Convenience Store Woman
by Sayaka Murata
She loves her convenience store job. Society has a problem with that.
For you if
you've ever been told that the life you've built for yourself is wrong because it doesn't look like everyone else's
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Keiko is 36, has worked in the same convenience store for eighteen years, and is completely content. Her family and friends are not. They keep trying to fix her — find her a husband, get her a career, make her normal. Murata uses Keiko's serene refusal to be fixed as a dispatch from inside Japanese social conformity — the immense pressure to perform the correct life, to want the correct things, to become the correct person. Short, funny, quietly devastating. The most subversive Japanese novel on this shelf precisely because it refuses to treat its narrator as a problem.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Japan • East Asia
- Voice
- Written by a Japanese author
- Themes
- belongingconformity
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
Idiocracy(2006)
dir. Mike Judge
Anti-intellectualism, played out five centuries ahead.
An average man wakes from hibernation 500 years in the future to find humanity's intelligence has collapsed so far that he's now the smartest person alive.
Why it’s here: A dumb comedy about the actual thing this whole catalog exists to resist — what happens when a culture stops valuing thinking at all. Funnier and more direct about anti-intellectualism than most films that take the subject seriously.
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For the family bookshelf
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