![]() Reviewers were naturally intrigued by the similarities between character and author. So unsettled is she by invasive questions about her lack of a husband and children that she takes in a lazy, abusive lodger just to deflect them. But Keiko, who is 36, a virgin and uninterested in the bourgeois lives of her married peers, excels at the pliant, robotic service demanded by the industry’s manuals. Japan’s 55,000 nearly identical convenience stores are considered stop-gap employers for job-hoppers, students, housewives and immigrants, “all losers”, says one of the characters in her book contemptuously. ![]() The novel’s oddball title character, Keiko Furukura, also relishes the predictable rhythms of her workplace. “I was so used to the rhythm of working that I found it hard to hang around all day writing,” she explains. Even after becoming a bestselling author ( Konb ini Ningen, or Convenience Store Woman, sold 1.4m copies and has been translated into 30 languages), she continued to work behind the counter until the attentions of an obsessive fan forced her to stop. She had toiled in them for half her life, writing most of her 11 novels and two nonfiction books in her time off. U ntil recently, Sayaka Murata, who won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa prize, worked in a convenience store. ![]()
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