A female science fiction writer from Japan? Being no kind of science fiction fan, I figured I’d pass on Elif Batuman’s profile of author Sayaka Murata (The New Yorker April 7, 2025). But as a faithful New Yorker reader, I give every article a chance to grab my attention. Three paragraphs in, I was hooked.

Sayaka Murata is a unique person by any standard. Quirky at the very least. Likely bizarre. Certainly diagnosable in our label-infatuated era. A Woman on the Spectrum. Ms. Murata is one of Japan’s most celebrated authors, yet continues to work part-time in a convenience store, as she’s done since college, as does the heroine of her most famous novel, Convenience Store Woman.

How can a convenience store be a setting for science fiction? The genre is premised on creating alternative worlds, while convenience stores are firmly rooted in this one. Actually, they’re so much a part of our world as to be almost invisible. Convenience stores are ubiquitous. Neither landmark nor eyesore, we drive by them without seeing them. Until we need gas or a soda or a chili dog, in which case we avail ourselves of their service. But we don’t engage with them. We don’t credit notable experiences to them. They are functional components of lives that we live in other places, at other times. Convenience stores are so of-the-moment that our moments in them don’t even register.

According to Ms. Batuman, Sayaka Murata’s writing is science fiction because she creates other worlds out of the one we actually inhabit. How? By subverting the assumed priorities of our society. By questioning the things that we do not question. Children. Career. Love. Honor. What are humans like who do not (pretend to) esteem these things?

Keiko knows from an early age that she’s odd. Vignettes of her youth, sprinkled through the narrative, illustrate a child without empathy—at least not as conventionally defined. When she and classmates come upon a struggling bird, that dies, she does not understand why they go through a ritual burial. Why not eat the bird? Her father likes quail! Time and again she is told that she’s strange, but the root cause of her problem eludes her. Her world is internally consistent to her, so she does not understand the faults others cannot overlook.

Thus, Convenience Store Woman is a much more frightening science fiction than the conventional kind. The alternative world is embedded in our own, and the alien is the daughter, the sister, the coworker among us, chortling a corporately scripted greeting with far too much enthusiasm than entering a convenience store deserves.

When Kieko, as a college student, first takes a part-tome job in a convenience store, her family and acquaintances (it would be a stretch to report she has any real friends) applaud her initiative. Eighteen years later, long-ago graduated, still single, still working part-time in the convenience store, she is considered an utter failure. Keiko lives for the convenience store. The rhythm of the register, the ebb and flow of daily customers, the critical importance of every display, every special, every sales goal met and exceeded. Fellow workers are her teammates; she molds herself however necessary for ultimate convenience success. Life beyond her always-open sanctuary…falls flat.

Since this is a novel, change must occur. A true loser enters her world. A convenience store failure, who cannot muster the necessary enthusiasm to greet and clean and stock and submit himself to the dreary customers. Shiraha falls through life’s cracks, and eventually winds up sharing Kieko’s tiny apartment, hiding from the world.

The specifics of their cohabitation, quirky and humorous to the reader, are exciting to the outer world. Keiko’s finally has a man! She’s moving on! She’ll get married! She can leave the convenience store, get a real job, raise a family!

I will offer no spoiler. You’ll have to read Convenience Store Woman yourself to find out what happens. What I will say is that, this simple, 2-3 hour read, is one of the most provocative books I’ve read. But I will offer this: how often in science fiction does the human world supersede the alien one? Never. Which begs the question of which world is more real. The ever bright, predictable, neatly packaged convenience store. Or the detritus beyond