Convenience Store Woman

On paper, Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata) isn't my thing at all. My dislike of contemporary literary novels is well-documented and while I appreciate the Japanese love of mystery novels, I'm not unusually obsessed with Japanese culture.  

Yet, it's a contender for the best book I read last year. 

Convenience Store Woman is a love story between a woman and a convenience store. Sounds crazy, right? Not in a totally ick way (like women who marry bridges) but with a hint of ick. Just enough to leave you unsettled, while also kind've rooting for it. You can't help but ship this woman with a place that sells sushi and toiletries, when that place makes her so very happy. 

 

Keiko is a thirty-something woman in Japan. A couple of telling stories from her childhood show how she struggles to understand others. She's too literal, to the point of accidental assault, and doesn't feel things in the same way as other children. The book never diagnoses her with anything, and for all her coldness (which sometimes edges on black humour) she is never portrayed as a bad person - she is consistently likeable. 

 

She is in more danger from the world than it is from her.

When she stumbles into a part-time job at a convenience store, Keiko's world suddenly makes sense. She knows where her place is, she understands how it operates, and the training even teaches her what to say and what expressions to make! She is praised and considered a model employee.

Years pass, and she is happy. She has a purpose in life, and it's to work at a convenience store. That means that she has to look after herself (to be fit and strong enough to work there). She eats convenience store food and drinks water from the store so that even at home, the store is still inside her. She models her outward mannerisms and appearances on her colleagues. She incorporates their speech patterns into her own.

 

During one comical scene Keiko describes how she chooses clothes - by noting the brands of a colleague she respects and then choosing similar (but not identical) items from the same company. It seems bizarre, even robotic, but when we break it down, aren't we all made up of stolen parts? Don't we copy mannerisms, and speech patterns, and buy similar things to the people we admire? We just don't do it so consciously.

For all that Keiko is happy, no one else in her life is. At thirty-six she should have a family or a proper career, and she has neither. Increasingly feeling the pressure, Keiko meets slacker Shiraha. He is sexist, smug, and unwilling to participate in a society that expects any sort of work from him. Keiko suggests that they begin a fake relationship, which will satisfy her family and colleagues, and will allow him to escape the world. She will keep him at home like a pet. 

 

It works - to an astonishing degree. Everyone is thrilled, and I mean thrilled, that Keiko isn't single. For the first time, she realises what an oddity she has been to the people around her, as they gush with delight over her relationship with a man who - just days before - repulsed them.  When Keiko's sister gets the impression that Shiraha is cheating on Keiko, her sister makes clear that this is still better than Keiko's former single existence.

For me, this story struck a deeply personal note. As someone who has serious issues around sexuality and relationships, and who was taught to never talk about my love-life openly, I know that I've been that oddity in every place I've ever worked. When I did openly date a man (as briefly and unhappily as Keiko) the flood of likes and well-wishes I recieved to my relationship-status update was almost comical. It felt like people were rushing to congratulate me for being normal. It's a painful thing to believe you were accepted and then discover you were a strange outsider all along.

 

For Keiko it's crushing. Her colleagues are no longer fellow workers but flawed people, who don't live for the store as she does. They invite her out to drinks (something they apparently regularly did without her) and gossip while there are important things to be done in the store.

 

What follows is a painful breakup between Keiko and her store. The last twenty pages are, in turn, heartbreaking and exhilarating, as Keiko tussles with 'society' and her own desires. The ending can only be bittersweet - whatever happens, our heroine must choose between a world she doesn't understand or a store that cannot love her back.

 

Sayaka Murata worked at a convenience store for many years, so the world-building is as richly detailed as you would imagine. Keiko's domain of produce and packaging is described in as satisfying detail as any ASMR video could achieve. She's a prolific author in Japan, but has only a few stories translated for Western audiences. Considering both this book and Earthlings were cult hits here, I assume more translations will follow. I'll certainly be reading them.