Convenience Store Woman Study Guide

Sayaka Murata was born in Inzai, a small city to the east of Tokyo in Chiba Prefecture, in 1979. She began writing fiction as a 10-year-old. When she was an adolescent, her family moved from Inzai to Tokyo, where she attended Kashiwa High School and Tamagawa University. From 1999 until 2017, Murata worked part-time at a convenience store while also writing fiction. In 2003, her first novel, Breastfeeding, won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers (Gunzo is a famous Japanese literary magazine that has published work by authors such as Haruki Murakami and Kenzaburo Oe). As of 2019, Murata has published a dozen novels, including her domestic and global bestseller Convenience Store Woman (2016), about an oddball named Keiko Fukuruka who finds happiness as a celibate part-time convenience-store worker despite social pressure to seek romance and a higher-status job. In 2016, Convenience Store Woman won the Akutagawa Prize, a prestigious Japanese literary award given out twice a year by the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Literature. In 2018, Convenience Store Woman because Murata’s first novel to be translated into English (by translator Ginny Tapley Takemori); it subsequently became a Los Angeles Times bestseller and was awarded Best Book of the Month by Amazon.

As represented in Convenience Store Woman, Japanese society is very focused on pressuring citizens to marry and reproduce. The novel was written against—and may have been informed by—a backdrop of Japanese population decline. In 2014, Japan’s Health and Welfare Ministry released a report suggesting that by 2060, Japan’s population will have shrunk dramatically due to a below-replacement birthrate and that people over 60 will account for 40 percent of the country’s residents. The novel, whose protagonist Keiko and antagonist Shihara are both virgins in their mid-30s, may also have been influenced by the growing prominence of the “incel” movement in the 2010s. “Incels,” which stand for “involuntary celibates,” refers to people—usually men—who want to have sex but are unable to find a sexual partner. The online incel movement has become associated with retrograde views about gender and extreme hostility toward women, both of which antagonist Shihara embodies: he continually claims that men and women haven’t changed since the Stone Age, claims he has a right to stalk women if he wants to, and insults Keiko’s looks, fertility, and sexual inactivity because she is a female virgin in her mid-30s, even though many of his criticisms of her should also apply to him.

Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman (2016) tells the story of Keiko Furukura, a 36-year-old part-time convenience store worker who finds social norms baffling and is totally uninterested in sex. Murata’s next novel after Convenience Store Woman, Earthlings (2018), also portrays a woman estranged from its society and largely uninterested in sex as its protagonist: in fact, Earthlings’s protagonist Natsuki is so different from the people around her that she believes herself to be an alien. Yet whereas Keiko is naturally different from the people around her and her story ends happily, Natsuki’s difference is arguably rooted in her childhood sexual abuse and her story devolves into cannibalism. Murata’s work often focuses on alienated women considered grotesque by society; contemporary novels with a similar focus include South Korean author Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007), about a woman with violent dreams who tries to become a plant, and American author Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), about a young woman who attempts to sleep for an entire year. Finally, Sayaka Murata is one of relatively few contemporary Japanese authors to be widely read in English translation. Others include Haruki Murakami, perhaps most famous for Norwegian Wood (1987) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), and Mieko Kawakami, most famous for Breasts and Eggs (2019).