Keiko Furukura has worked at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart since it opened eighteen years ago. What started out as a college job continued on well into adulthood, and Keiko is fine with that. She understands the convenience store. Not only is she good at the job, it's the first and only thing she's done that has made her feel like part of human society. But as 40 fast approaches, her family and peers express their disappointment and displeasure that she's never pursued a "real" job, married, or had children. Suddenly Keiko is facing pressure from all directions to do something—anything—other than the one thing she knows she does well.

Because here's the thing: Keiko has never understood human society, with its confusing unspoken rules and baffling distinction between right and wrong. She learned as a child that it was better for her to keep her head down and power through life causing as little commotion as possible. The convenience store has been her ticket to inclusion and acceptance by society so far, but now the rules have changed again and she worries she must find a way to appease the pressure towards marriage and kids now too.

Convenience Store Woman was originally published in Japan in 2016, and an English language translation was released two years later. 

I fell in love with this book almost immediately. There's something about me that loves a slice-of-life style book, and it's always refreshing to experience life through the eyes of a character that isn't in a  high-powered, self-important job. As someone who spent close to eight years as a cashier, first at a grocery store and then at a fast food restaurant, I completely related to Keiko's dreaming about work. I too have heard the sound of a scanner or a drive-thru alarm drone on repeat all night long. I've dreamed of customers queued up in my house, walking through my bedroom one at a time while I, bleary-eyed and sleepy, weighed their potatoes and scanned their cases of cheap light beer and collected their payment. I've felt the elation of realizing I understood the inner workings of the humming bee hive of activity around me. I've also felt the disappointment when I realized most people didn't consider what I did "real" work. 

I enjoyed reading the perspective of someone like Keiko (who, while undiagnosed, seems autism and/or sociopathy-coded) who wasn't a serial killer or other sinister figure. Her quest to find a way to be useful to society while also feeling personally fulfilled was easy to care about and become invested in. While this was my first time reading Sayaka Murata's work, it certainly won't be the last.