself, honest and to the point. I read this book as a humorous commentary, if not satire, regarding Japanese working culture. On another level, it serves as a general critique of Japanese society and those, particularly women, through no fault of their own are doomed never to fit in. For someone like Keiko, not fitting in could be perceived as real freedom. Overall, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to those who like a bit of quirk with their fiction. show less
Protagonist Keiko Furukura has always been different. She has never quite “fit in” and does not follow the usual rules of social interactions. It is implied she is on the autism spectrum. The storyline follows Keiko as she finds satisfaction in convenience store work, where the rules of behavior are clearly defined. This works well for her until further social pressures are brought to bear. I tend to enjoy stories of eccentric people who do not quite fit into mainstream society. The author does a fabulous job of showing how pressure to conform does not cease with adolescence.
Intelligent, unwavering prose. I fell in love with this book and all of its idiosyncratic characters. The amount of times Shiraha would bring up the Stone Age and the roles of men and women made my skin crawl, however. Why did she have to let him stay in her house I don’t know but the ending of the book is just so beautiful and perfect and exactly what I was hoping for. Fuck the Stone Age, ok! Bring on the enlightened life of convenience store workers and thensome! Let those who wish to escape the chains of societal pressures, escape! A joyous read.
I dunno, y'all. Miss Furukura and Shiraha aren't people I'd want to hang with. I kept reading their names as "Lieutenant Uhura" and "Sriracha," which didn't help me identify them as actual people.
Oh wait....
As this is a translation from a language with which I feel absolutely no kinship, I'll confine myself to observing this is a very quick read, possessed of enough narrative drive to make reading it with dilated eyes and a headache seem like a good idea. I was diverted, I cared a strangely large amount about Keiko Furukura, and while there was not one single surprise or twist in the tale, it was keenly observed and honestly told.
I have never been so glad in my life as when Author Murata stopped banging my eyeballs with "Irasshaimase" about halfway through the book. I am one of those subverbal-vocalizers, and that phrase got my entire limbic system into an uproar because, although I know Japanese pronunciation is dipthongless, I could *not* scan that alphabet soup to save my life, and the YouTube videos pronouncing it for me made my nose hairs hurt. I think Japanese is a hideous language. Cool words, great concepts, please don't speak it to me.
Anyway. So Lieutenant Uhura meets Sriracha and things get weird. Only they don't because, well, they're exactly alike and while that's an awful thing to say, it's just the truth. She's one step away from a serious break when she visits her younger sister and interacts (sort of) with her infant nephew. He's already broken. Her saving grace is that she knows *she* is the problem:
And that, in a nutshell, is why the book kept me reading. I was fascinated against my will by the savvy that she brought to the problem of acting human when she quite simply isn't. She knows she lacks something, hasn't a clue what it is, and no one knows how to explain it to her; what she stumbles upon in the convenience store is a model she can emulate. A worker is supposed to BE the job in the convenience store and she needs someone to be. Perfection.
Poor Sriracha is an incel, as we call them these days, a loser/misfit/nobody whose essential wrongness comes from the other usual place this unsocialized issue comes from: He knows what being human means but he's too lazy to do it, then feels outrage and anger when he isn't given all the privileges of being a human male. Lieutenant Uhura can't grok this, since she's a hard worker and a genuinely indifferent to humans person. She doesn't feel excluded, as he does; she realizes she is excluded and takes steps to minimize the exclusion so others will feel happier:
See? Faultlessly logical. Not human, but deeply logical.
So fiction about the neurodiverse made my uncomfortable day of eye-doctoring, riding back and forth in a cramped position, and having to soak the bloodstains from my knee-rocks breaking through the skin due to sitting *ptooptoo* on sitting! for five hours, bearable. That by itself deserves praise. It's hard to know what to do about recommending such a quirky tale to others. In general, I'm against "must read" recommendations in all but a very few cases. I think this read will quite rightly polarize people's opinions, as did that "Completely Fine" thing that made me so bone-rattlingly mad that I Pearl-Ruled its condescending self. But this story, told by a person whose grasp on how to be human was tenuous and whose desire to figure it out was other-directed, is a different matter altogether. I might not love the way it ended, which I won't discuss, but I fully agree that it was an inevitable ending. I ended up glad I'd read it, and that's saying something. show less
Oh wait....
As this is a translation from a language with which I feel absolutely no kinship, I'll confine myself to observing this is a very quick read, possessed of enough narrative drive to make reading it with dilated eyes and a headache seem like a good idea. I was diverted, I cared a strangely large amount about Keiko Furukura, and while there was not one single surprise or twist in the tale, it was keenly observed and honestly told.
First we practiced the various phrases we needed to use in the store.Standing shoulder to shoulder in ashow more
line, our backs straight, we lifted the corners of our mouths to match the smiling face in the training poster and in turn called out the stock welcoming phrase: Irasshaimase! ... I was good at mimicking the trainer's examples and the model video he'd shown us in the back room. It was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech.
I have never been so glad in my life as when Author Murata stopped banging my eyeballs with "Irasshaimase" about halfway through the book. I am one of those subverbal-vocalizers, and that phrase got my entire limbic system into an uproar because, although I know Japanese pronunciation is dipthongless, I could *not* scan that alphabet soup to save my life, and the YouTube videos pronouncing it for me made my nose hairs hurt. I think Japanese is a hideous language. Cool words, great concepts, please don't speak it to me.
Anyway. So Lieutenant Uhura meets Sriracha and things get weird. Only they don't because, well, they're exactly alike and while that's an awful thing to say, it's just the truth. She's one step away from a serious break when she visits her younger sister and interacts (sort of) with her infant nephew. He's already broken. Her saving grace is that she knows *she* is the problem:
"Um, you do realize you'll be fixed?"
"What?" {Shiraha} asked, as if he hadn't heard right.
"Oh, nothing. Hurry up and change so we can do the morning practice!"
A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment, so the likes of you are fixed right away I thought as I watched him taking his time getting changed. But I didn't say it out loud.
And that, in a nutshell, is why the book kept me reading. I was fascinated against my will by the savvy that she brought to the problem of acting human when she quite simply isn't. She knows she lacks something, hasn't a clue what it is, and no one knows how to explain it to her; what she stumbles upon in the convenience store is a model she can emulate. A worker is supposed to BE the job in the convenience store and she needs someone to be. Perfection.
Poor Sriracha is an incel, as we call them these days, a loser/misfit/nobody whose essential wrongness comes from the other usual place this unsocialized issue comes from: He knows what being human means but he's too lazy to do it, then feels outrage and anger when he isn't given all the privileges of being a human male. Lieutenant Uhura can't grok this, since she's a hard worker and a genuinely indifferent to humans person. She doesn't feel excluded, as he does; she realizes she is excluded and takes steps to minimize the exclusion so others will feel happier:
You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange—maybe that's what everyone means when they say they want to "cure" me.
These past two weeks I'd been asked fourteen times why I wasn't married. And twelve times why I was still working part-time. So for now I'd decide what to eliminate from my life according to what I was asked about most often I thought.
Deep down I wanted some kind of change. Any change, whether good or bad, would be better than the state of impasse I was in now.
See? Faultlessly logical. Not human, but deeply logical.
So fiction about the neurodiverse made my uncomfortable day of eye-doctoring, riding back and forth in a cramped position, and having to soak the bloodstains from my knee-rocks breaking through the skin due to sitting *ptooptoo* on sitting! for five hours, bearable. That by itself deserves praise. It's hard to know what to do about recommending such a quirky tale to others. In general, I'm against "must read" recommendations in all but a very few cases. I think this read will quite rightly polarize people's opinions, as did that "Completely Fine" thing that made me so bone-rattlingly mad that I Pearl-Ruled its condescending self. But this story, told by a person whose grasp on how to be human was tenuous and whose desire to figure it out was other-directed, is a different matter altogether. I might not love the way it ended, which I won't discuss, but I fully agree that it was an inevitable ending. I ended up glad I'd read it, and that's saying something. show less
Keiko Furukura is a thirty-something, who has been working at the same job as a convenience store worker for eighteen years. She is a model worker, and the job provides her with the routine and the social cues she needs in order to function in society. Society, however, sees an asexual, unmarried woman in a menial job and begins making assumptions and either rejects her or barrages her with advice.
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.
Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.
Keiko hooks up with another outcast, a jobless incel to try and game show more the system. Perhaps life will be easier if people thinks she's in a relationship; but the expectations continue to pile on.
I liked Keiko, and empathized with her desire to live her simple life without outside judgment. Shiraha was a bit of a caricature, but one that I don't mind harpooning. This book won the Akutagawa Prize in 2016. The author herself had worked part-time in a convenience store and drew inspiration from the experience. She says she wanted to show how odd the people who think they are normal are. show less
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.
Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.
Keiko hooks up with another outcast, a jobless incel to try and game show more the system. Perhaps life will be easier if people thinks she's in a relationship; but the expectations continue to pile on.
I liked Keiko, and empathized with her desire to live her simple life without outside judgment. Shiraha was a bit of a caricature, but one that I don't mind harpooning. This book won the Akutagawa Prize in 2016. The author herself had worked part-time in a convenience store and drew inspiration from the experience. She says she wanted to show how odd the people who think they are normal are. show less
I’ve read two other books that were translated from Japanese, both by Haruki Murakami: Kafka on the Shore, which I hated, and 1Q84, which I really liked. The writing in both those novels was very clean, direct, and to the point. I thought that might have been just Murakami’s style of writing, but Convenience Store Woman had the same refreshingly clear and uncluttered prose. Now I wonder if that style of writing is common or trendy in Japan, just like the sort of flowery young-adult style is here. It might also be a common thread in translated Japanese work because that’s simply the way the language translates to English—I can’t read Japanese, so I will probably never know. Regardless, I really enjoyed the writing in show more Convenience Store Woman, especially Keiko’s very matter-of-fact way of describing things and people.
That seems like a good segue into the fact that this may be the first book I’ve read in which an (not explicitly but very clearly implied to be) autistic character gets to experience joy on their own terms. As an autistic person, I really related to Keiko and to the way she relates to other people, so it was nice that the story didn’t end up being about her being “cured” or becoming “normal.” The sense of usefulness that she gets from being a convenience store worker and the fear she has that she will someday stop being useful are, at least to me, extremely relatable and topical. I think, especially in today’s late capitalist society, everyone wants to feel useful. It’s drilled into us that if we aren’t adequately providing society with something, we have no place in society. I personally don’t believe that people should be considered “useful” or “useless,” because that’s a direct pipeline to eugenicist thinking and, as a disabled person that cannot work and is therefore “useless” to capitalist society, I would rather people not think I’m a waste of space.
That being said, Keiko’s fear that she would be useless if not for being a convenience store worker and the happiness and comfort she gets from being important and needed in that context made me happy because it’s such a refreshing portrayal of someone who doesn’t follow society’s “rules” when it comes to the trajectory of their life. Keiko’s family and friends are all deeply concerned about her and say that she needs to find a real career or get married and have kids, but neither of those options appeals to Keiko and she knows she would never be happy that way. Though the path she has chosen for her life is unconventional and viewed by the other people in her life as unfulfilling and sad, it brings her joy. If someone is happy and comfortable with where they are in life, why should they be encouraged to abandon that because it’s not what society accepts as normal? show less
That seems like a good segue into the fact that this may be the first book I’ve read in which an (not explicitly but very clearly implied to be) autistic character gets to experience joy on their own terms. As an autistic person, I really related to Keiko and to the way she relates to other people, so it was nice that the story didn’t end up being about her being “cured” or becoming “normal.” The sense of usefulness that she gets from being a convenience store worker and the fear she has that she will someday stop being useful are, at least to me, extremely relatable and topical. I think, especially in today’s late capitalist society, everyone wants to feel useful. It’s drilled into us that if we aren’t adequately providing society with something, we have no place in society. I personally don’t believe that people should be considered “useful” or “useless,” because that’s a direct pipeline to eugenicist thinking and, as a disabled person that cannot work and is therefore “useless” to capitalist society, I would rather people not think I’m a waste of space.
That being said, Keiko’s fear that she would be useless if not for being a convenience store worker and the happiness and comfort she gets from being important and needed in that context made me happy because it’s such a refreshing portrayal of someone who doesn’t follow society’s “rules” when it comes to the trajectory of their life. Keiko’s family and friends are all deeply concerned about her and say that she needs to find a real career or get married and have kids, but neither of those options appeals to Keiko and she knows she would never be happy that way. Though the path she has chosen for her life is unconventional and viewed by the other people in her life as unfulfilling and sad, it brings her joy. If someone is happy and comfortable with where they are in life, why should they be encouraged to abandon that because it’s not what society accepts as normal? show less
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ThingScore 75
...for all the disturbance and oddity in “Convenience Store Woman,” the book dares the reader to interpret it as a happy story about a woman who has managed to craft her own “good life.”
added by Lemeritus
Convenience Store Woman closely observes the inevitable failures of a society to embrace all within it, and the contrasting ways disenfranchised men and women manage to cope... Through the eyes of perceptive, dispassionate Keiko, the ways in which we’re all commodified and reduced to our functions become clear. What’s unclear is what other option we have. We all want to be individuals, and show more yet we also want to fit in somewhere. We all want to be seen for our own intangible humanity, and yet we see others for their utility. show less
added by Lemeritus
Murata’s slim and stunning Akutagawa Prize–winning novel follows 36-year-old Keiko Furukura, who has been working at the same convenience store for the last 18 years, outlasting eight managers and countless customers and coworkers.... Murata’s smart and sly novel, her English-language debut, is a critique of the expectations and restrictions placed on single women in their 30s. This is a show more moving, funny, and unsettling story about how to be a “functioning adult” in today’s world show less
added by Lemeritus
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Author Information
17+ Works 7,371 Members
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Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Notable Lists
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title*
- Buurtsupermens
- Original title
- コンビニ人間
- Original publication date
- 2016-07-27
- People/Characters
- Keiko Furukawa; Shiraha
- Important places
- Japan; Tokyo, Japan; Hiiromachi, Japan; Smile Mart, Hiiromachi, Japan
- First words
- A convenience store is a world of sound.
- Quotations
- But so far as I could see, aside from a few minor differences they were all just an animal called a baby and looked much the same, just like stray cats all looked much the same.
I find the shape of people's eyes particularly interesting when they’re being condescending. I see a wariness or a fear of being contradicted or sometimes a belligerent spark ready to jump on any attack. And if they... (show all)re unaware of being condescending, their glazed-over eyeballs are steeped in a fluid mix of ecstasy and a sense of superiority.
...you should really either get a job or get married, one or the other...Or better still, you should do both.
I couldn’t stop hearing the store telling me the way it wanted to be, what it needed. It was all flowing into me. It wasn’t me speaking. It was the store. I was just channeling its revelations from on high - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I could distinctly feel all my cells stirring within my skin as they responded in unison to the music reverberating on the other side of the glass.
- Blurbers
- Ozeki, Ruth; Kawakami, Hiromi; Batuman, Elif; Sloan, Robin; Nguyen, Viet Thanh; Attenberg, Jami (show all 9); Wang, Weike; Chang, Jade; McInerney, Lisa
- Original language
- Japanese
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 895.636
- Canonical LCC
- PL873.U73
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.
Classifications
- Genres
- General Fiction, Fiction and Literature
- DDC/MDS
- 895.636 — Literature & rhetoric Literatures of other languages Literatures of East and Southeast Asia Japanese Japanese fiction 2000–
- LCC
- PL873 .U73 — Language and Literature Languages and literatures of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania Languages of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania Japanese language and literature Japanese literature
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