Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
A review of Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman
“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.”
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016/2018). Published by Portobello Books (English).
Everyone had been talking about this book for months. Every single time I opened up my bot Instagram, whenever I opened BookTube, and whenever I browsed the Asian literature in translation hashtags, every single person was literally talking about Convenience Store Woman. I didn’t originally get it, because I thought the cover was honestly terrible and unappealing. I’m very picky about my book covers, but that’s another story.
And so, one day when I was wandering the library pre-pandemic, I found this book nestled in the fiction section. I remembered it’s title because it had literally been everywhere. By this point, the hype had died down, and the book was resigned to merely appearing on “Best of the Year” book lists or “Asian Women in Translation” lists. I’d still see it, but not as often.
But, on this strange day when I ran across it in the library, I chose to bring it home with me. And oh my god it was so painful to read. I just didn’t like it or the plot. The writing style itself was fine, but I could not get with the story. Let’s get to the nitty-gritty.
Book Blurb
Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction ― many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual ― and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It’s almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action…
A brilliant depiction of an unusual psyche and a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed look at contemporary work culture and the pressures to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh portrait of an unforgettable heroine.
Content / Plot + Characters
I legit have to merge these two sections together for this review, just because I cannot disassociate the plot with the personality of the main character. We follow Furukura Keiko, a thirty-six year old woman who basically has no purpose in her life. She’s completely and utterly socially inept, which is kind of sad to read about, and so she practices being a regular human being with the manual of how to be a convenience store worker. It is here that she learns to greet customers, to be polite, or to smile at humans.
Keiko is the only stagnant figure in this store. People come and go, get married, have kids, etc. but she’s always the same, reading her manual on how to blend in to normal society. She literally remains this way the entire novel. There is zero character arc. None. Her family wants her to get married and have a real job, but to the outside world she seems like a robot. And she doesn’t change. She doesn’t succumb to societal pressure, instead choosing to exist in this constructed environment.
That’s why I find the book so boring. There’s little nuggets of her backstory that I enjoyed, like when she was a child in school, to break up a fight, she almost killed one of the kids by smashing him on the head with a shovel. She didn’t understand what that meant socially back then, nor did she feel any emotions, so I found that story to be an interesting flashback. But we don’t get many of those flashbacks.
Keiko is seen as someone who needs to be fixed by society, and perhaps the story is trying to get at that by having her stay the same and resistant to the ideologies expected of her, but I just couldn’t stand her as a character. If one is trying to make a feminist critique with Keiko, I genuinely don’t think you can make that argument because she doesn’t seem to understand the rules of society, as demonstrated by her discovering social interaction and living by a manual.
It would be more of a feminist story for her to quote-on-quote normal and be actively resisting the patriarchy of Japanese society. I’ve seen reviews speculating that she is autistic, but I refuse to play psychiatrist on a literary character, as I wouldn’t do that to someone in real life either. If she were specified to have a specific mental problem or disorder, I think that would’ve made the narrative stronger, because then we have a clear, concrete reason by Keiko is the way she is. It makes her seem like less of a vapid machine-like woman, and instead makes a statement about how mentally different people are treated in Japanese society, especially when they are a woman.
Writing
Something I did find brilliant about the writing was that the allegory of the convenience store for society as a whole was brilliant. The people working at the store come and change, as well as what’s sold, but people themselves never change. Keiko stays stagnant, society as a whole stays stagnant with its ideologies, as seen when they are pushing her for a normal job and marriage. Everyone is constantly saying that there is something wrong with Keiko, even to her face, but then she doesn’t change.
At times, I found the concepts to be repetitive, but all in all the prose was decent. I’m not mad at it, that’s for sure. Murata knows what she’s doing, especially considering she’s one of the bestselling authors active in Japan right now.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a watered down version of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. I hate to say it, but I think it’s true. This novel has so much potential, but it’s just missing the mark conceptually. Perhaps the 176 pages are too little for Keiko’s story, but I think she as a character needs more of an arc other than people telling her to change, or her working at the convenience store. There is so much power in her story, but I think it’s largely untapped potential in its current form.
