Convenience Store Woman

Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (translator)

This weird and wonderful novel focuses on the microcosm of a Japanese convenience store and expands it into the entire world of our heroine, Keiko. She’s 36 years old, she’s never had a boyfriend, and the convenience store is her safe place.

Keiko’s entire life revolves around the store where she’s worked for 18 years. She finds solace in the repeating rows of products and the routine of her work shift. She takes pride in re-stocking the shelves just so. She cheerfully greets each customer with a perfect cadence, just as she was instructed in her training video.

Keiko consumes food and bottled water from the store almost exclusively: ‘When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.’

Her friends and family — a devastatingly normal sister, snarky friends, ambitious co-workers — don’t understand her: Why she doesn’t crave a more respectable job? A husband? Babies?

In her own way, Keiko makes sense; her world is compact but complete. Then a new employee invades her life and upsets her equilibrium in ways that she — and we — could never have anticipated.

As Keiko fights to get a grip on her true identity, we can’t help but root for her.

Fun fact: There are more than 50,000 convenience stores — called konbini — in Japan, and author Sayaka Murata still worked part-time in the convenience store that inspired this story, even after winning a prestigious Japanese literary prize. Convenience Store Woman sold more than 650,000 copies in Japan and is her first novel to be translated into English.

The audiobook, read by Nancy Wu, is a delightful way to be pulled into the story. Keiko’s first-person narrative is very expressive, and the way Wu gives voice to Keiko’s judgy friends is hilariously biting.

I love this moment. It feels like morning itself is being loaded into me. The tinkle of the door chime as a customer comes in sounds like church bells to my ears. When I open the door, the brightly lit box awaits me — a dependable, normal world that keeps turning. I have faith in the world inside the light-filled box. — Sayaka Murata

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