How to Become More Than a Person
A Story Of Embracing Your Ikigai And Loving Cheap, Convenient Goods
Tags: #Konbini #Novel #Japanese #SayakaMurata #TranslatedNovel #JapaneseCulture #GinnyTapleyTakemori #Irasshaimase #KeikoFurukura #Literature
Convenience Store Woman is a novel by Sayaka Murata (2016|2018). Following the main character Keiko, the reader sees into the life and mind of a ‘convenience store animal’. Keiko never felt like she fit in until she started to work at a convenience store, or konbini in Japanese. By imitating her colleagues for 18 years, she adapts and becomes a cog in the store’s machinery. While Keiko enjoys her work at the convenience store, a new and entirely useless and misogynistic worker, Shiraha, appears, driven by his agenda to find a wife. Under pressure from friends and family to adapt and become ‘normal’ like other women her age, Keiko plots with Shiraha to appease society’s expectations of them both. Despite her love for the store, Keiko is pressured by Shiraha to quit her job to pursue a more prestigious career. Ultimately, Keiko realises she cannot exist as anything other than a convenience store worker and she returns to what makes her happy, ignoring those that would change her for their own comfort.
“Thank you for your custom” (Murata 2018, 4)
Keiko neither understands norms nor customs of society. She recounts for the reader an experience from her school days where, to stop two kids fighting, she hits one with a shovel. To Keiko, the reactions of those around her did not make sense, as the boys had stopped fighting, but the teachers and her mother were focused on her actions and not the result. Later, Keiko attempts to stop her teacher from yelling at the class by pulling down her skirt and underwear. Again, though Keiko receives the result she wanted, she is the one that ends up in trouble.
She is continuously puzzled by people’s reactions to her unconventional mannerisms. So much so that Keiko relies on scripted answers from her sister to help her blend in. That is until she started her job as a worker at a convenience store. Fascinated by the manual and the neatly described everyday mannerism she is required to adopt, Keiko doesn’t just feel like she is finally fitting in but that she’s reborn as a konbini person. The konbini becomes her reason for being, her ‘ikigai’.
“Everyone started hooking up with society, either through employment or marriage, and I was the only one who hadn’t done either” (Murata 2018, 36)
A major theme of Convenience Store women is society’s gendered expectations of life where women have essentially three options. First, you can get married and become a baby-making factory. Second, you can embrace your masculine side and climb up the career ladder. Third, you can aim for a combination of both. Women’s role in society is neatly framed within reductionist patriarchal understandings of womanhood and the same is reflected within the novel. The problem is, however, at least in the eyes of everyone around the leading lady, Keiko isn’t interested in pursuing any of these options but instead is befuddled by those gendered constraints.
Outside of the store and her scripted interactions, Keiko has trouble connecting and understanding social cues. Her friends don’t seem to understand why she still works at the konbini. They are all either married and raising their children as stay-at-home moms or working on their careers. Keiko’s excuse of having poor health begins to crumble under scrutiny. That she could have a total lack of interest in romance and family, doesn’t even occur to these women - it is so outside of their worldview.
Even her sister, Mami, cannot really understand Keiko’s disinterest in what is seen as ‘normal’. As Keiko enacts her plan with Shiraha, she calls Mami to explain. When Mami hears that there is a man at Keiko’s apartment, she questions if Keiko is finally thinking of marriage. However, when Mami tries to visit Keiko to meet her sister’s boyfriend, she is stunned that Keiko is using Shiraha for appearances and thinks of him as more of a pet. Mami questions “will you ever be cured, Keiko…? … How much longer must I put up with this?” (Murata 2018, 131) Keiko’s attempts to please her sister, asking if she should stay with Shiraha and quit the konbini, only seem to make Mami more upset. It is not until Shiraha, coming out from hiding in the bathroom, gives a thinnest excuse for Mami to cling onto, that Keiko realises she is not understood by anyone, not even her sister.
“Men go hunting and women keep the home and gather fruit and wild herbs while they wait for the men to come back” (Murata 2018, 50-1)
In contrast to Keiko, we have Shiraha. Where Keiko is uncertain about her relationships with others outside of the store, Shiraha assigns blame and reasoning to every interaction – he epitomised incel culture by blaming women for their lack of interest in him. He repeatedly tries to justify his hostile reasoning by referring to society still being in the Stone Age when it comes to relationships where only the strongest, most masculine men will succeed, while the likes of him are left begging for scraps. His mindset is quite interesting if you think about it, he expected to find a life-partner while having absolutely nothing to offer in return by responsibilizing women for not supporting a good-for-nothing; a real charmer indeed. Why wouldn’t any sensible woman lust after such a misogynistic catch? But we digress…
Keiko thrives in the scripted world of the konbini, enthusiastically greeting every customer and filling shelves and prompting sales. Shiraha is put out by the morning meetings, and hides behind the registers, playing with his cell phone. To Keiko, Shiraha and his disinterest is abnormal. That he would come to work and not carefully restock the shelves is difficult for her to understand.
However, they do agree in their dislike of the pressure society places on them to get married or pursue a more glamorous profession. Shiraha’s suggestion that they use each other, and his misogyny-filled reasoning, glances off Keiko. Her total lack of interest in romantic and sexual relationships is at odds with Shiraha's desire for such a relationship – just not with Keiko. Shiraha convinces Keiko to quit her job at the konbini, resulting in her becoming a shell of her former self, losing all interest in the world around her. The lesson here, children, is don’t change for a man, ever, especially the disgustingly misogynistic ones. And that’s a lesson Keiko learns too: on her way to a job interview, Keiko drops into a convenience store and instantly provides a helping hand to the overwhelmed store workers. She realises that everyone else had it wrong; this is her life and she wants to embrace her konbini-self, heedless of if she is considered normal or not.
“My hands, my feet – they existed only for the store” (Murata 2018, 163)
Keiko discovers her ikigai – her purpose in life, her reason for being - with the konbini. Despite everyone around her pressuring her to change and adapt to how they think she should be, Keiko accepts her weirdness, choosing to live outside the norms of society. She chooses her own path because she “can’t betray [her] instinct” (Murata 2018, 162) any longer. She finally understands what makes her happy and, this time, nobody will take it from her. So once again, Keiko becomes a cog in the konbini.
As the reader, following along with Keiko’s thoughts, we are tasked to question what is normal. Are the friends and family trying to hammer the woman that sticks out back into her role normal? Or is it the woman who lives and breathes a convenience store manual? Striped away from conventional thought processes, the novel challenges societal norms and standards to live by. Instead, it allows the reader, as it did Keiko, to find comfort in their own weirdness. And if we are all weird, isn’t weird normal?
Moral of the story: fuck everyone, konbini is life … at least for Keiko, Irasshaimase.
Image Credit:
村田沙耶香 Sayaka Murata [@sayakamurata] (2023). "The new color "Convenience Store Woman" has arrived in Japan! What a beautiful purple color...I am very impressed. The paperback of this book now comes in four colors. Thank you so much, @GrantaBooks!!!" 9 February. https://twitter.com/sayakamurata/status/1623760665675710469