Convenience Store Woman

Sayaka Murata’s “Keiko”, the protagonist of her book “Convenience Store Woman” is the “Smile Mart” she has worked at for 18 years and the store is her.

In my quest to read more Asian authors, my fascination with Japan and that I have brought myself to live in a city where a 7-eleven is always within 500 yards, I couldn’t have merely walked past Murata’s section at the bookstore.

The book explores, in a rather deadpan narrative, what it means to be normal. While everyone around Keiko Furukura has tried to fix her to better fit society, she feels more connected to the convenience store than what others expect her to be. Reprimanded for being weird even in her earliest memories from when she was a child, Keiko begins suppressing who she really is and instead relies on her sister’s tips on how she could pretend to have social needs and awareness. To be touted different is perhaps a suffering that many of us can relate to. In her efforts to be normal, Keiko finds a solution in copying her coworkers’ way of speaking, acting and dressing. The monotony of her life within the synthetic, structured walls of the convenience store is a step by step manual 36-yr old Keiko lives by. She takes care of her body and eats to be fit to work. She goes to bed early and dreams of the store even in her sleep.

For breakfast I eat convenience store bread, for lunch I eat convenience store rice balls with something from the hot-food cabinet, and after work I’m often so tired I just buy something from the store and take it home for dinner. I drink about half the bottle of water while I’m at work, then put it in my ecobag and take it home with me to finish at night. When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.

Eighteen years later, however, people around her are starting to wear her act down — as far as they are concerned, at her age she could do better than being a part-time convenience store worker, she should find herself a husband, build a family.

The next thing I knew, just like that time in elementary school, they all turned their backs on me and started edging away, staring curiously at me over their shoulders as though contemplating some ghastly life form.

Oh, I thought absently, I’ve become a foreign object.

Enter Shihara, an even bigger misfit that Keiko. He has decided that the society is still stuck in the stone age and refuses to conform to social norms. He convinces Keiko that living together will gain them social credibility and mask their supposed aberration. The results are quick and satisfying — from her sister to co-workers and friends, people are enthralled with the news of her finding a live-in partner. Inside the walls of her apartment, she treats him like a pet — feeds him boiled vegetables and rice, he sleeps on a futon in the bath, watches movies on his tablet, they barely interact. He lives off her and wants her to earn more money. He makes her quit her job at the convenience store. That’s when Keiko realises,

“More than a person, I’m a convenience store worker. 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.”

The book is hardly a hundred and sixty something pages and almost a breezy read, until one starts thinking about the social problems Murata is trying to highlight. She questions the idea of “normalcy”, of traditional roles and the legitimacy of finding happiness in conformity. A must read!