The Novel: Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six year old 'convenience store woman,' is considered a disappointing oddball by her family and small circle of friends because she chooses to work part-time in a low-paying, unglamorous service-related job rather than accept either of the traditional roles — motivated career woman or stay-at-home wife and mother — that Japanese society demands that she accept. Keiko has no interest in sex, no interest in finding a husband and none whatsoever in climbing the corporate ladder despite the fact that she is exceedingly bright and is the holder of a university degree. Her entire life, indeed her entire identity, is inseparable from the job she does and the place in which she's been doing it for eighteen highly regimented, uneventful years. 'When I first started here,' she states early on in the novel, 'there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don't have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.'
Keiko is not lying. She literally has no clue how to be a so-called 'normal person' and never has. Her life has been a prolonged attempt to conceal her oddness from other people, starting with her parents and conventionally-minded younger sister. She's become an expert at assuming poses and adopting attitudes designed to make her 'fit in' with others, a process that began when she was a child after she suggested, quite logically in her view, that her family take home and cook rather than bury a dead bird she had found in the park. This off-putting behavior was soon followed by her decision to end a schoolyard fight between two of her male classmates by clouting one of them over the head with a shovel.
These behaviors, completely natural as far as she was concerned, made Keiko the subject of censure and taught her that the best way to get along in life was to speak as little as possible and, when she was obliged to speak in order to maintain the appearance of normalcy, then to automatically echo whatever was being said by everyone around her.
The quest to camouflage her true self and avoid the hypercritical scrutiny of the world carried over into adulthood, defining Keiko's life both inside and outside the controlled, neon-lit fishbowl that is the convenience store. 'I'd noticed soon after starting the job,' we're told, 'that whenever I got angry at the same things as everyone else, they all seemed happy. If I went along with the manager when he was annoyed or joined in the general irritation at someone skiving off the night shift, there was a strange sense of solidarity as everyone seemed pleased that I was angry too.' And her efforts to assimilate are not exclusively limited to acts of verbal conformity. She also copies the clothing styles and speech patterns of her co-workers Mrs Izumi and Sugawara, women with whom she has nothing in common beyond the fact they're employed by the same unnamed corporate entity and the three of them do their morning pre-shift exercises together each day, shouting motivational phrases in unison at the appropriate moments when prompted to do so by their manager. 'Good,' she congratulates herself one day after this tactic has once again prevented her from being viewed as a freak. 'I pulled off being a "person".'
This dishonest life, which Keiko accepts and to some extent even learns to enjoy, is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of Shiraha, a new employee whose poor attitude is matched by his slovenliness and air of scornful negativity. Unlike Keiko and the store's hardworking manager, Shiraha views himself as being too good for the position he's been hired to fill, deliberately flouting the rigid store rules by arriving late and talking on his cell phone while operating the cash register. He dismisses Keiko and their fellow convenience store workers as 'stupid losers… housewives who can't get by on their husbands' salary, job-hoppers without plans for the future, and the crappiest students who can't get better jobs like being a home tutor.'
Far from being offended by these cynical observations, Keiko recognizes them as the musings of a kindred spirit. 'He was really just like me,' she realizes, 'uttering words that sounded human when really he wasn't saying anything at all.' But Shiraha does surprise her by admitting that he only took the job to find himself a wife, an admission that leads to what becomes a frequently repeated rant on the subject of how a world that considers itself so clean and modern is, in fact, in the process of disintegrating and reverting to the Stone Age. 'The youngest, prettiest girls in the village,' he complains to Keiko, 'go to the strongest hunters. They leave strong genes, while the rest of us [ie. weaker, less attractive single men or 'incels' like himself] just have to console ourselves with what's left.'
Of course, Mrs Izumi and Sugawara and the store's other employees dislike and disdain Shiraha, accusing him of being a weirdo and referring to him as a 'creep' behind his back. They feel relieved when, having broken the rules once too often, he is promptly fired, assuring themselves that things will now return to normal because he's been, in Keiko's phrase, 'eliminated' from the staff roster and, by implication, from life itself. 'The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.'
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Grove, Atlantic first US edition, 2018
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But Shiraha proves much harder to dispose of than Keiko imagined. After attending a barbecue where she is once again subjected to the criticism of her married friends and their husbands for being single and leading what, to them, appears to be a dull and directionless life, she begins to think it might be convenient to have a man around not for reasons of companionship and sexual gratification but as another, even more visible means of demonstrating that she is, in every sense, 'normal.' To this end she invites Shiraha — whom she meets by chance on the street one day and visits a restaurant with, only to learn he's been evicted from the apartment he shares with another man for failing to pay his half of the rent — to share her own tiny apartment, her one stipulation being that he pay for his own food.
Shiraha is happy to become Keiko's new roommate, promising her that he has no sexual interest in her because he too is seeking an opportunity to hide from a world which does nothing but criticize and condemn him for making what it considers to be unorthodox life choices. Keiko soon tells her sister that she has a man living with her, an announcement her sister greets with surprise and unconcealed delight. At last, it seems, Keiko is behaving like a normal young woman with normal sexual urges and the desire to marry.
This is also the reaction Keiko receives from her co-workers when they learn she now has a live-in boyfriend. Suddenly they forget their former distrust of Shiraha and begin to joke with her about getting married and settling down. They insist that she and Shiraha come out drinking with them after work — something she has never done in all the years she's worked at the convenience store — unaware that her new lodger sleeps and eats in the bath and, true to his word, displays zero interest in the idea of having sex with her. Instead, Shiraha prefers to treat her like dirt while continuing to complain about society having reverted to the Stone Age. 'Society has reached the stage,' he angrily declares, 'in which not being of any use to the village means being condemned just for existing… Your uterus belongs to the village too, you know,' he reminds the perpetually unmoved Keiko. 'The only reason the villagers aren't paying it any attention is because it's useless. I want to spend my whole life doing nothing. For my whole life, until I die, I want to just breathe without anyone interfering in my life.'
This mirrors Keiko's own desire to live under the radar, as it were, and soon sees them enter into a mutally beneficial arrangement that remains unaffected by her co-workers and friends — formerly so excited to hear that she had at last found herself a man — learning that he openly exploits her. Better to be sponged off, their knowing looks and resigned shrugs imply, than to go through life as a lonely, unwanted spinster. Rather than contradict them, Keiko says nothing and allows them to believe whatever they feel comfortable believing, viewing this as another aspect of her initiation to the desired if elusive state of normalcy. 'I had the feeling,' she admits, 'they were all welcoming me on board.'
And Shiraha does the same, telling his own nagging sister-in-law — someone to whom he owes money — that they plan to marry as means of getting the woman off his back, explaining that Keiko is planning to quit the convenience store and find herself a proper job while he starts an online business and raises the child they plan to have together.
Keiko becomes swept up in this fantasy and takes the previously unimaginable step of handing in her notice at the convenience store. 'Over the course of eighteen years I'd seen any number of people leaving,' she recollects toward the end of her final shift, 'and in no time at all the gap they left was filled. The space I had occupied, too, would quickly be replenished, and from tomorrow the convenience store would carry on operating as usual.' Cut
adrift from the only kind of life she's ever
known or felt in any sense comfortable with, Keiko finds herself wondering if she should actually go ahead and have a baby, only to
be told by Shiraha's sister-in-law that she could serve the world much
better by choosing not to procreate and taking her 'faulty genes' to the grave with her.
Keiko arrives home to find Shiraha scanning the job vacancy advertisements and, a few days later, goes through the motions of attending an interview for a job as a temporary secretary that he plans to accompany her to. Having arrived more than an hour early for the appointment, Shiraha enters a nearby convenience store to use its bathroom, prompting Keiko to do the same — a decision that sees her instantly revert to her old in-store habits, obsessively checking shelves and rearranging stock while worrying if there are enough beverages in its refrigerator to meet the needs of the customers, many of whom begin to give her funny looks as do the store's legitimately employed staff.
Shiraha is disgusted to find her behaving like this, but for once Keiko refuses to be bullied by him. "I'm a convenience store worker," she reminds him when he questions her behavior. "Even if that means I'm abnormal and can't make a living and drop down dead, I can't escape that fact. My very cells exist for the convenience store." It's only a matter of time, we're led to believe, before Keiko once again takes her place behind the cash register, ready to recite the morning sales chant and greet her customers with an enthusiastic cry of "Irasshaimase! Good morning!" She may never be normal, no, but at least she knows where she belongs.
It's easy to see why Convenience Store Woman has become a worldwide publishing phenomenon and has now been translated into more than thirty languages. Combining brevity, dark humour and a highly intelligent dissection of what it means to be young and alienated, the book conjures up a world that is compellingly reflective of the contemporary world yet also strangely timeless and, on occasion, eerily unsettling. Murata examines issues of conformity, expectation and the role of women in society in ways that force the reader to question their own attitudes to these issues, using the convenience store — arguably the most ubiquitous commercial institution in the developed world — as a striking and highly original metaphor for human life — or, in Keiko's case, what she accepts as being her life — as it is experienced by a staggering number of people in the twenty-first century.
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SAYAKA MURATA, c 2018
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The Writer: "Since my debut book," Sayaka Murata told one of her many interviewers in 2019, "I have always been writing about women who are
considered abnormal. Girls who have issues with their parents, or girls
who struggle to live ‘normally’… Sense of congruity is a grand theme for me, ever since I was small."
Murata's own life could be described as being very much against the norm by Japanese standards. The daughter of a District Court Judge, she was born on 14 August 1979 and grew up in a suburb of Tokyo where she began writing at the age of ten, inspired by the science fiction novels passed along to her by her mother and brother. Like the latter, she was expected to embrace and accept the future her parents had planned for her. "It was a strict, old-fashioned house: I was told I was a girl so I
should learn how to cook or something… The expectations were all on my older
brother," she recalled in another interview published in 2020. "It looked really hard to be him — I’d have gone crazy."
Yet Murata did make the effort to conform for a time, becoming romantically involved with a convenience store manager — she began working part-time in one of Japan's more than 50,000 konbini while she was a university student and remained in the job until 2017 — and striving to present herself as a quintessentially 'cute' Japanese girl, an experience she later described as "horrible…I felt like I'd lost my will. It felt like being physically and mentally exploited."
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Allen & Unwin UK, 2018
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Shortly after graduating from Tamagawa University, Murata published her debut novel Jyunyū [Breastfeeding], a book which won her the 2005 Gunzo Prize for New Writers. It was followed by Mausu [Mouse, 2008], Gin'iro no uta [Silver Song, 2009], Hoshi ga su mizu [Water for the Stars], Hakobune [Ark, 2010] and Shiro-iro no machi no, sone hone no taion no [Of Bones, Of Body Heat, Of Whitening City, 2012] which won her the Mishima Yukio Prize the following year, an award that honors Japanese writers whose work is deemed to have broken new literary ground.
It was Murata's tenth novel Konbini ningen [Convenience Store Person, 2016] that made her a literary superstar in Japan, winning her the coveted Akutagawa Prize and selling 1.5 million copies before being translated as Convenience Store Woman two years later and selling several million more copies in the West and other parts of the world. Popular as it remains, this book is uncharacteristic of the majority of her work, much of which is dystopian in theme and sometimes contains graphic descriptions of violence and sexual abuse and depictions of women confronting the misogyny that remains an endemic element of Japanese society.
This is very much in evidence in Chikyu seijin [Earthlings, 2018], her eleventh novel and the second to be translated into English, a work that features another female protagonist who experiences sexual abuse and resolves her situation through violence. "The people who know me through Convenience Store Woman are disappointed [with this new book]," she remarked following the novel's hotly anticipated publication and subsequent translation. "But I was a cult writer before that success. People [who appreciate my older work] are saying the old Murata has returned."
Murata, who has not published anything since the collection of stories Shinko [Faith] in 2022, remains one of Japan's most popular writers, particularly among young women who recognise in her work their own struggles to obtain a greater sense of automony and individual freedom in a society that has traditionally compelled them to conform to an idealized vision of 'womanhood' created and maintained exclusively by men.
