Convenience Store Woman is the first of Sayaka Murata’s ten novels to be translated into English and this novel has enchanted critics who fell in love with the quirky, iridescent, and exhilarating weird story of a woman who challenges the social conformity of Japanese (and any) society against the fluorescent backdrop of a convenience store. This book has been a huge success in Japan and worldwide — although I have mixed feelings, it is undoubtedly an offbeat and charismatic exploration into what we must each leave behind to participate as a functioning human being in this world.
The protagonist of this book is Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six-year-old woman who is a self-professed oddball and the epitome of abnormality in a society that over-values normality and conformity. Keiko secures herself a job at the local Smile Mart convenience store at age 18 and ruminates upon watching the training video that “it was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech” — so begins her sense of contentment and newfound comfort in the brightly lit fluorescent aisles of the convenience store where she has finally “pulled off being a person”.
Half of the eclecticism of this book is embodied in the character of Keiko, a symbol of rebellion against the homogeneity and traditional values so highly upheld in Japanese culture. At 36, Keiko is unmarried and blithely indifferent to dating or sex, describing the condescension she experiences from the men in her social circle as “fascinating”. Her family’s concerns that Keiko is hurtling towards a childless middle-age with a dead-end job at the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart is met with nonchalance. She is depicted as bordering on the psychopathic, occasionally endorsing utilitarian violence; for example, when her sister despairs that her baby won’t stop crying, Keiko idly marvels that no-one has thought to stab it with a small knife. Her ability to anticipate shopper’s desires and to efface herself seems soulless and depraved, she believes that she can “hear the store’s voice telling what it wanted, how it wanted to be. I understood it perfectly”. The menial, repetitive hourly labour is depicted as a strange and alienating job but Keiko’s eerie cheerfulness to the routine and acute awareness that she is “one of those cogs, going round and round… rotating in the time of day called morning” is perhaps even more unsettling.
Herein lies Murata’s insightful commentary on the conformity of Japanese society, which enforces the idea that women marry at a certain age and pursue a conventional career path. Keiko represents the demographic anxiety in Japanese society, which has experienced falling marriage rates and low birth rates for years. The media have critiqued young Japanese people’s aversion to sex and romance (celibacy syndrome) and the past decade has also seen an increase in hikikomori — men who withdraw from the public sphere and retreat into their homes to play video games or sleep. In this society, Murata remarks that “the normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects, anyone who is lacking is disposed of” and Keiko reflects the grim post-capitalist disillusionment.
There is no Prince Charming who rescues Keiko from her isolated existence — instead, we are introduced to Shiraha, a lazy, reckless, and unreformed misogynist who gets fired from the Smile Mart as he refuses to carry out any of his tasks. He informs Keiko of his desire to find a wife to finance him, stating that “nothing has changed since the stone age, people who don’t fit into the village are expelled, men who don’t hunt, women who don’t give birth to children”. Keiko and Shiraha agree to live together in order to fulfill the image of normalcy. Although Shiraha also yearns to escape the homogenizing pressures of Japanese society, his entrenchment into uselessness, entitlement, and solipsism is garish and nothing about him is attractive. However, his presence in Keiko’s home enables societal approval, with Keiko observing that “It appears that if a man and a woman are alone in an apartment together, people’s imaginations run wild and they’re satisfied regardless of the reality.”
Although this novel is an international bestseller, it’s not flawless. The deliberately flattened prose feels immersed in a garish, fluorescent light with Keiko’s character coming off as robotic and disturbing. At times, the dialogue is artificial with characters explicitly stating what the reader is supposed to feel or draw from the scene. Shiraha seems to be more of a plot enabler than a fully developed character and Murata could have honed in more on Keiko’s psychopathic streak in the writing.
Despite these shortcomings, this novel is charmingly eccentric and the idiosyncrasies of the prose unfurl an odd, hauntingly beautiful story centered on the world of the convenience store and Keiko’s path to fulfillment. Murata does not attempt to create a light, airy novel — instead infusing the story with black comedy and disturbing details that derails all semblance of normality. Ruth Ozeki (author of A Tale for the Time Being) summed this book up perfectly, it is “quirky, deadpan, poignant and quietly profound, a gift to anyone who has ever felt at odds with the world”.
