Introduction
Published in September 2025 as a paperback, The Convenience Store by the Sea is a slice-of-life collection of vignettes surrounding a store called Tenderness. Authored by Sonoko Machida and translated by Bruno Navasky, it is the first book in the series.
A Summary
The book threads together a set of lives that rarely intersect: teenagers, middle‑aged adults, and men at the edge of old age. Each chapter takes its name from a convenience‑store dish, giving the whole collection a quiet, everyday intimacy.
Writing Style
The Convenience Store by the Sea contains 6 chapters, each focusing on a different character, all connected by a store called Tenderness. The writing is very descriptive surrounding food and places.
My Thoughts
I really wanted to love this book, and I thought I would. A cozy, translated piece of fiction surrounding a small convenience store sounds right up my alley. However, this book took almost a week for me to get through - which is an incredibly long time for a book under 300 pages for me - and this was mainly due to the writing style. The writing felt extremely long and clunky, and this contrasted to the light coziness of the stories themselves in a way that I couldn’t enjoy. It felt as if the writer did not trust the reader to have an imagination, and therefore had to describe everything in order to curate their perfect idea. This approach isn’t wrong or bad, but it didn’t fit with the type of story being told and made for an incredibly slow read.
I also have to say that some of the short stories contained themes of sexism and misogyny that were never truly addressed. The short story between the retired husband and wife was the worst offender of this. How is it a feel-good ending by the husband merely realising his wife has dreams of her own? I believe that the translator of this novel spent too much time trying to perfect the imagery of the original and left out character insights that would have guided these stories to a more comfortable end.
Recommendation
If you loved Before the Coffee Goes Cold, but wanted it to have more imagery and discussions of food, then I think you’ll love this. But do be aware, this book feels a lot longer than the 288 pages that it is.
