If you feel strange, strange things will happen to you. So said Rita Dove in a poem called “Best Western Motor Lodge, AAA Approved.” In Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman,” a small, elegant and deadpan novel from Japan, a woman senses that society finds her strange, so she culls herself from the herd before anyone else can do it. She becomes an anonymous, long-term employee of the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, a convenience store, a kiosk for her floating soul, where she finds it easier to shout “Irasshaimase!” (“Welcome!”) and “Hai!” (“Yes!”) all day than to have more complicated human contact. On certain days, one understands this impulse.

“Convenience Store Woman” has touched a chord in Japan, where it has sold close to 600,000 copies. Its heroine, Keiko, is 36, essentially friendless, a virgin and contented. She’s worked in the store for 18 years, which is about 17 years longer than the average Smile Mart employee hangs around. She is a sort of wimple-free nun, the Smile Mart her convent. (“Oh thank heaven,” ran the American ads for 7-Eleven.) It’s a Pop Art kind of convent, as if designed by Jeff Koons and lit 24 hours a day by the strobe flashes of a bank of Weegees.

Keiko is a blank slate; she holds the world at prophylactic remove. She thinks: “I want to be a useful tool” and “Good, I pulled off being a ‘person’.” A thumb drive in human form, she tells us: “It feels like ‘morning’ itself is being loaded into me.” Keiko eats most of her meals at the Smile Mart. (The food at Japanese convenience stores is miles above the Hot Pocket cuisine in ours.) “When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store,” she says, “I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.” If you are what you eat, Keiko is a vegetarian wonton, minus the vegetables.