Keiko Furukura is a 36-year-old Japanese woman who has worked at a convenience store, Smile Mart, her entire adult life. While everyone else her age is obsessed with getting a better job, getting married, or having children, Keiko is content to work at the store. To her, the store is more than a job—it is a calling. She considers herself “reborn” (14) after starting her career at the store, and she thinks that her “very cells exist for the convenience store” (109). The store offers structure and rules to live by, unlike the real world where nothing seems to make sense. Keiko knows she is abnormal by the world’s standards (and knows how she is supposed to act)—but struggles to understand why she needs to act a certain way. In the confines of Smile Mart, everything has a clear purpose: serving the needs of the store and its customers.

Keiko cannot understand conventional behavior and mimics her coworkers’ styles of speech and dress to perform social norms. She is observant and notices that others do the same in subtler ways. Because of the high turnover rate of convenience store employees, Keiko constantly absorbs new people into her own mannerisms (88). In doing so, she believes she can appear more “human.