Consumption Is the Answer to Your Identity Crisis

Convenience Store Woman. Sayaka Murata. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Grove, 2018. 176 pp. $20.00 (cloth).

Convenience Store Woman is a short volume that fits in hand, purse, or satchel and can be sneaked out and read in little bursts, as quick as popping a Tic Tac. I have read it three or four times, always in a sitting or two (midair on a flight, seated next to a man who used his laptop to manically toggle between PowerPoint slides on the subject of salesmanship; curled up in our strange pink secondhand chair, taking notes while balancing the book on the back of a clingy hound dog; in my office in the hour before teaching a night class, while eating my store-bought, plastic-wrapped meal). It continues to delight.

Part of the delight is the subversive nature of the object itself: the smallness of it, like the rice balls and cans of coffee and mango chocolate cream buns that Keiko, its narrator, so meticulously organizes for maximum salability and aesthetic appeal during her shifts at the Smile Mart; the candy-bright colors of its dust jacket, which shows a coy smiling anthropomorphic rice ball made to look like both a girl and an emoji; and the story inside, which manages to be so small and so mammoth at the same time: a brief and awful glimpse into the existential chasm of what it means to be a human animal in late capitalism, filtered through the sensory experience of shopping for packaged food. The book is cute, and I am, by all outward appearances, a small woman in a public space reading a cute little book.

Convenience Store Woman, however, is more of a companion to the work of Thomas Bernhard, Rachel Cusk, Nicholson Baker, or even Daniel Clowes than the manga that its cover evokes. Keiko Furukura is in the eighteenth year of her first and only job: worker in a twenty-four-hour convenience store in some nondescript business district, where she serves a constant rotation of customers, alongside a constant rotation of coworkers and managers. There, Keiko is philosopher-clerk, possessed of a Zen-like contentment with her station in life and an almost uncanny self-knowledge. “When I first started here,” she tells us, “there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.” Any emphasis or value we put on the word normal here is entirely ours: Keiko does not at all yearn to change—only to exist, unnoticed, as “a normal cog in society.” The steps she takes in order to do so are the most wonderful aspect of the book, and we quickly find ourselves rooting for stasis. But Keiko is a single, virginal thirtysomething working a menial job; this will not do. Societal pressures bear down in the form of meddling friends and family members eager to see her “happy”; she escapes their advances by forming a chaste alliance with a man whom we recognize as a type of angry incel.

The cynicism of the novel—no one is safe from irony, not even Keiko—is particularly refreshing in this era of social-media-mandated and algorithm-driven “sincerity.” Through an expertly wrought unreliable narrator, the book tempts the reader to make all kinds of easy, even lazy, readings, but snatches each possible reading away just as it introduces a new one. We are invited to read for Keiko’s inherent humanity, and for a sense of right and wrong that drives the narrative. This is, after all, how we’re taught to read stories: characters carry wounds with them that propel them into, and through, conflict. Keiko begins the novel by laying out what we would recognize as her childhood “wounds,” which include a series of violent episodes we might read as the work of a psychopath. What do we make of Keiko when she muses about how it would be easier to stab her infant nephew than to quiet him down? Or how she proposes to barbecue someone’s dead pet budgie and serve it as yakitori to her father? She cannot understand the other children’s funeral service for the dead pet. “Everyone was crying for the poor dead bird as they went around murdering flowers,” she says, and this sentiment makes sense. Of course society is crazy and human ritual is void of meaning. It actually would take less effort to do away with a screaming baby than to comfort it; so much of what we do in the name of love, affection, and caretaking is inefficient, even destructive, and Keiko’s got this figured out from the beginning. So, this must be a (wo)man-versus-society story.

But Convenience Store Woman is not simply that kind of narrative, because it would presuppose that Keiko’s predilections—her love of the convenience store, its constancy, its rituals and sounds and smells, which she describes in detail (and which are, admittedly, pleasing every single time)—place her, somehow, outside society. Yet I’m writing this essay on a machine that even now is monitoring my habits and serves me advertising targeted to light up the capitalism-pleasure-centers in my brain. I’d be lying if I claimed that I didn’t like that targeting, even love it in some ways, just as it repels me. What is the difference between being enticed—either through advertising or, in Keiko’s case, her expertise in merchandising and serving—into purchasing the exact things we need or desire (or don’t even know we need or desire yet) and being cared for by a mother or a loved one? How can one claim that familial or romantic relationships are not, in their own ways, deeply transactional? When Keiko details the ways she must predict and meet the needs of the store itself, she speaks like a mother anticipating the needs of her child: warm products sell on cold days. A person who jingles change in pockets is often there to make a small purchase of cigarettes or coffee. New construction in the area means the lunchtime rush will soon be busier. And when she enters into a convenient, socially acceptable living arrangement with Shiraha, an odious misogynist, they both benefit from the arrangement—for a while.

Keiko is so much a part of society that this book is, at its core, a coming-of-age tale that pushes hard on the boundaries of sexuality, gender, identity, and selfhood, to the point that we close the book wondering why we worry at all about such trivial designations. “Here in the convenience store we’re not men and women. We’re all store workers,” Keiko proudly announces to Shiraha after he’s explained his theory about the size of women’s brains. Isn’t the utopia we desire free of discrimination based on difference? And doesn’t capitalism want to sell to everyone? And doesn’t everyone want to be catered to, sold to, loved by society?

Though she is the author of ten books and the winner of Japan’s top literary awards, including the Mishima Yukio Prize and the Akutagawa Prize, only a select few of Sayaka Murata’s works have been translated into English. Her short story “A Clean Marriage,” published in Granta in 2014, describes in great detail the lengths an asexual couple go to in order to reproduce. Ultimately they end up spending a lot of money on a shady high-tech procedure that is, when you boil it down, plain old sex plus some wires and tubes. Here, too, Murata treats her central characters with both irony and a great deal of dignity, casting them not as outsiders but as a perfectly reasonable “new-age couple” making a difficult decision. The hallmark of a Murata story, in fact, is its conspicuous lack of judgment, particularly toward its female first-person narrator. This is why any reading of Convenience Store Woman as “the story of a misfit”—a point made by many reviewers since the book’s publication in English—doesn’t quite hit the mark.

A brave culture explorer, Murata ushers in a new wave of femaledriven fiction that asks not “How should a person be?” but “What should a person be?” In Convenience Store Woman, the answer is likely to make you uncomfortable, right before it sells you the comfort you desire.

Read more from Issue 17.1.