The author of Convenience Store Woman talks about working behind the counter, rejecting marriage and children, and her dark new tale of murder and cannibalism

Until recently, Sayaka Murata, who won Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa prize, worked in a convenience store. She had toiled in them for half her life, writing most of her 11 novels and two nonfiction books in her time off. Even after becoming a bestselling author (Konbini Ningen, or Convenience Store Woman, sold 1.4m copies and has been translated into 30 languages), she continued to work behind the counter until the attentions of an obsessive fan forced her to stop. “I was so used to the rhythm of working that I found it hard to hang around all day writing,” she explains.

The novel’s oddball title character, Keiko Furukura, also relishes the predictable rhythms of her workplace. Japan’s 55,000 nearly identical convenience stores are considered stop-gap employers for job-hoppers, students, housewives and immigrants, “all losers”, says one of the characters in her book contemptuously. But Keiko, who is 36, a virgin and uninterested in the bourgeois lives of her married peers, excels at the pliant, robotic service demanded by the industry’s manuals. So unsettled is she by invasive questions about her lack of a husband and children that she takes in a lazy, abusive lodger just to deflect them.

I thought, when I was this age, women and men would be equal, but that’s not how it has worked out

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