Many of us living in Japan are regular combini customers, but how many of us have ever considered what it would be like to work there? This is exactly the question Convenience Store Woman explores.
Selling everything from daily necessities to services such as printing, combinis are thought to be a modern-day version of the yorozuya (a “store which sells everything”). This is not surprising, given that there are over 50,000 of them across the country. But what I found so captivating about this novel was not the protagonist’s strange personality or the society it portrays, but its focus on a perspective which, until now, has gone unnoticed: the other side of the combini counter.įor anyone who has ever been to Japan, combinis are a familiar sight found on nearly every street corner. Through its portrayal of Keiko and those around her, Convenience Store Woman depicts several issues facing Japanese society today: the pressure to conform, labor shortages, and a decreasing marriage rate, coupled with the growing number of unmarried singletons. The Japanese title is more accurately translated as “Convenience Store Human ,” which got me wondering why Western readers were so fixated on the protagonist’s femininity. I first heard about the English version of Convenience Store Woman (Grove Press, 2018) translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, but on reading the Japanese version what struck me before I had even turned the first page was the difference in title. As such, translated works offer a fascinating insight into a society which is often very different from our own.Ĭonvenience Store Woman tells the tale of 36-year-old combini (convenience store) worker Keiko Furukawa, a lifelong dokushinsha (singleton) who has always felt out of place in society.
Besides the language barrier, one of the main reasons for this is the cultural difference. When Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman came out in English in 2018, it was an immediate hit, selling over 650,000 copies and winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.Īlthough Japanese writers such as Haruki Murakami and the British-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro have steadily gained popularity in the West, contemporary Japanese literature remains rare in the English-speaking world.
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