Convenience Store Woman

Keiko Furukura has never fit the mold society keeps holding up to her. At thirty-six, she has worked part-time at the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years, and it is the one place where she knows exactly who to be: the store's manual tells her how to speak, how to move, how to smile, and in following it she feels calm, useful, and whole.

But the people around her — her family, her old classmates, her coworkers — cannot understand a grown woman with no career and no husband, and their concern curdles into pressure. To quiet them, Keiko strikes an uneasy arrangement with Shiraha, a bitter, freeloading man who offers her a shortcut to looking "normal," even as it threatens the fragile life she has built.

Sayaka Murata's sharp, deadpan, internationally beloved novel is a wry and unsettling study of conformity, work, and what it costs to be yourself in a world that insists everyone must be the same.