Taipei American School • English Literature
Sayaka Murata — Metacognitive Reading Worksheets & Section Presentations
Monitor • Question • Clarify • ConnectEach section below has two resources: a worksheet with before, during, and after reading activities — comprehension tracking, double-entry journals, and metacognitive reflection — and a presentation to guide you through the section's key ideas. Begin with the Day One presentation before reading Section One.
Introduction
Before you read
Day One: Introduction to Convenience Store Woman
Context, background, and the world of the novel. Sayaka Murata, contemporary Japanese fiction, and the question the novel keeps asking — what does it mean to be normal, and who decides?
Select a section
Section One
The Store Creature
Keiko has never understood people — not the way they expect. Then, at eighteen, she puts on a uniform for the first time, and everything clicks. The store gives her a script, a sound, a self.
Section Two
The Manual
Eighteen years in. Keiko has refined her system: absorb the speech of coworkers, mirror their gestures, assemble a self from borrowed parts. The store clock is her heartbeat. The rest is performance.
Section Three
A Foreign Body
Shiraha arrives — loud, resentful, certain the world owes him something. He gets everything wrong. The store spits him out. But in his outsider logic, Keiko recognises something uncomfortably familiar.
Section Four
The Costume
Keiko designs an arrangement: Shiraha moves in, providing the appearance of a normal life. She calls it clearly — a costume, a prop for other people's eyes. She believes she can wear it without being changed by it.
Section Five
The Wrong Music
The costume works — everyone approves. But the one space where Keiko was genuinely herself begins to close. She arranged everything rationally. She didn't account for what the arrangement would cost her.
Section Six — Final
What I Am
The arrangement collapses. The store is gone. And then, in a moment no one anticipated, Keiko Furukura hears a sound that answers everything — and the novel asks its final question.