If you like: Banana Yoshimoto, Welcome to Night Vale, challenging conformity.
Convenience Store Woman has a very cute cover. The pink and blue, with the little smiling onigiri, decorated with a bow and flower.
Maybe deceptively cute, depending on how you think book covers should reflect the story, although I could see a certain level of irony at play.
If I had to pick a cover that was more of a straight interpretation of the book, it would be a shot of convenience store shelves, perfectly lined up, perfectly packaged, perfectly artificial under the fluorescent lights.
Keiko puts a lot of consideration into the shelves of her convenience store. Besides knowing exactly where everything should be to anticipate the needs of the customer, she knows the shelves are the one thing that truly changes in the store, even if they look the same year to year. Like a body shedding and reproducing cells, it’s never the same onigiri for sale, each product is jettisoned and replaced.
Her co-workers are a little like that, too. No one makes working at a convenience store a long-term career. Keiko knows it all too well. Someday her own body is going to break and once she's no longer useful, she'll have nothing left.
“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.”
Ever since she was a child, her parents have tried to "cure" her, to figure out how to integrate Keiko while Keiko herself can't quite figure out why people do the things they do. She's like an anthropologist from another planet, courteous but operating on her own logic.
“I’d noticed soon after starting the job that whenever I got angry at the same things as everyone else, they all seemed happy. If I went along with the manager when he was annoyed or joined in the general irritation at someone skiving off the night shift, there was a strange sense of solidarity as everyone seemed pleased that I was angry too.”
I like one example from her childhood -- she and her sister see a dead bird on the ground. Her sister is upset the bird is dead, but Keiko wants to take it home and cook it. Her mother isn't concerned so much by the sanitary condition as how her older daughter doesn't seem to be sad, which she thinks is the right reaction for a little girl.
To Keiko, though, they eat dead birds, this is no different.
As an adult, Keiko finds templates for what "normal" is and does her best. The convenience store rules of conduct, which one character compares to a religious cult, give her a way to fit in.
“When morning comes, once again I’m a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person.”
The older she gets, though, the more people notice she sticks out. She observes there are two choices as acceptable for normal people: Get a career that makes good money or get married.
She goes with marriage, the easier choice, and it's scary how quickly it changes the way people treat her, even puts the chauvinistic man-boy she adopts into a better light.
But will her compromise last?
Like I said, Convenience Store Woman is a lot like those picture-perfect shelves. Useful and planned, everything fitting in neatly, but also recognizing the artificiality, which undermines it all. Keiko recognizes that the convenience store is more like real life than the world outside.
I suppose this is a book about living your best life, no matter what. NO MATTER WHAT.
"Convenience Store Woman" by Sayaka Murata; Grove Press; June 2018.
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