The pressure the people around her put on her to follow their life patterns, to change her job or get married, frustrate her. She has little interest in family or friends: when she visits her sister, who has a newborn baby, she compares the child to the baby of her friend Miho and feels that “there wasn’t any difference between Miho’s child and my nephew they were all just an animal called a baby”. When her co-workers talk about a colleague who was fired for unreliability, Keiko silently worries that one day she too will cease to “be a useful tool”, and wonders how she would structure her life without the safety and familiarity of the convenience store. Without the convenience store, she feels lost, trapped in a world where she is considered strange and unsettling. For her, the manual for working in the store is like a manual for life, telling her how to behave without fear of getting it wrong. However, it isn’t just that Keiko doesn’t want to leave: she feels she can’t. They express surprise at her happiness in what they see as such a menial job and ask her when she plans to marry and have children, but she is happy to live alone and continue working at the convenience store. She started working at the convenience store as a student, and enjoyed the approach to life it gave her so much that she chose to remain there, much to the annoyance of her family and friends.

This is something that throughout the novel, Keiko is deeply frustrated by.

They are viewed as an ideal place for college students or older people to work, but a role as a convenience store worker is not a career. Japan’s convenience stores are famous for their highly regulated atmosphere, and serve as one-stop shops selling small household items and snacks. Many reviewers were simultaneously shocked and enchanted by the protagonist, Keiko, and her quirky, literal narration Julie Myerson called her “sublimely weird” and “nuttily likeable”.Ĭonvenience Store Woman follows Keiko, a woman in her thirties living in Japan, where she works in a convenience store. One of the major public descriptions of Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman, when it was first released as an English translation in 2018, was weird.

Convenience store woman review