It soon becomes clear why the novel Convenience Store Woman would be popular. Sayaka Murata does more than inhabit a ubiquitous world, probably taken for granted by many, the world of convenience stores. And she aims higher than providing an insider's catalogue of quirks and facts and doesn't adopt an easier (though justifiable) stridency of tone. Keiko, CSW and narrator, tells her story with love of the convenience store, taken to the comic extreme of an adherent for a religion. It's from this perspective that she inadvertently arrives at a harsh truth that applies to most any low-wage, essential labor you can think of, a truth people know or find one way or another to evade: For all her devotion to the store, she gets nothing much in return.
Nothing much by most people's standards, anyway. It's a dead end job. Crummy pay that doesn't seem to have increased since she started, almost two decades back. If anything, it's a liability when attempting to get another, better job. If and when her body breaks down due to the physical demands of the job, she'll have no place. Though acknowledged to be a model worker, she's looked down upon by coworkers and society at large, particularly because she's single and in her mid-30s.
Keiko isn't like most people. For one, she's a lifelong misfit. No real friends. No romance. No interest in romance. No notable academic achievements. No ambitions. No prospects. She resolves her problem with basic human understanding and interaction by imitating anyone she perceives as normal and keeping a low profile. This pre-convenience store backstory comprises a few pages. The decisive event of her life, making up the bulk of the novel, is her employment at the store, which gives her a role, complete with a script, and a form of human contact that is manageable. She's outlasted fellow clerks and managers alike.
Where does a misfit go? Beyond work, the store is a microcosm of society itself. Keiko may seem as if she's at the bottom of the social hierarchy when really she has the best view of the true bottom: Those who can't passably function within the system at all. Enter Shiraha, who was briefly a coworker of Keiko's and might be described, in the pejorative sense, as an incel. He's angry, self-pitying, and misogynistic. He's incompetent, ugly, and a stalker too. Repulsive in every way. Keiko sympathizes and invites him to live with her in her dumpy apartment.
A deadpan novel, laughs on practically every page. Straightforward in its structure and sentences. It's slim, which might invite the charge of being undercooked, slight. But Murata is shrewd in paring down the story and providing only an amusing hint here, an amusing aside there.
Considering the politics of the book lends to the darkness of it. The concept of, say, demanding better pay and working conditions, if it ever crossed Keiko's mind, might strike her as an offense against the store. The model worker, a boss's dream, permanently smiling, forever eager, willing to toil for free if necessary, so immense is the privilege. Cheerfully acquiescent. The book is fun but make no mistake: the religious fanatic, no matter the religion, is always a figure to be wary of.
Yet she's no mere fanatic and this doesn't exactly read as a cautionary tale. Again: she's a misfit. And when dealing with her "pet" or her friends, she displays some self-awareness and assertiveness. She quickly observes that the form of freedom Shiraha seeks, which also conflicts with society's norms, necessarily comes with suffering. He falls silent. Ultimately Murata says more than I initially thought. Self-pity is foreign to Keiko too. She's undeceived about what to expect by living her life as she wants, without striving for a relationship or children or elevated status or power or financial gain and without inflicting herself upon others: reproach, mockery. And she doesn't care. She loves being a cog in the machinery of the convenience store, accepts being less than human. A bold and frightening choice.
Then again, "normal," Murata lightly illustrates for the reader, doesn't look so great (or so normal, for that matter), either.
Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
