Convenience Store — Literary Fiction

Dokgo, the “main” character, is a bit of an outlier: an unhoused man with self-inflicted amnesia who is positioned as beyond the standard ills of society and reacts as an idealized outsider might. He responds to physical threats in kind, and when his fists cannot do the talking his halting charisma smooths out a situation. or his guru-like wisdom or intellectual flexing solves the social puzzle as presented. He’s functionally a max-stat RPG protagonist, and you’re just sort of watching him decide via whim which way to solve each of the various subquests that pop up.

I am still a sucker for this structure, though, so even if the vibe was off, it’s still fine.

David DinaburgFebruary 21, 2026Short Stories, interconnected, translated, Korea, Convenience Store

The Convenience Store by the Sea

Without easy access to the totality of the original Japanese release of The Convenience Store By the Sea, I had to go outside the text to validate my suspicions, and, well, I guess DINK has a history as a loanword (loan acronym?), so that’s probably just there. If I’m keeping a running tally, it seems pretty unlikely currently that a professional translator is going to simply just insert the Americanized version of something into a text. Culturally, I hope we remain past the point where a translated novel is going to pretend it didn’t come from somewhere else.

David DinaburgJanuary 4, 2026Translated, localization, Convenience Store, Konbini, Bodega, ensemble