Convenience Store Woman

Keiko Furukura has worked in a convenience store for 18 years. It is the only part of her life that gives her meaning and purpose, predictability and certainty. Keiko's eternal struggle is to appear normal to the people around her to gain acceptance. Keiko does this by paying close attention to social norms and cues, and her attention to detail makes her mask and camouflage adequately.
This short novella explores a lot in its brief pages: the reliance on and comfort to be found in the predictability of consumer capitalist culture, alexithymia, neurodivergence (perhaps Keiko is autistic or lives with antisocial personality disorder?), agency, meaning and purpose, social and gender norms, asexuality and aromanticism, heteronormativity, incel culture and toxic masculinity.

Murata's talent seems to be in revealing how experiences or thoughts a reader may think are unique or individual, even unusual, are actually symptomatic of something more universal and human.

I really liked the ending of the story. Keiko's ultimate empowerment challenges us to rejoice in her rejection of and escape from toxic masculinity and expected gender roles, and yet we feel eerily haunted by her finding salvation and delight in being a cog in the consumer capitalist machine - a role in which she accepts and delights in having no gender and being closer to animal than human.
But are these latter feelings inherent to Keiko or are they really a product of her social exclusion and alienation?
Ugh there's so much to unpack here, and that it Murata's brilliance: starting a conversation.