User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
Keiko has worked at the convenience store her entire adult life. But as she nears 40, the pressure to find a “real” job or get married is mounting – what sort of life awaits Keiko outside the comfort zone of the store and will she step out to meet it?
I feel like there’s a good novel somewhere in Convenience Store Woman but Sayaka Murata didn’t realise it. Her commentary on conformist society and the individual is inane and unoriginal though far worse is her muddled placement of the main character within that commentary.
It’s never explicitly stated but Keiko is obviously autistic. She doesn’t understand human behaviour, talks repeatedly about the mask/disguise she wears and takes her cues from her peers, mimicking their body language, speech patterns and dress to pass as “normal” – not that she cares all that much about being “normal” but she feels life is easier if that’s how people perceive her. She comes off as robotic and unemotional. She has no interest in sex or relationships in general. She works, thinks and lives mechanically. She even has her sister come up with lines for her to repeat in social situations to seem like a “normal” person.
She’s practical to a fault. An anecdote from her childhood (which also shows that her behaviour is not the result of working in a convenience store): two boys are fighting in the schoolyard, someone calls to break them up, so Keiko grabs a shovel and smacks one of the boys on the head, nearly killing him. She doesn’t understand – she broke up the fight didn’t she? Later on, her sister’s baby is crying and she briefly thinks that she knows a way to permanently stop it making noise and stressing her sister out. There’s no malice behind the thought of killing a baby, she’s just thinking practically without understanding appropriate social behaviour (though she knows enough not to act on it).
So I would definitely say that Keiko’s autistic, or at the very least somewhere on the spectrum. Not that anything’s wrong with that of course - but then what’s the novel’s point? Murata seems to be critical of a conformist society where certain jobs relegate people to cogs within a machine – dehumanised, essentially – in a society with far too rigidly-defined roles with no room for individual expression, leading to unsatisfied lives.
Except Keiko is happy to be a cog in a machine because of the way her brain is wired. And it wasn’t society that did this to her, she was simply born this way. She fully embraces the role of convenience store worker, as it’s clearly defined and therefore understandable. She could do without societal rules with its grounding in complex human behaviour, which she’s never understood.
Her character arc is non-existent. She knows her place in the world and she’s satisfied with it. She starts and ends as a convenience store worker. Something happens – which was completely arbitrary and never explained - along the way that takes her out of that setting but it only confirms her contentment with her lot in life and puts her back where she started. Is the point then that society should accept that some people are fine with/don’t care about “low” status? Or that the rules should be different for someone who’s autistic/on the spectrum, who clearly can’t handle/doesn’t want the complexities that come with more traditional ideas of success – high paying jobs, lots of material possessions, families, etc.?
I found Convenience Store Woman underwhelming as its ultimate message – you’ve got one life to live, it’s yours, don’t waste any time worrying about what other people think and live it the way you want – isn’t just a mundane, obvious observation but is something I took to heart years ago and I think is how most people live anyway. At least that’s what I took the meaning to be seeing as Keiko affirms her place in the world, regardless of what people think, and is more than ok with it. Unless it’s meant to be tragic as she tried and failed to “climb the social ladder” by getting a new job? But if she’s autistic, then she probably wouldn’t be able to handle anything else so isn’t she already doing the best that she can?
And that’s why I don’t think the conformity critique – if that was what Murata was going for – works well alongside an autistic character. Because conformity, regularity, mindless, repetitive labour, etc. actually fits an autistic person who can’t handle change. Maybe that message would’ve been more effective if Keiko had started out as a girl with hopes and dreams for a fulfilling career, a nice house, a husband and kids, and ended up a single convenience store worker. Except the novel is actually about how someone found their place in life right out of high school and has continued to be happy with it; it’s everyone else who has a problem with that.
So the novel is about a character who doesn’t change, a society that doesn’t change, and how both have found comfort in conformity, and the author’s conclusion to all this is… who knows? At any rate it doesn’t add up to much!
People seem to really dig autistic fictional characters these days – like the gay professor in that wildly successful yet desperately unfunny sitcom, and Don Tillman in Graeme Simsion’s bestselling The Rosie Project – so I can see why this would be popular. And Japanese convenience stores really are incredible. Their food culture is light years ahead of what we have in the west. Convenience store food is delicious and the selections are many and mind-bending – if you ever visit, you’ll be blown away with the treasures inside these ubiquitous shops.
Still, it’s generally a well-written book that’s easy to read and, for a novel mostly set in somewhere as ordinary as a convenience store and its day-to-day machinations, it’s never boring so credit to Sayaka Murata for that. Maybe it’s messaging is more relevant to close-buttoned Japanese society but I wasn’t impressed with it and found it left a confused impression. If it had been clearer and more focused, this would be a decent novel; as it is, it’s a jumbled mess.
Rating: really liked it
The moment I finished reading this story - I immediately wanted to know everything about the author- Sayaka Murata. WHO IS SHE? I was screaming inside about how WONDERFUL she must be.
This book is a GEM!!!!! Awe-inspiring writing — irresistible—and weirdly outlandish!
My gosh...I had the best laugh when I discovered that ‘our author’ —-one of Japan’s most exciting contemporary writers—[I AGREE,I AGREE] —‘really’ works as a part time employee in a convenience store. Talk about material for inspiration— Sayaka has first hand experience. Cracks me up! I love it!
I love Japanese Literature anyway ....and Sayaka’s storytelling is so marvelous- with humor - complexity of conformity- that I just can’t stop smiling about this slim ADORABLE - but ALSO VERY AFFECTING....( with sad undercurrents)...novel.
Who WOULDN’T enjoy reading this? I can’t imagine anyone not being consumed by it.
What stands out to me about our main character -Keiko (self- acclaimed different )- who has worked in the convenient store for 18 years, watching other university students come and go....and managers come and go....
is how deliciously self aware Keiko is. This girl is ‘not’ stupid.
I felt that even when Keiko copied the styles of fashion - and language
-jargon of others - demonstrating that she ‘could’ blend in—that mostly she was at peace with herself exactly the way she was. There are many ways to look at this story — the illusions about what society calls normal - and our human agreements about what’s considered a successful life or not...etc.
I adore Keiko. I hope the author writes more books about her. I’d love to continue to follow Keiko again. I miss her already. Honestly- I can imagine a dozen stories centered around Keiko!
The other thing that makes this book so special is ‘THE FEELING/THE AURA’ we ‘experience’. A GEM I tell ya, a precious gem! ......leaving us with much to think about!
*HIGHLY RECOMMEND*...it’s a quick treasure of a read!
Thank You Grove Atlantic, Netgalley, and Sayaka Murata ( I’m a new fan!!!)
Rating: really liked it
A quick and easy read with an endearing narrator who doesn't fit societal expectations of what an adult "should" be. There were lots of funny deadpan moments (like her constant shade at the incel dude), but ultimately it reflects conformist society and how people impose their ideals for marriage and success onto others. I think due to the simplicity of the story though, it hasn’t stuck with me as much as another book would.
Rating: really liked it
A quirky novel about a 36 year old woman who works in a convenience store and cannot conceive herself beyond her job. But this is also about a woman who doesn’t know how to be human in the way others expect her too. At times funny, at times sad, always compelling.
Rating: really liked it
I am somewhat taken aback by the quotes plastered around this novel that reiterate just how
funny it is. I have a dangerously weak spot for deadpan humour, but I do have to...worry about those to read
Convenience Store Woman and found humour in it. This has to be one of the most relentlessly depressing tales ever put to print. It's practically Dostoyevskian. I'm going to have double my mirtazapine tonight.
Rating: really liked it
‘
Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.’
In 2020 the “essential worker” became a hot topic of conversation. As the world shut down, the essential worker stocked shelves, collected trash, took temperatures and kept society going. Yet, for all the praise justly bestowed upon them, these are often jobs that are disregarded, looked down upon and don’t provide much of a wage. Sayaka Murata’s hit novel from recent years,
Convenience Store Woman is a darkly comic look at the life of--you guessed it--a 36 year old woman working in a convenience store and the many ways she is looked down upon by ‘normal society’. Having surpassed a socially acceptable age for the job and to still be single, Keiko is relegated to the fringes of society despite being a model employee. As someone who is also on the autism spectrum, she often has difficulties navigating what is considered normal, wishing there was a manual to life she could study and master the way she has the store manual. In this slim novel, Murata humorously and effectively skewers society for the inherently ableist and often misogynist undercurrents in socially enforced hierarchies and questions perspectives of normality all while also crafting a touching ode to essential employees who are doing their best despite our lack of care and attention for them.
As someone who worked in retail most of my life, this book really hit me. Keiko instinctively knowing exactly how to organize a display for optimal sales, charting your day around busy periods, picking up difficult hours when others leave, all these things are something I’ve lived and breathed my entire adult life. It’s always a pretty thankless job and something where being good and reliable at it usually becomes a sort of self-punishment when you get tasked with the more difficult shifts and added responsibilities and the verbal thank you’s are never echoed in your paycheck. I adored Keiko, and she certainly reminded me of people I’ve worked with, particularly when I was a manager at a Goodwill for a year. Each scene in the store breathed with life and felt true, an authenticity she was able to capture as Murata was working in a convenience store while writing the book. I could place myself in those back offices and felt deep in my heart the various employee reactions to corporate mottos and extreme instances about greeting each customer. While I’ve never shouted ‘
Irasshaimase’, which becomes almost a mantra in the novel, the scenes around it’s use in the novel really rang true within me.
It also makes me think of the way we treat essential workers and make it somehow shameful to be working in a role like this. I remember near a decade ago working at a Barnes & Noble and how often customers would condescend us, usually on a supposed “education” basis (for some reason this came up there more than any other retail job I’ve ever worked) which was always odd to me as almost everyone working there had a degree and several were currently working on a Masters. A few years back I was working as a bartender at a wedding when, after spilling a bottle of wine on myself some drunk father commented to his daughter right in front of me “this is why you go to college so you don’t end up serving people” I had a degree and was currently going for another at the time, but I had to smile and hand them their drinks (this sort of thing is undeniably worse when the employee is a woman or PoC and all the intersectionality). So I really felt it when Keiko comments:
‘When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that’s what a human is.’
This is a novel for the retail clerk, the essential workers, and anyone who has ever been made to feel less simply for working a job. Shoutout to you.
‘
So the manual for life already existed. It was just that it was already ingrained in everyone’s heads, and there wasn’t any need to put it in writing.’
Keiko is a really empathetic character. While it is never specifically called out, it would seem that she is on the autism spectrum. Right away she recounts a stories from her childhood where taking a literal approach to something someone says lands her in trouble--such as hearing “stop them” when two boys are fighting and therefor hitting one with a shovel--and describes her confusion in not being able to process why people were upset with her. Her childhood is spent visiting therapist after therapist with them and her family attempting to ‘
cure’ her, but for the life of her she can’t figure out what she is doing wrong. Luckily her younger sister is there to help her, with Keiko wanting her to tell her what to do, say, and how to act in social situations. And when she turns 18, she gets a job at the convenience store where she still works 18 years later.
The symmetry of 18 years is a nice metaphor for the dichotomy for Keiko as an employee and Keiko as a social being. Outside the store she is an outsider, while inside she is the star employee. The store does, however, give her an opportunity to observe how the “normal” people act and dress, with Keiko often adopting the mannerisms and clothing styles of coworkers she enjoys best. ‘
After all, I absorb the world around me,’ she thinks, ‘
and that’s changing all the time.’ As employees come and go, so to does Keiko’s mannerism, which she is embarrassed of when it is pointed out to her. In college I was also someone who absorbed close friend’s personalities, so I found the emphasis on this aspect of Keiko to be rather endearing. Keiko is happy working in the store, but society deems it beneath a woman her age and this push and pull between doing what makes her happy and doing what society deems acceptable begins to pull her apart.
The store starts to appear as a microcosm of the world for her. When new employee, Shiraha, shrugs off work, refuses to listen to his female coworkers and complains constantly (we all know this guy), Keiko asks him ‘
Um, you do realize you’ll be fixed?’ Keiko sees employees all as cells in the body of the store, and the defective or sickly ones are discarded and replaced. Such is the way of a store. She accepts that her pay is solely to keep her alive enough to keep working and is constantly aware of her need to stay healthy ‘
for the store.’ While this subtly points to how jobs don’t provide a living wage and keep employees trapped in the lower classes, it also makes her realize that she too will eventually be replaced.
When you do physical labor, you end up being no longer useful when your physical condition deteriorates. However hard I work, however dependable I am, when my body grows old then no doubt I too will be a worn-out part, ready to be replaced, no longer of any use to the convenience store.
The extreme ableism in a work culture such as this is perpetuating a class of ‘undesirables’ and outsiders. Keiko notes that this is how social life is too, and while she may still be a star employee, in her social life she is constantly exposed as ‘not normal’ and criticized openly for it. Keiko has no interest in sexual relations--shoutout to anyone who is ace, you are valid and I support you--yet constantly told ‘
deep down you must be getting desperate.’ To be an outsider, Keiko finds, is also to be bombarded with opinions on how you should live your life and to be always making excuses for yourself instead of able to just embrace your own being. ‘
The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects,’ she thinks, despairing, ‘
anyone who is lacking is disposed of.’ This is, understandably, a difficult impasse of an existential crisis, particularly for one who wants to just be themself and work their job with pride.
‘
The specific form of what is considered an “ordinary person” had been there all along, unchanged since prehistoric times I finally realized.’
This perspective is only amplified when Keiko converses with Shiraha who spends all his time ranting about how society discards the outsiders. Shiraha is obsessed with his theory of tribalism and that humans haven’t changed ‘
since the Stone Age’ of discarding the weak and outsiders. While he isn’t exactly wrong about society being oppressive, Keiko concedes, he himself is part of the problem (one of my favorite scenes in The Big Lebowski is Jeff Bridges saying ‘You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole”) as he reinforces misogyny and he doesn’t want to dismantle the oppressive structures but instead climb them to be an oppressor. Shiraha is essentially an Incel with his combination of sexual predator nature combined with a massive victim complex and is fired after harassing woman employees and then stalking a woman customer. He himself says he only got a job he considers beneath him to meet women. Like a Jordan Peterson fanatic, he views all of life as a masculine hierarchy set against him where the strong men get the spoils and men like him are oppressed, while also claiming women have ‘
a cushy time of it’ and regards them only as sexual objects to be obtained for social clout. He goes so far as to compare being an outsider among men as being raped.
I considered him one step short of being a sex offender, but here he was likening his own suffering to sexual assault without sparing a thought for all the trouble he’d caused for women store workers and customers. He seemed to have this odd circuitry in his mind that allowed him to see himself only as the victim and never the perpetrator…
This description tracks with philosopher Kate Manne’s analysis on Incel behavior as men ‘
looking for an unjust hierarchy to locate themselves on, thereby vindicating their preexisting feelings of inferiority and aggrieved resentment...a post hoc rationalization for an extant, and unwarranted, sense of victimhood.’
Despite Shiraha’s completely repulsive behavior and personality, Keiko sees how he may be useful. She can keep him ‘
hidden from society’ in her apartment because having a man live there will raise her ‘normalcy’ in other’s eyes. ‘
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,’ she says. Because he is homeless, Shiraha agrees (though adding that he wouldn’t sleep with her because she is so beneath him like the scumbag Incel he is).
‘
She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.’
Here we see how social norms are a frail playacting. ‘
I was beginning to lose track of what “society” actually was,’ she thinks, ‘
I even had the feeling it was all an illusion.’ What is sad is how once she has penetrated the illusion, her perceptions on everyone around her crumbles as does her world. The people she respects at work are revealed as gossips more interested in social interaction than doing a job, which is devastating to her, and her plans go inevitably awry. However, I found the conclusion of the novel to be hopeful and empowering, especially as it validates essential workers as being something to be proud of.
All in all, Sayaka Murata has crafted a brilliant little gem that quickly cuts to the heart of society and exposes normality and social hierarchy as a mere facade for oppression. This is one for the outsiders, the “losers” (as Shiraha is quick to call people), those making ends meet while rightfully believing they are still dignified. It is deeply and darkly comical but is written with such an earnest and light touch that it reverberates in your soul like the sun breaking through the clouds as you step out of work. Poignant, hopeful and empowering,
Convenience Store Woman is a winner.
4.5/5‘
I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality— all simply store workers.’
Rating: really liked it
This is a popular new book you have probably heard of. It’s short, almost a novella, by a Japanese woman author. The blurbs call it ‘darkly comic.’
Keiko is 36 and she has been working part-time in a convenience store in Tokyo for 18 years. She’s an excellent worker – a dream employee who loves her job – so much so that she even comes in on occasion, unpaid on her time off, to help out. She can’t even help herself from straightening things out in other stores she doesn’t even work in.
Keiko has always had issues – some would say she is mentally challenged or ‘lacks commons sense.’ Ever since she was a child she did things like this: (view spoiler)
[ at school her teacher was trying to break up a fight among some boys, so Keiko, wanting to help out, grabs a nearby shovel and hits one of the boys in the head. She doesn’t understand what she did wrong. (hide spoiler)] Yet she’s quite intelligent, good with numbers, and bright enough to understand how different she is. She thinks: “I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.” [The store employee manual that she was trained with about how to treat customers and what to what to say in various situations.]
Keiko is socially awkward and has few if any real friends. Her sister gives her lines to repeat by rote when people ask her why she still has a part-time job after all these years or why she has no male friends.
But suddenly she is befriended by a male former employee who was fired for laziness and a bad attitude. (view spoiler)
[ He talks her into letting him live in her apartment and she supports him with food and doing his laundry. There’s no sexual relationship -- he’s happy as a clam sitting in her bathtub listening to music all day. (hide spoiler)] He talks her into quitting her job to find a higher paying one and of course she is lost.
A good story with a predictable ending.
Photo of a 7-11 in Tokyo from www.ft.com/__origami/service/image
The author from wantedonline.co.za
Rating: really liked it
You learn something new every day.
Maybe sometimes that thing is a life skill, like how to drive, or something classically school-related, like how to speak Spanish.
I do not know how to do either of those things, but I do now know that I apparently like reading about convenience stores and the people who are obsessed with them, thanks to this book.
And that counts as something I learned.
I will now commit a necessary evil and use a word I hate but one that is perfectly able to describe this book: This is very "quirky." It is not quite funny and not quite weird but it is somewhat strange in a pleasant way. And that worked for me.
The themes here, of how silly and restrictive society can be, how the success of a life should be measured by the happiness within it - however atypical the source of that happiness may be - and not by whether someone has met social benchmarks, really worked for me.
Also they hit me at the right time because I am a single 23 year old who is not working in a field she is passionate about, surrounded by people 10-15 years older who are nonstop having babies. It is as if having babies is actually the job, and I have been maliciously fooled.
This also made me wish a time when I lived two doors down from a 7/11, which is not something I have specifically missed before (due to the fact that things like "being followed" and "being addressed against my will" were constantly happening to me within the confines of that store), but I am constantly to some degree missing that phase of my life so it adds up.
Anyway. This was nice and I immediately bought a copy of it so I can own it.
Bottom line: Life is bizarre and this book is too! But the former in a kinda bad way and the latter in a good one.
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pre-reviewmy 100th book of the year! what a good one.
review to come / 4 stars
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taking lily's idea and reading only books by asian authors this month!
book 1: the incendiaries
book 2: last night at the telegraph club
book 3: dear girls
book 4: sigh, gone
book 5: frankly in love
book 6: emergency contact
book 7: your house will pay
book 8: convenience store woman------------
currently in the opposite of a reading slump, when every book sounds good and you want to read all the time
Rating: really liked it
Keiko Furukura lives an atypical life. At thirty-six-years-old, she's a virgin and completely disinterested in romantic relationships.
She has worked part-time at a Japanese convenience store for eighteen years. Her family was thrilled when she was first employed because they saw it as a sign of her growth as a person. Keiko has always been considered peculiar, but the job helped her finally become an "ordinary person." The convenience store is "a dependable, normal world" where she's valued as an equal amongst her coworkers and receives no scrutiny about her personal life. Best of all, there's a written manual that tells her exactly how she needs to behave! She absorbs the personalities of her coworkers and uses them to construct her own "normal person" identity: "Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human."
Everyone assumed that the convenience store was just the first step in Keiko's journey to bigger and better things, but she's still in the same spot almost two decades later. The biggest sign of her evolution has become additional evidence of her deficiencies. I absorb the world around me, and that’s changing all the time. Just as all the water that was in my body last time we met has now been replaced with new water, the things that make up me have changed too.
Keiko's atypical lifestyle causes discomfort for everyone around her. She's such an anomaly! Her family and friends are always trying to fix her, but she feels perfectly fine the way she is. The only thing that causes her discomfort is everyone else's judgment! She has a stockpile of vague prepared answers to defuse awkward situations, but those answers aren't working anymore as she ages.
Keiko values her relationships and doesn't want to be cut off from her social groups, so she decides that it might be easier to just meet their demands. She doesn't even have to lie! She announces a life change and everyone fills in the blanks based on the standard story. Sadly, she realizes she never really belonged at all, even with the people she felt the most comfortable. As she takes a single step into normalcy, even her safe places become places of scrutiny.
Succumbing to one societal demand just leads to more expectations. Keiko notices that having a troubled normal life is more acceptable than having a content abnormal life.
“Look, anyone who doesn’t fit in with the village loses any right to privacy. They’ll trample all over you as they please. You either get married and have kids or go hunting and earn money, and anyone who doesn’t contribute to the village in one of these forms is a heretic. And the villagers will come poking their noses into your life as much as they want.”
At 176 pages, this darkly quirky novel is a quick read. Japanese convenience stores sound amazing! I never thought I'd want to visit another country and immediately run to a convenience store!
The language is plain and some of the concepts were mentioned repetitively, but I adored Keiko. She has a cold, logical attitude, but I felt so warm towards her (despite some of her darker inclinations)! I really liked the relationship between Keiko and her sister and how it evolved throughout the story.
This little novel also tapped into some deep rage! Keiko encounters frequent misogyny throughout the story. Keiko's experiences triggered memories of rude comments I received when I was a romantic late bloomer, during a brief stint at Taco Bell, and while I was pursuing an art degree. Even when I got a great design job right out of college, one of my professors responded, "Oh well! We all have to start somewhere!" Those experiences made me feel extra empathetic towards Keiko. The awkward scenes where Keiko is singled out made me cringe!
The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.
So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.
Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.
The convenience store mirrors life; the parts change, but the whole stays the same. Perhaps we're still trapped in old-fashioned social paradigms, even though we tend to see ourselves as more evolved than people from past eras. An innate "manual" is passed on to everyone for centuries: get married, have babies, make more money. Anyone who doesn't meet those standards must be persuaded to take the correct path or be ostracised. Of course, even if you meet those standards, there's always something else to obtain.
When it comes to making everyone happy, the goalposts are constantly moving! Keiko also notices there's always someone lower in the hierarchy. People who feel attacked find their own people to lash out at.
Everyone, even her equals, is vocal about what's wrong with Keiko and what she needs to do to succeed. Will Keiko be able to drown out all the voices and accept her true calling or will she conform to societal demands? Convenience Store Woman is a strange little book with an interesting protagonist! If you like this book, I think you might also like Nineveh by Henrietta Rose-Innes.
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I received this book for free from Netgalley and Grove Atlantic/Grove Press. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. It will be available June 12, 2018.
Rating: really liked it
Actual heart emojis burst from my aura the whole time I read this book. Hilariously quirky, full of social commentary that’s nothing short of brilliant. Savvy author to deliver a great conclusion just when the premise starts to wane. It’s a 3 hour read that will stay with me forever. Genius!
Rating: really liked it
I'm so glad I picked this book up at Schiphol airport. Loved this book. Something else. Haven't read anything like it. I guess it is all about what is the expectancy of society of what people are and should be. If you are different, you don't fit in and people simply won't accept. Keiko is a convenience store worker for years. And she seems to really like it and is good at it. But people don't understand and don't accept it. And they don't understand she does not have a boyfriend. Admittedly, she is a bit weird. But she loves her job. What's wrong with that? Do we all have to pursue top career paths? Is it weird when women are not in a relationship? Do women have to become mothers? Those are the questions I got when reading this book. Loved it. So out of the box, yes, indeed, quirky, even surrealistic in atmosphere. And sweet. Great story & food for thought. 4.4. More to follow as usual.
Rating: really liked it
I enjoyed the beginning but I felt like the author could have gone further with the social commentary.
Rating: really liked it
Such an interesting and different book. Keiko is different, not considered "normal" by friends, family, and co-workers so she tries to mimic what is supposed to be normal, just to keep everybody off her back. She loves her convenience store job, of eighteen years, her head and life hum with the love of her job. It's only when she feels she must change herself even more that she goes too far out of her way to be "normal" and her life falls apart. Yes, everyone else thought her life was meaningless and worthless but it was everything Keiko could want. And then she lets go of what makes her happy and it almost kills her. Thank goodness that Keiko finds herself and what is important to her, in the end.
Thank you to my library for the loan of this book :-)
Rating: really liked it
“At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.”
Some may view 18 years spent working in a convenience store next to those who will move on to other jobs pretty soon a failure in life. Add to that being a 36-year-old single and childless woman in Japan - and you can just imagine the pitying whispers of those judging you behind your back. But for Keiko Furukura this seemingly dead-end job represents the essence of life itself, the place where she feels she can successfully imitate being “normal”.
You see, Keiko has always been a bit different from others. Somewhere on autism spectrum, or so it seems, she has not been able to pick it subtle societal cues and arrive at societally acceptable actions
(for instance, she logically assumes that to break up a fight the most efficient way is to hit the fighting kids in the head with a shovel, which admittedly works but does not earn her praise). It is only in the store, dressed in a uniform, following a routine and cheerfully repeating memorized customer service phrases that she feels like
she blends into supposed “normality”, finally becomes a cog in the machine like everyone else, and forges her identity as the titular Convenience Store Woman. Keiko is excellent at her job, and in the rest of her life she relies on copying the manners and dress of her “normal” colleagues and on exasperated advice from her sister on how to navigate life situations.
“When I first started here, 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.”
All in all, Keiko is satisfied with her life. The issue is that the society isn’t satisfied with letting her go on this way. Society would like for her to be someone else - not single, not childless, not employed in a dead-end job. And if Keiko wants one thing in life it’s to be “cured” just like her family longs for her to be.
“The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.
So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.
Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.”
From glancing at the reviews prior to starting this book, I noted a few references to its dark humor, and the GR book description went even farther in promising “laugh-out-loud moments” — and that’s where I’m taken aback a bit as it wasn’t as much “lol” as “wtf”. To me, there was no humor - just angry seriousness of a woman forced to mold herself into something acceptable to others
(and to a point it’s ok - the point that excludes the head/shovel combo) and yet it’s not enough to fit into those rigid norms that have been deemed to be okay.
“She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.”
And to add to that all, she comes along a pathetic self-pitying parasitic guy who’d be labeled an “incel” pretty quickly by anyone even peripherally familiar with the term, who does not mind speechifying to manipulate Keiko while hiding his ineptitude and general awfulness under endless angry rhetoric directed at the society that supposedly oppresses him so much. And yet he still sees himself as vastly superior to Keiko, a woman, despite her being infinitely better than him navigating this weird thing called life.
“I considered him one step short of being a sex offender, but here he was casually likening his own suffering to sexual assault without sparing a thought for all the trouble he’d caused for women store workers and customers. He seemed to have this odd circuitry in his mind that allowed him to see himself only as the victim and never the perpetrator I thought as I watched him.”
————
“Up until now he’d been ranting about people meddling in his life, yet here he was attacking me with the same kinds of reproaches that were making him suffer. His argument was falling apart I thought. Maybe people who thought they were being violated felt a bit better when they attacked other people in the same way.”
If you’ve ever spent any part of your life working retail, you’ll recognize the attitudes Keiko has to put up with over her choice of work and life (I will never forget people who’d be either dismissive or speak with that exaggerated clarity that one puts on when talking to someone presumed stupid when I was helping them in a store in my last year of college, about to head off for my medical training; same people would sometimes advise me to enroll in college so that I could get a better job, assuming that retail was the best I could do). Same if you have no kids, or no partner.
It’s not even judgment but that condescending pity that is doled out by those thinking that of course you should aspire to something else than what you are and conform to the expectations without questions. It’s that assumption that you are defective in some way, even if you are doing quite well as far as you are concerned.
So all I want to say at the end of this story is - go be what you are, Keiko, don’t fit your life into someone else’s mold, don’t allow malodorous incels into your place — and don’t bash anyone in the head with a shovel or consider knifing a baby to make it stop crying. You’ll be just fine. You are a convenience store woman, and that is just fine.
Shine on, you crazy diamond, as Pink Floyd would say. Shine on. Because what the hell is “normal” anyway?
4 stars. “When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that’s what a human is.”
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Buddy read with Stephen.
Rating: really liked it
In Britain these things are called corner shops, even if they aren’t on a corner. My local convenience store is really not convenient at all. It’s small and cram full of groceries and all kinds of crap in teetering towers so you can hardly edge your way inside. When you are in if there’s anyone else there it becomes an uncomfortably intimate experience if you try to get past that person to the thing you want. Then there is the owner. He fixes you with a baleful death-glare from the moment the broken bell goes click clack as you shuffle inside. He is expecting you to rob him or shoplift or perhaps just knock down one of these towering piles of crap. When you make it to the fridge and grab the only thing you ever want from this shop (milk) he switches from baleful to mournful in a second and pours on the how can my family hope to survive when all you loathsome creeps only buy milk or a packet of biscuits or a packet of chewing gum? Do you consciously want us to starve to death? Is this your desire? He sighs sorrowfully over your single purchase. Then while cashing up he will begin his monologue which is entitled Why I Hate Running this Corner Shop. (You have to work 26 hours a day and it’s frankly no longer worth it but as he’s being doing this for 28 years now he’s not fit for anything else anyway no one will buy this business, he’s tried selling it, no takers, so this is his living death prison). You will stumble out (over the bags of cat litter by the door expressly put there to trip up the unwary) into the daylight swearing never to go back. But you do, when the milk runs out. It’s convenient.
Corner shops in Japan are not like this, not at all. They have aisles and are well lit and have friendly staff and special promotions which the friendly staff have been told to announce regularly throughout the day in loud but jovial tones : “10% off white chocolate all day today! Thank you for your custom!” with manic big smiles. Actually I’m not sure what’s worse, my miserable corner shop or the enforced Brave New World utopian stores of Japan.
In this teeny novel which I read in one day and still had time to do other things we have an Eleanor Oliphantish mid-30s woman called Keiko who finds she needs the rigid cultlike structure of her stupid dead end job in order to provide an exoskeleton of normality as she was born without the ability to figure out how to be a human being. Eventually though her family decides she has to grow up, get a proper job and get married. That part of normal is not, unfortunately, addressed in the Store Manual and so the fun begins. It’s a sad kind of fun.
But I do like novels I can read so quick that I finish them before I've listed them as "Currently Reading". Tolstoy could have taken a leaf from Sayaka Murata.
