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Paper short abstract

This presentation examines Konbini Ningen through the lens of invisible disability, arguing that Keiko’s sustained performance of normality and movement between convenience stores signal permanent liminality rather than autonomy.

Paper long abstract

Murata Sayaka is a prominent contemporary voice in Japanese literature whose work engages with the social pressures and normative expectations of everyday life in Japan. Her novel Konbini Ningen (Convenience Store Woman), which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2016, has attracted sustained attention both in Japan and internationally. Since its English translation in 2018, the novel has generated a growing body of scholarship, yet remains open to other critical perspectives. This presentation examines one such perspective, that of invisible disability.

Konbini Ningen follows Furukura Keiko, a 36-year-old woman who has worked for eighteen years in a convenience store she describes as a “brightly lit box.” Through episodic recollections from childhood to adulthood, the narrative presents behaviors and cognitive patterns that suggest neurodivergence. As an adult, Keiko learns to mask these traits by imitating the speech patterns, gestures, and emotional responses of those around her, performing normality with guidance from her sister. Despite sustained efforts to conform to socially sanctioned expectations and to lead what is perceived as a “normal” life, Keiko eventually leaves her workplace and later ends up working at another convenience store, foregrounding both the exhaustion produced by continuous performative labor and the limits of social accommodation.

Drawing on disability studies and Japanese literary scholarship, this presentation reads Keiko’s neurodivergence as an invisible disability, one that may be understood in relation to autism without relying on formal diagnosis.

Rather than being recognized as disabled, Keiko is repeatedly othered as “not normal” through everyday interactions, revealing how invisible disabilities often become legible only through moments of social misrecognition. The presentation challenges celebratory readings that interpret Keiko’s decision to work at a convenience store as an act of radical autonomy or creative self-fashioning. Instead, it argues that her movement from one convenience store to another signals a condition of permanent liminality, in which Keiko is neither fully assimilated into normative society nor meaningfully accommodated within it. The convenience store thus functions as a space that contains and regulates her difference without recognizing it, producing an ongoing cycle of containment rather than resolution.