Consistency is important. When things begin to change too quickly for humans to adapt, we value what doesn’t shift, even if it’s not very good. In my twenties and thirties, I travelled a lot by car for various jobs. Convenience stores rank high in a short list of life’s inevitabilities among death, taxes, and lines for the lady’s room. They are inevitable. A byproduct of modern life. I became familiar with the facilities on various routes. Which stores had okay food? Who had the best coffee? Who didn’t appear to draw the bottled water from a rusty drainpipe in the back of the parking lot? There were times in the middle of nowhere, when all I wanted was a Phillips 66 because they had the cleanest bathrooms and stocked sanitary supplies rather than fetish accessories in their vending machines.
Sayaka Murata’s award-winning 2016 novel, Convenience Store Woman is a dark comedy and social commentary on our obsession with normalcy and how society targets individuals who don’t follow the prescribed life paths.
The story surveys several months in the life of Keiko Furukura, who has never fit in with family, friends or at school. Early in the narrative, Keiko relates her inability from childhood to understand what people expected from her. She learns to copy manners of dress, language, and actions from others as a means to adapt in the world. Keiko, at the age of 18, finds her calling as a convenience store worker, reporting each day at the Hiiromachi “Smile Mart” location. The worker’s manual at the store provides the rules for how she’s to function and she finds harmony and meaning in her role.
“The Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart has remained open ever since that day, its lights on without a break. Sometimes I use a calculator to work out the number of hours that have passed since then. The other day, the store was open on May 1 for the nineteenth time, having been open continuously for 157,800 hours. I’m now thirty-six years old, and the convenience-store-worker-me is eighteen. None of the other workers who did their training with me are here anymore, and we’re now on our eighth manager. Not a single product on sale in the store at that time is left. But I’m still here.”
Keiko, for her part, is content in her situation. She adeptly picks up cues from those around her on how to behave and what to say. She has no interest in changing jobs, finding a partner, getting married or having children. Keiko identifies with herself as a “convenience store worker” and all that she undertakes is intended to feed that role. Pink Floyd lamented that “all we are is just another brick in the wall.” Keiko revels in this uniformity of purpose. The life of the convenience store has provided structure and peace in a world where much of human interaction and emotion are mysterious to her.
Her parents, coworkers, and friends don’t understand why Keiko has never sought out a career or had a relationship. She possesses a series of set responses like “I’m not strong,” drilled into her by her sister when questions are asked about why she isn’t married, or still works in a convenience store. The conflict comes when Keiko’s set answers no longer hold water.
“As long as you wear the skin of what’s considered an ordinary person and follow the manual, you won’t be driven out of the village or treated as a burden.”
What ensues is an completely inappropriate match with a man who doesn’t work and sleeps in her bathtub. Keiko leaves her job, the cornerstone of her life, to find something more “adult.” The well-crafted, comfortable existence she’s created for herself begins to unravel while she pursues the trappings of “normal.”
Keiko is an unconventional, sharply drawn narrator who provides marvelous insights about society, herself, and others in this quick read of 160 pages. Murata’s novel is enjoyable, heartbreaking, funny, relatable, and astute from beginning to resolution.
We can be true to ourselves, but also a “brick.” For Keiko, the uniformity of the convenience store is the ultimate form of subversion.
ReDNeT Press 