Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata My rating: 5 of 5 stars Keiko has been working at the same convenience store for 18 years. After coming across the store during a university internship, what was supposed to help her pay her student lifestyle suddenly became a more permanent job. This momentarily gets disrupted when an incel tries to manipulate her into colluding against society together. Keiko finds her voice again and stands up for herself and for what makes her feel useful. It’s not stated […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]