Convenience Store Woman (コンビニ人間）Sayaka Murata (村田沙耶香) Portobello Books 9/10/18

September 10, 2018

I got this book at Hong Kong Airport. I saw the review on “Convenience Store Woman” on LA Times a little while ago, and I was interested in reading it. The translation from Japanese to English is very quirky and funny, for purpose, I think. It sometimes sounds some of bad owners manuals in English we found in Asian products! The Convine (an abbreviation for a convenience store) is totally a Japanese culture! People take it as a sanctuary, a hang-around place, a restaurant (you can find basically everything there), etc.. Things are packed so neatly (as you imagine in Japan!) and everything is done according to manuals. The store opens 24 hours/7 days all year-long, and it is always clean and organized! So the character in this book, Ms. Furukura, loves rules and manuals. In all her life she struggled to fit into the society, and finally she found “Convine” as her comfortable place to be. She feels she is a part of the store. Her life is to work at the store, she tries to sleep and eat well in order to work well at the store. I don’t want to give away everything! You have to read the rest of the book, whether in English or Japanese! I liked the most about this book is Ms. Furukura’s family. They accept her weirdness and peculiar attitude, and simply love her. It is about the Japanese culture, but it applies to everywhere. How do we want to be an individual human-being? Everybody is different.