Best for: Anyone whose life doesn’t fit the script. And anyone whose does, but insists that other’s lives fit as well. In a nutshell: Keiko is 36, single, and has been working in the same convenience store since she was 18. Family and friends want her to get another job, find a husband, and maybe have a child. Worth quoting: “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.” “The normal world has […]

Convenience Store Woman is a small story both in that it is about a single (individual) woman in the bustling metropolis of Tokyo and it’s also less than two hundred pages. I read it in a single evening in a single sitting, so fast my rear end barely had time to fall asleep. I was never entirely sure what I was reading, but I also didn’t mind my own confusion. The main character, Keiko, has worked at a local convenience store for eighteen years, half her life, and she’s never felt at home anywhere else. She’s never understood how to […]

At eighteen, Keiko Furukura, a strange, adrift young woman, landed a part-time job at a convenience store. It gave her a uniform, and an identity; more, it gave her a purpose: the dead-end job as moral calling. As others have noted, she’s a reverse Bartleby. Where Melville’s character preferred not to fulfill his duties, Furukura lives for hers. As she grows older (the bulk of the novel takes place when she’s thirty-six), her family and friends hector her: when will she get married, or get a real job? That she prefers not to do either never crosses their minds. What […]