Reviewing 'Convenience Store Woman' by Sayaka Murata

Reviewing Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Heads up, there are no spoilers in this review!

However, I think I could probably spoil the ending for you and it wouldn’t make you enjoy the book any less. For me, this is one of those novels that you read as much for the tone and the reassuring voice of the protagonist as you do for the story. I’m used to sifting through text quickly to find the information I need- I’m sure I’m not alone in this and I’m blaming technology. I’ve even got into the habit of skim-reading when I’m reading for fun, and never making it to the end of a sentence. This didn’t happen for me with Convenience Store Woman.

Set in twenty-first century Japan, the story centres around Keiko, a thirty-six-year-old convenience store worker who has been working in the same shop since she was eighteen. This renders her something of an oddity in the eyes her friends and acquaintances, for they cannot fathom how a woman of Keiko’s age can allow her life to pass by doing only menial work, living cheaply with no husband or child to care for. However, Keiko is content live her life in this way. To her, the convenience store is not simply a place of work but a refuge from the confusion and judgement which she feels subject to in her daily life. Here, it is never taken for granted that Keiko already knows how she should speak and behave; she is taught how to become the epitome of subservience, and relishes her working hours, the time when she takes her place as a cog in the well-oiled machine of the Japanese service industry.

She’s a weird one, Keiko. She is, for the most part, rather passive and docile in nature, but there is an undercurrent of violence to her character, which appears only a few times but is unnerving in each. For example, as her sister rocks Keiko’s wailing infant nephew, Keiko eyes a knife and reflects that ‘if it was just a matter of making him quiet, it would be easy enough’. She is never malicious, however. Keiko is a character entirely stripped of nuance; for her, everything action is a means to an end. So, a knife is a solution to a noisy child. Likewise, she prepares herself plain rice and vegetables each evening, eating so that she may arrive at work the next day well-nourished and ready to serve.

Despite this lack of nuance, however, Keiko is incredibly aware of herself and her surroundings. It hasn’t escaped her notice that those around her regard her as an oddity or that her strangeness makes them uncomfortable, and she spends a great deal of her time concocting stories with her sister to make herself and her situation more acceptable in the eyes of society. So, when people ask her why she is content to remain working at the convenience store, she lies and tells them that her health prevents her from working anywhere else. For a few years, the lie works and allows Keiko to mix with others, passing for ‘normal’. But inevitably, the disguise wears thin and people begin to ask questions with a brashness that even socially-clueless Keiko finds rude. In this respect, I’ve never related to a character more, because it’s so true, if you aren’t doing exactly what everyone else thinks you ought to be doing, you are often treated like some problem that needs to be fixed. I found myself nodding and rolling my eyes as Keiko exposes the hypocrisy of her friends, for while they pretend they are concerned only for her well-being, they do not want to hear that Keiko is happy and healthy; they want to hear that she is a miserable, unfulfilled invalid. This novel will hit so close to home if you’ve ever experienced others making suggestions over the top of your head about what needs to be done to make you more normal.

It's tempting to read Keiko as a product of the convenience store, and therefore as a metaphoric representation of the evil effects of life in a consumerist society; the view could be taken that Keiko’s humanity has shrivelled and faded with from her many years of service to the materialistic whims to its subjects. However, the further I got into the story, the less I felt that this was the case. Rather than Keiko being a product of the convenience store, it could instead be that the convenience store comes into being to meet the needs of the social outcasts such as Keiko. In her review in The New Yorker, Katy Waldman describes the novel as ‘a love story between a misfit and a store’, and this is the way that I like to look at it. In world in which Keiko is buffeted from one set of judgemental eyes to the next, the convenience store is the only place which accepts Keiko as she is, kindly reducing her to a pair of functioning legs, arms strong enough to heft produce about and a voice loud enough to make herself heard over the din of shoppers. So, Keiko happily slots herself into this role, and relishes the hours in which she is both useful and anonymous, when nobody will criticise her for the choices she has made. It’s kind of a homecoming in this way for the misfits like Keiko, the convenience store benevolently offering them a safe haven from the chaos that awaits them beyond its doors.

At just one-hundred-and-sixty pages, this novel was over far too soon.  A former convenience store worker herself, this is the first novel of Sayaka Murata’s to be translated into English, and I certainly hope to read more of her novels in the future, because I was totally absorbed in the quiet, peaceful and yet mildly discomforting voice of Keiko. The best thing I can say about it is that for days after I had finished the story, I found myself wondering what had become of Keiko. I’d be happy to think that she’s still assiduously packing people’s bags and smiling widely as she shouts ‘Irasshaimasé!’.