Sayaka Murata is the author of many books, including Convenience Store Woman, winner of Japan's most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa Prize. She used to work part-time in a convenience store, which inspired this novel. Murata has been named a Freeman's "Future of New Writing" author, and her work has appeared in Granta and elsewhere. In 2016, Vogue Japan selected her as a Woman of the Year.Ginny Tapley Takemori has translated works by more than a dozen Japanese writers, including Ryƫ Murakami. She lives at the foot of a mountain in Eastern Japan.
Praise for Convenience Store Woman: Shortlisted for the Best
Translated Book Award
Longlisted for the Believer Book Award
Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
A Los Angeles Times Bestseller
Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, BuzzFeed, Boston
Globe, Literary Hub, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Electric Literature,
Library Journal, Shelf Awareness, WBUR, Hudson, Bustle, Chatelaine,
and Globe and Mail
An Indies Introduce Title
An Indie Next Pick
An Amazon Best Book of the Month (Literature and Fiction)
An Elle Magazine Best Summer Book Pick
One of Vogue's Books to Thrill, Entertain, and Sustain You This
Summer "In Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman, a small,
elegant and deadpan novel, a woman senses that society finds her
strange, so she culls herself from the herd before anyone else can
do it . . . Casts a fluorescent spell . . . A thrifty and offbeat
exploration of what we must each leave behind to participate in the
world."-Dwight Garner, New York Times "Alienation gets deliciously
perverse treatment in Convenience Store Woman . . . Murata herself
spent years as a convenience store employee. And one pleasure of
this book is her detailed portrait of how such a place actually
works. Yet the book's true brilliance lies in Murata's way of
subverting our expectations . . . With bracing good humor . . .
Murata celebrate[s] the quiet heroism of women who accept the cost
of being themselves."--John Powers, NPR "Fresh Air" "The novel
borrows from Gothic romance, in its pairing of the human and the
alluringly, dangerously not. It is a love story, in other words,
about a misfit and a store . . . Keiko's self-renunciations reveal
the book to be a kind of grim post-capitalist reverie: she is an
anti-Bartleby, abandoning any shred of identity outside of her work
. . . It may make readers anxious, but the book itself is
tranquil--dreamy, even--rooting for its employee-store romance from
the bottom of its synthetic heart."--Katy Waldman, New Yorker
"Keiko, a defiantly oddball 36-year-old woman, has worked in a
dead-end job as a convenience store cashier in Tokyo for half her
life. She lives alone and has never been in a romantic
relationship, or even had sex. And she is perfectly happy with all
of it . . . Written in plain-spoken prose, the slim volume focuses
on a character who in many ways personifies a demographic panic in
Japan."--Motoko Rich, New York Times (profile) "As intoxicating as
a sake mojito, Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman is a rare
treat: a literary prize-winner that's also a page-turner. Its
heroine, Keiko, is an 18-year-old Tokyo misfit who yearns to be
like everyone else. Then she lands a job at Hiiromachi Station
Smile Mart, one of those enchanting Japanese wonderlands that are
equal parts 7-Eleven, McDonald's, and Starbucks. As Keiko finds
liberation in the self-effacing rituals of being a good convenience
store employee, Murata offers a smart, deliciously perverse look at
everything from how mini-marts actually work to the rules, many of
them invisible, that ultimately define our identity. And because
the book is bracingly brief, you can down it in one afternoon
gulp."--John Powers, Vogue "It's the novel's cumulative,
idiosyncratic poetry that lingers, attaining a weird, fluorescent
kind of beauty all of its own. The world of the store with its
dented cans and rice balls and barcodes and scanners, and Keiko's
shivery, unashamedly sensua
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