HEADS UP: I love modern Japanese novelists. It began with Haruki Murakami who will, I think, one day win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have tried to read everything he has written that has been translated into English (my Japanese being less than fluent) and I’m a huge fan.
But there are times when Murakami has what I’m going to call a very ‘male gaze’, and that observation sent me skittering off in search of Murakami’s female contemporaries - writers like Hiromi Kawakami (The Nakano Thrift Shop is wonderful), Banana Yoshimoto, Mieko Kawakami (no relation to Hiromi, I don’t think) and now Sayaka Murata.
As someone who has ‘listened’ for a living, I like audiobooks and when I found Sayaka Murata’s award-winning Convenience Store Woman on audio I was delighted.
It’s the story of Keiko Furukura, an unmarried 36-year old woman who has worked at the same convenience store - a SmileMart - for 18 years. Keiko is ‘different’. When she says what she thinks or does what she wants to do, it upsets people. As a child, for instance, she comes across children weeping over a dead bird, snatches it up and asks her mother whether they can eat it. On another occasion two boys are fighting in a schoolyard. Onlookers shout ‘stop them’, so schoolgirl Keiko stops them by hitting one over the head with a shovel. It stopped them.
It isn’t until she starts working part-time at the SmileMart that she finds her place in society. Life in the convenience store is highly regulated - customers have to be greeted in a certain way, actions and timings are set out in a corporate manual and work in the konbini has a soothing rhythm.
The trouble is that Japanese society expects a 36-year old to be married and have children, and people - including Keiko’s sister - can’t understand why she’s still single and working in what they see as a ‘dead end job’.
Eventually, Keiko strikes a pragmatic deal with Shiraha, a man who worked briefly at, and was sacked from, the SmileMart. He is, in every sense, a loser and there is no affection between the couple - but Keiko reckons that if he moves into her tiny apartment people will draw their own conclusions and stop asking awkward questions. For Shiraha, it’s a free ride - he gets his bed and board and is kept (like a pet) by Keiko.
But Shiraha the loser wants more. He persuades Keiko to leave the konbini and apply for higher paid jobs. Keiko - who has modelled her dress style, behaviour and speech patterns on her colleagues at the SmileMart - is unconvinced. On her way to the first interview, she pops into a different convenience store to use the toilet - and immediately sees that the store is less well run than it could be. She begins rearranging the merchandise, assisting staff and offering advice. The store, she realises, is telling her what it needs.
She walks away from Shiraha, scraps the job interview and decides to find a new konbini to look after.
It’s a simple story, but it raises some big issues - issues that run throughout Sayaka Murata’s work: what are the consequences of nonconformity in society for men and women when it comes to gender roles, parenthood and sex. Keiko’s relationship with Shiraha is asexual - neither wants to sleep with the other, something Shiraha states unequivocally and in brutal terms. But society has demands that force them into a sham relationship.
And what’s wrong with being a convenience store worker anyway? What if it’s something that gives you pleasure?
Listening to Convenience Store Woman I was reminded of the Japanese concept of Ikigai - that state of wellbeing that arises from a devotion to activities one enjoys, which also bring a sense of fulfilment. (And my favourite book on that subject is The Little Book of Ikigai by Ken Mogi.)
And if Keiko Furukura finds her purpose in work at a convenience store, that is her Ikigai and nobody’s business but her own. Right at the beginning she sees people rushing past the fingerprint-free glass of the brightly-lit box of the convenience store and observes that they are cogs in the machinery of the world. “I am one of those cogs,” she says with satisfaction, “I have found my place in the world.”
Keiko - the narrator - has her own quirky take on the world, and she is beautifully drawn by Sayaka Murata in a story that is both gentle and insightful. It’s a great read (even if actually I listened to it).
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata published by Granta. Audiobook 3hrs 21 minutes, narrated by Nancy Wu.