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Reader's Review: Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Published 10/15/2024 By Lisa Baldwin

Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata, Grove Press, 2018) follows a 36-year-old Japanese Woman, Keiko Furukura, as she grapples with the fact that she is considered outside the norm, but she feels perfectly content where she is in life. She has worked at a convenience store for half her life and Keiko can feel the pressure to find a ‘real’ career, a husband, and lead a more normal life. Yet, Keiko wants nothing more than to continue to work at this store, she feels that it gives her a purpose and a life script.

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The book opens with a beautifully crafted description of the convenience store, Murata carefully puts together the imagery along with Keiko’s almost analytical view of the store. Keiko has worked at the store so long that she has an instinct about the items, the customers, and the flow of the day.

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This storyline of this book shows as Keiko explains to the reader that she has always been ‘strange’. Our first example of this is a story from her childhood where she found a dead budgie in the park. Keiko did not find this sad or upsetting, she simply saw it as a bird and thought that her father would love to eat it. He likes to eat grilled chicken, how is this bird any different? Keiko was shamed by her mother and peers for thinking of such an idea, telling her it was an atrocious way of thinking. Yet, little Keiko only really understood that she should never suggest eating an animal that’s usually a pet, especially not one she found in a park. It seems she did not understand that it is culturally immoral to eat a pet, or that it was sad to find a dead pet abandoned in the park.

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As the book follows Keiko in her job day to day, new people get hired at the store. One of them being a lazy, and sexist young man, Shiraha. Keiko finds him annoying, not for his viewpoints, but purely for the fact that he cannot do his job properly. He doesn’t put the drinks in the fridge correctly or check out customers the way they’re trained to. Despite this, Keiko decides to use him as a fake husband to alleviate some of the pressure from her family and old friends. During this chapter, Keiko reveals to the reader that she desires some kind of change “Deep down I wanted some kind of change. Any change, whether good or bad, would be better than the state of impasse I was in now.”

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As the book moves forward, Keiko agrees to let Shiraha live with her on the condition that he pays for his own food. He tries to convince her that she needs him, that without him she will forever be alone, and she’ll never meet the standards of normality. At one point, he even admits that he intentionally wanted to become a parasite to women, though, Keiko seems relatively unfazed by this. These two characters routinely use a stone-age village analogy to make their point to each other, such as if you are a burden, or not useful to the village you’ll be thrown out or persecuted. This leans in heavily to Japan’s anti-individualism culture, everyone must be working toward the same goal of keeping the ‘village’ alive and well.

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As strange as she seemed to every other character, Keiko never looked at herself as the real problem. As a character I don’t think she saw social ideas as issues at all unless they concerned the convenience store. The book carefully persuades the reader that neither side is wrong, it’s not wrong that Keiko doesn’t follow norms, nor are the other characters wrong for following Japanese norms. There is a point in the book where Keiko’s sister finds out about Shiraha living with her, and asks Keiko ““Will you ever be cured, Keiko…?” She looked down, not even bothering to remonstrate with me. “I simply can’t take it anymore. How can we make you normal?” Keiko never seems to take offense to these comments, she only tries to please them by asking how to be normal. But rarely does anyone want to offer such advice, to give her a manual like the convenience store did.

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Near the end of the book, Keiko is persuaded to leave the convenience store by Shiraha. It fasts forwards about a month later on a day that Shiraha is escorting her to a job interview at a temp agency. They get there quite early and Shiraha goes into a convenience store to use their bathrooms. When Keiko follows him in she is immediately consumed by the convenience store. She begins rearranging displays, fixing advert signs, looking over the refrigerator displays, and even instructing one of girls working there. Keiko comes to her own realization that she is made to do this, there is nothing more in the world that she wants than to be a convenience store worker. ““I realize now,” I went on relentlessly. “More than a person, I’m a convenience store worker. Even if that means I’m abnormal and can’t make a living and drop down dead, I can’t escape that fact. My very cells exist for the convenience store.””

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I think some readers may be disappointed that Keiko doesn’t become ‘normal’ by Japanese standards. But I think it makes more sense for her character to only become more resolute in doing what she wishes. I think it makes the book feel more full and real, rather than the fantasy an author may have of curing someone of their abnormal behavior. It’s a vivid and well-crafted story, it’s well paced and doesn’t lull. Murata clearly achieved what she set out to write.

About the Author

Lisa Baldwin is an aspiring editor pursuing a B.F.A in Writing with a minor in creative writing. She is currently the Vice President of the Writer's Club at her College, Savannah College of Art and Design. She hopes to dive into the publishing industry after graduating.

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