Japanese Lit Challenge 18 #2

I read this for the Japanese Literature Challenge 18.

Convenience Store Woman: A Novel - Sayaka Murata

This story is set in Tokyo in the 2010’s. Due to unfortunate incidents in her childhood, the narrator Keiko Furukura feels she is strange, not normal, having only little insight into what other people are thinking and expecting of themselves and others.

From childhood, Keiko maintains radio silence, fearing the consequences if normal people realize that she is not like them. Consequently, Keiko never makes any friends, which raises red flags though adults are also relieved she never complains and never takes initiative to do anything. Her younger sister provides her with bland catchphrases to provide non-answers to the nosy questions of inquiring minds as to why Keiko is still unmarried in her middle thirties or why she works part-time in a convenience store, hardly a suitable job for a single woman her age. After all, it is only normal for normal people to be curious as to why somebody is so weird and to suggest advice to remedy their weird situations.

Perhaps it is just as well that people don’t know her very well, that Keiko is unforthcoming with what is going through her mind. Reticence maybe keeps her out of jail or an institution. When she visits her sister, her new nephew squalls and cries as babies are prone to do. Keiko observes in a brief aside how easily a knife could be used to quiet the infant down.

Woh-ee-oh.

The narrator’s employer, however, finds Keiko a model employee of a chain convenience store. Because our narrator does not know how to pick up on or get across social cues, she is fine with the store putting her through training on catchwords for customers and smiles for her face. Keiko talks and dresses like her fellow employees and adapts their ways and views. She eagerly participates in the corporation’s sales and pep talks. Since the job gives her a sense of purpose and connection, Keiko dutifully eats and sleeps to maintain her health so she can do her job. She’s always on time, never misses a shift, and makes herself available to work over New Year’s even though working means not seeing her parents. She is appalled when her fellow employees gossip about her instead of re-stocking shelves and preparing for a sale.

Keiko doesn’t think of romance, she resents people prying. She fears:

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.

Keiko questions the arbitrary assumption of normal people that happiness hinges on marriage, kids, position, property, respect, a future. But under the pressure of other people’s curiosity and concern and her own feeling of being in a rut, she allows a lazy, abusive, smelly incel to move into her apartment.

Shiraha’s got enough angry misfit tendencies for two women-haters, but he’s normal in that he knows what is going on in the minds of normal people and knows what to say to placate and con them. The normal folks applaud that Keiko takes in Shiraha, without even knowing whether the incel will be good to her or not, without being concerned whether Keiko can defend herself in a relationship. To our relief, Keiko is impervious to the incel’s manipulations because she’s oblivious to his gaslighting and sarcasms.

Is Keiko normal with a lot of problems (as her family hopes) or could Keiko be diagnosed with – who knows? I sure don’t -  a disorder like autism or ADHD? We are kept in suspense about the outcome of Keiko’s descent into unemployment and the resulting agoraphobia and depression till the end of this unsettling novel.

Murata possess a striking ability to create an atmosphere of disquiet in deadpan prose. It’s painful and eerie in spots, but also funny as hell – who the frick do normal people think they are, prone to crooked thinking and nonsensical bias as they are, to think their arbitrary conventions and capricious prejudices are the way it ought to be? It raises questions on the behalf of people someplace on the neurodivergent spectrum and their struggle to become a telepath like everybody else, whereas neuro-typical adults find mind-reading and play-acting as natural as popping open an umbrella, confidently believing that coffee stunts your growth, no innocent people are behind bars, and growing older with more experiences will make you more mature.