Convenience Store Woman
This week the girls talk literary prize winning Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata - an ultra-modern, hilariously deadpan examination of what it means to be different, what it is to truly find your place and the cost of conforming to others' expectations.
How do the girls get into such deep concepts you ask? Well:
- We start off with an examination of why Katie now wants BTS merch (oh you read that right)
- A detour through how Murata's gorgeously succinct prose reminds the girls of Ridley Scott's Alien
- How society accepts and rejects people like it's some gross wobbly collective of...wobbly stuff (the Alien thing might kept going here)
- Katie's first Woke Alert - a three minute a parallel between Keiko's copying her coworkers to try to look like a person and the effects of advertising on the general populace
- Chloe blowing everyone's minds with her unbelievable grasp of symbolism
- Thomas the Tank Engine and how mentioning it can break the tensest of situations
- An introduction to the girls' friendship charter (specifically the section referring to how conversations about food impact ongoing silent treatment)
Catch the full episode
More on Convenience Store Woman
The English-language debut of one of Japan’s most talented contemporary writers, selling over 650,000 copies there, Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction―many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual―and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It’s almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action…
A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine
More on Sayaka Murata:
Sayaka Murata (村田沙耶香 Murata Sayaka; born August 14, 1979) is a Japanese writer. Her first novel, Jyunyū (Breastfeeding), won the 2003 Gunzo Prize for New Writers. In 2013 she won the Mishima Yukio Prize for Shiro-iro no machi no, sono hone no taion no (Of Bones, Of Body Heat, Of Whitening City), and in 2014 the Special Prize of the Sense of Gender Award. In 2016 her 10th novel, Konbini ningen (Convenience Store Person), won the prestigious Akutagawa Prize, and she was named one of Vogue Japan's Women of the Year.[7] Konbini ningen has sold over 1.5 million copies in Japan and in 2018 it became her first book to be translated into English, under the title Convenience Store Woman. It has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Murata worked part-time as a convenience store clerk in Tokyo for eighteen years until 2017
For more on Sayaka Murata, visit