Convenience Store Woman

Convenience Store Woman is a novel by the Japanese writer Sayaka Murata, first published in the magazine Bungakukai in June 2016 and in book form the following month. It is narrated by Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six-year-old woman who has worked part time at the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years, ever since she was a university student, and who has come to model her speech, gestures and sense of self on the store's rigid operating manual because it offers her a clear script for behavior that the rest of society, which has always read her as strange, does not. Under pressure from family and coworkers to marry, hold a proper career and otherwise conform to conventional adult life, Keiko enters into a sham cohabiting arrangement with Shiraha, an embittered, equally alienated former coworker, in an attempt to appear normal, only to find that the arrangement threatens to take her away from the convenience store work that is, however peculiar this seems to everyone around her, the one thing that gives her life genuine structure and purpose. Murata, who herself continued working part time at a convenience store even after her earlier fiction had won literary prizes, drew directly on that experience to write the novel. Convenience Store Woman won the 155th Akutagawa Prize in 2016, Japan's leading award for new literary fiction, sold more than 1.5 million copies in Japan, and became the first of Murata's novels to appear in English translation, in 2018.