![]() Through its portrayal of Keiko and those around her, Convenience Store Woman depicts several issues facing Japanese society today: the pressure to conform, labor shortages, and a decreasing marriage rate, coupled with the growing number of unmarried singletons. The Japanese title is more accurately translated as “Convenience Store Human ,” which got me wondering why Western readers were so fixated on the protagonist’s femininity. ![]() I first heard about the English version of Convenience Store Woman (Grove Press, 2018) translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, but on reading the Japanese version what struck me before I had even turned the first page was the difference in title. As such, translated works offer a fascinating insight into a society which is often very different from our own.Ĭonvenience Store Woman tells the tale of 36-year-old combini (convenience store) worker Keiko Furukawa, a lifelong dokushinsha (singleton) who has always felt out of place in society. Besides the language barrier, one of the main reasons for this is the cultural difference. ![]() ![]() ![]() When Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman came out in English in 2018, it was an immediate hit, selling over 650,000 copies and winning the prestigious Akutagawa Prize.Īlthough Japanese writers such as Haruki Murakami and the British-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro have steadily gained popularity in the West, contemporary Japanese literature remains rare in the English-speaking world. ![]()
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