Tuesday, April 9, 2019

Convenience Store Woman – A Wryly Humorous Tale of a Social Misfit



“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.”



The society we live in can be so exacting that anyone falling out of the dictated ‘norms’ can get ostracized; their lives like the fluid-preserved specimens would be scrutinized carefully with a hidden disgust. For the 36-year-old narrator, Keiko Furukura in Sayaka Murata’s first English translated novel, Convenience Store Woman (published in 2018 and translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori), the goal in life seems simple: to be ‘a cog in society’, i.e., ‘a normal person.’ But the prerequisites to conform to the ‘normalcy’ within middle-class life is so tightly controlled that Ms. Furukura’s eccentricities and choices in life dismays people around her. Keiko is somewhere in the autistic spectrum who often ponders over conflicts in practical terms rather than in humanistic terms. She recalls a fight between two unruly boys when she was in primary school. When someone cries out to ‘stop them’, Keiko takes a spade from the nearby shed and bashes one of the boy in the head, bringing the altercation to an abrupt end. Later in life, the adult Keiko visits her younger sister and her newly born nephew. When the baby bawls she steals a glance over to the knife on the table, finding an easy way out of the hassle. Yet Keiko understands that it isn’t appropriate social behavior to act out her ‘practical’ solutions.

Upon leaving college, Keiko takes a part-time job at Smile Mart, the convenience store where the store-workers must jubilantly greet their customers with Irasshaimase!’ Keiko has stayed in the same job for 18-years, finding solace in the mechanical, unemotional space of the convenience store. She mimics her colleagues' speech patterns, their body language, dressing sense, etc. And her self-identity or self-worth is wholly connected with fulfilling the store-set targets and perfectly arranging the products. Keiko has never felt frustrated by the job and she may not comprehend Marx’s theories on work and alienation. She is ‘happy’ to have ‘reborn’ as the convenience store worker. It is only when a new 30-plus temp worker, Shiraha starts working at the store, Keiko thinks about change and the need to ‘normalize’ herself.

The boorish and nearly homeless Shiraha keeps on ranting about ‘Stone Age’; on how the gendered roles in society has never changed since ancient times. His aim in life is to find a wife by working in the store, sponge off her savings in order to start some ‘online business.’ Shiraha is simply a slacker whom Keiko things just one step removed from being a ‘sex-offender’. Nevertheless, she comes to an arrangement with him: he will make her appear “normal”. In return, Shiraha wants her to forgo her store-worker job and take a better job to support him. He will satisfyingly play the role of a boyfriend or husband, which may keep her away from the prying eyes and minds of family & friends. 

Convenience Store Woman is less of a social critique on exploitation of low-wage labors or dehumanizing capitalist system, and more of a keenly observant study of a woman with an unorthodox lifestyle. While author Murata asks us to accept and respect the woman’s very simple choice in life, she also skillfully illustrates the absurdities of modern life. Keiko leads a contented life in her own way, but the society wants her to keep on conforming to traditional expectations even though it means going through the same cycle of problems and being unhappy. Written in lucid prose, Murata does well in depicting the store’s setting – its inner-workings, mechanized work-flow, sounds of bar-code scanners and door chimes, etc -- which serves as the predominant link to her heroine’s existence. The author also excels in providing insight about a introverted character’s thoughts, who in reality doesn’t allow others to perceive what’s going insider her mind. At the same time, the slim novel does get a bit repetitive, especially with Shiraha’s non-stop rants. Moreover, since there’s not much of a character trajectory for Keiko, some parts in the second-half of the story felt vacuous.
 

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