2026 Contributor
Essay
Nonconformity for Women
Keiko Furukawa is a 36 year old who is unmarried and has no children. She spends her life working at a convenience store, repeating the same routine everyday. The door chiming when someone walks in, the sound of the barcode scanner, plastic bags rustling, the heels of customers clacking on the floor. These sounds all blend together to make the convenience store that Keiko finds solace in. She enjoys the script that working at this store provides her, that she is trained exactly how to speak and how to act to customers after a life of never knowing how to properly react to a situation or socialize with others. She has worked here since she was 18 and hasn’t done anything else since, but the constant pressure from others to be normal by getting a husband or a better job is making her life difficult. People don’t understand her and look down on her for not doing what is considered normal, for not following along with the rest of society. Convenience Store Woman explores societal norms and the consequences of not conforming to them, and asks the question of why society judges those who don’t follow this path so harshly. Feminist values are told through Keiko not wanting to get married and not wanting to have sex, both of which are expected for women to do so they can bear children. It takes an extra look at not just societal expectations for everyone, but the unique expectations that are placed upon women as well.
The literary devices used in this story to carry its message are shown through various metaphors. For Keiko, her freedom and happiness is shown through sound. The very first paragraph describes all the different sounds of the convenience store blending together to make the sound that ‘ceaselessly caresses her eardrums’ (p.1). Keiko hears the sound of the convenience store even when she isn’t there, listening to the noises in her head until she falls asleep. She even compares the chime of the door to church bells. During the climax of the story, when Keiko is pressured enough to quit her job at the convenience store, we see the way her freedom is taken and replaced by the will of a man through how she describes the sounds. “Until now, the convenience store had always been ringing in my ear. But now those sounds were gone” (p. 141). This was the day before Keiko quit her job, and now she no longer hears those sounds in her head. “The long forgotten silence sounded like music I’d never heard before. As I stood stock-still listening to this, it was split by the sound of the floor creaking under Shiraha’s weight” (p. 141). The once comforting and familiar sounds of the convenience store were replaced by silence, and then taken over by the man in her home making noise. This man, Shiraha, is another person who society doesn’t accept. He met Keiko by getting a job at the convenience store to find a wife, only to get fired quickly for harassment. He uses Keiko by telling her if they live together, people would assume they were a normal couple and leave them alone. With this same logic, he convinces Keiko that she has to find a better job or she’ll be a foreign object that gets thrown out. Shiraha uses words like ‘the village’ to describe society and ‘foreign objects’ for people who are of no use to the village. He compares society to a village in the Stone Age because nothing has changed since then, according to him. “Society hasn’t changed one bit. People who don’t fit into the village are expelled: men who don’t hunt, women who don’t give birth to children… Anyone who doesn’t try to fit in can expect to be meddled with, coerced, and ultimately banished from the village” (p. 89-90). With this constant imagery of modern society not being any different from men hunting and women gathering, we see the way Shiraha views the world. Keiko doesn’t see society much different, but she likens society to be just like the convenience store. She says anyone who the store doesn’t need is fired, and to stay at the store you have to be a store worker. “In other words, you play the part of a fictitious creature called an ‘ordinary person’ that everyone has in them. Just like everyone in the convenience store is playing the part of the fictitious creature called a ‘store worker’” (p. 93). With these different metaphors, we can see the unique way both Shiraha and Keiko see the world, and understand why they act the way they do. These worldviews collide at the end of the book when Keiko and Shiraha are waiting for Keiko’s interview at a new workplace. Before going, they stop at a convenience store where she hears its voice again. At this point, the convenience store is almost its own being in the text. She says she can hear its voice, like music to her ears, telling her everything that it needs. She begins to fix areas around the store that aren’t properly stocked, according to what the store’s voice is telling her. She says, “I could hear the store’s voice telling me what it wanted, how it wanted to be. I understood it perfectly” (p. 159). Shihara tries to stop her but Keiko insists that she is a convenience store worker more than a person and that she doesn’t care if it’s abnormal. Shiraha brings up the village again, saying that the mentality of the village would never allow her to exist, that it goes against the rules and they will never let her do this without being persecuted. Keiko says, “It’s not a matter of whether they permit it or not. It’s what I am” (p. 162). Murata uses these characters and their metaphors for society to show her own critique on societal norms. The setting of the novel, as well as Murata being a Japanese woman, adds another layer of context, as Japan is a country that highly values conformity. Convenience Store Woman is a social commentary, a novel that looks at the abnormal and asks if it’s such a terrible thing to be different.
All of Sayaka Murata’s novels question societal norms, but she also writes with high emphasis on the expectations placed on women. The people in Keiko’s life, including her sister and people from highschool, seem to care less about her job choice and more about her not having a husband. They only think it’s okay for her to work part-time at a convenience store if she is married to a man. If you can’t find a better job, you can at least get married, they say. However, she isn’t married and she hasn’t even had a boyfriend before. “I’d never experienced sex, and I’d never even had any particular awareness of my own sexuality. I was indifferent to the whole thing” (p. 37), says Keiko. This choice to not have sex and to not get married ultimately leads to her never having a child. There are several lines in the book that suggest, or outright say, that it’s going to be too late for Keiko soon, meaning that she will be too old to have a child and she ‘must be getting desperate’ as if that should be her ultimate goal. Most of these jabs at her age come from Shiraha, who is plainly a raging misogynist, akin to the modern day ‘incels’ on the internet. His rants about society usually center around the fact that strong men, ‘the ones who hunt’, get all the pretty girls, and people like him who are useless, are despised. In the same breath where he states that men have it harder than women and to not lump him together with women who have it easy, he tells Keiko that she is secondhand goods, a useless woman past childbearing age, but because he is a man, he can still be redeemed. Despite the fact that he is also a person with no job and no wife, he jabs at Keiko like she’s worse. “Your womb is probably too old to be of any use, and you don’t even have the looks to serve as a means to satisfy carnal desire. But then, neither are you earning money like a man” (p. 105). If you’re not useful to a man or working like a man does, you’re useless. Both him and Keiko are people who aren’t contributing much to society, but Shiraha frames it as if he’s a victim of it, but Keiko is to blame for her own situation. He even describes his situation as society ‘raping him’ because he is the minority. Keiko thinks to herself, that despite him harassing women at the store, he compares his own suffering to sexual assault. “He seemed to have this odd circuitry in his mind that allowed him to see himself only as the victim and never the perpetrator” (p. 87). Shiraha represents the man that expects everything handed to him because he’s a man, like he is owed a woman in his life, and then blames society instead of himself when he doesn’t get one. A type of person who, like Keiko, can be considered a ‘loser’, but they are also very different. Keiko just wants to live her life without people treating her like she’s a foreign object. With all the clues we get about Shiraha, we can infer that the reason he is unhappy with his life is because of his own actions, and not some fault of society. While the book’s overall message is about nonconformity and the rigid expectations for everyone to follow the same path, that doesn’t mean that everyone who is ostracized doesn’t deserve it. Despite it all, Shiraha ends up living with Keiko, under the impression that him living there will make her appear normal to society, and that he just wants her to hide him away from society so he can’t be judged any longer. Despite the fact that he’s very clearly taking advantage of her, his claims about his presence keeping people out of Keiko’s business weren’t false. Keiko doesn’t even hide the fact that the man living with her does nothing, her sister is just happy that she’s normal, going as far as to say that she was finally ‘cured’, like being with an abusive man was at least better than her previous situation. All of those friends from high school, even her coworkers who talked about how terrible he was, were all extremely happy for Keiko. However, Keiko wasn’t happy. She doesn’t understand why her lifestyle is so wrong or what she needs to be ‘cured’ from, but she follows along with what everyone wants from her and quits her job at the convenience store. Shiraha has taken the sound of the store and her very reason for living away from her. She falls into a depression and loses the will to take care of herself because she always made sure that her body was healthy for the sake of the convenience store. Shiraha, her sister, and all the people in her life wanted to control her because they thought they knew what was better for her. Shiraha says that she needs to let him live with her and get a better job or she won’t be able to continue living like this, when he is only trying to use her for his own gain. The other people in her life just want her to be normal, to be with a man even if it’s hurting her. Keiko is a woman who is punished for behavingnon-traditionally and Murata uses this novel to critique and question the lifestyle that is expected for women to follow. Keiko’s reason for finding so much comfort in the convenience store is because everyone is equal there. She says that there are no men and women, just store workers. At one point, Shiraha claims that certain jobs at the store, like organizing and cleaning, are meant for women, but Keiko quickly calls him out on that. The convenience store is a safe haven for her, where she can escape expectations and judgement. The critique of these norms and expectations are shown through how far Keiko goes just to break free of those and feel like she isn’t a ‘foreign object’ that gets thrown out of the village. She would rather live her life as a store worker, instead of a human that is expected to be a woman.
Sayaka Murata herself is a strange woman who doesn’t follow the traditional path, and a lot of Convenience Store Woman is based on her own life, as she worked at one for 18 years, just like Keiko. She says, “No one said anything if you showed up one day with no makeup. It was almost like I wasn’t a woman, I was just a convenience store worker. I was just a kindly vending machine”, which is the same mindset that Keiko herself has. A lot of Murata’s works are based on her own life dealing with gender norms and feeling like all she was seen as was someone that could give birth or as a sexual object. All of Murata’s works also critique societal norms and contemplate the idea that adhering to these norms is more insane than not. Convenience Store Woman is the tamest and most digestible of her novels, and her other works are much more dark and absurdist. They have stronger themes of sex and pregnancy, which directly correlates to the declining birth rates in Japan and more people choosing to be celibate in response to the deeply misogynistic society. “Feminism is desperately needed in Japanese society today,” she says, “Some say that the worlds I write about are dystopian, but a lot of people think that actually reality is worse.”
Convenience Store Woman is not only a compelling piece of literature that brings readers into the strange mind of Keiko Furukawa, but it also asks an important question about society. What is considered normal? Why do we punish those so harshly for not being like everyone else? It is also a feminist novel because it looks closely at how society treats women and the expectations placed upon them. The ultimate goal for a woman shouldn’t be to marry a man and have his children. Women can be more than just mothers and wives, and they should be able to live the lives that they want to without society looking down on them, even if that life is just being a convenience store worker.
Works Cited
Allardice, Lisa. “’Marriage Feels like a Hostage Situation, and Motherhood a Curse:’ Japanese
Author Sayaka Murata.” The Guardian, 19 Apr. 2025,
theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/19/marriage-feels-like-a-hostage-situation-and-
motherhood-a-curse-japanese-author-sayaka-murata.
Murata, Sayaka. Convenience Store Woman. New York, Ny, Grove Press, 2019.