![]() ![]() Keiko is a blank slate she holds the world at prophylactic remove. (“Oh thank heaven,” ran the American ads for 7-Eleven.) It’s a Pop Art kind of convent, as if designed by Jeff Koons and lit 24 hours a day by the strobe flashes of a bank of Weegees. She is a sort of wimple-free nun, the Smile Mart her convent. She’s worked in the store for 18 years, which is about 17 years longer than the average Smile Mart employee hangs around. ![]() ![]() ![]() Its heroine, Keiko, is 36, essentially friendless, a virgin and contented. “Convenience Store Woman” has touched a chord in Japan, where it has sold close to 600,000 copies. On certain days, one understands this impulse. She becomes an anonymous, long-term employee of the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, a convenience store, a kiosk for her floating soul, where she finds it easier to shout “Irasshaimase!” (“Welcome!”) and “Hai!” (“Yes!”) all day than to have more complicated human contact. So said Rita Dove in a poem called “Best Western Motor Lodge, AAA Approved.” In Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman,” a small, elegant and deadpan novel from Japan, a woman senses that society finds her strange, so she culls herself from the herd before anyone else can do it. If you feel strange, strange things will happen to you. ![]()
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