Memo 013

The Convenience Store Woman

Nicholas Chung, 30 October 2023



Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata tells the story of Keiko Furukura, a thirty-six-year-old Tokyolite who has been working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart”, a fictitious convenience store franchise, for eighteen years. As a young child, she has always had trouble fitting into ‘normal’ life and finds solace, and arguably even delight, in the mundane, routine repetition of life as a convenience store worker. Her parents and sister have on numerous occasions attempted to treat her with the hopes of her being ‘normal’. As she reconnects with classmates from her past, they too begin asserting societal expectations of employment, marriage, and children onto her. In an attempt to fit in, she begins to mimic the behaviour and inflexions of her colleagues, namely Miho, Mrs. Izumi, and the Manager. It should be noted that most people who work at a convince store are part-timers or as a secondary income source, and is often a transition between jobs rather than being a ‘proper’ or ‘normal’ occupation. Keiko has seen many cohorts of colleagues and managers come and go, whilst she herself remains under the pretence of a medical handicap that refrains her from strenuous labour. By all accounts, this excuse protects Keiko from being expelled from the convenience store, and by extension ‘normal’ society.

In the novel, we are first presented with Keiko’s routine life as a convenience store worker, and how the devaluation of her (non-existent) individuality as a cog in the machine ironically gives her an itemized list of daily purpose that first was presented to her in the form of an instruction manual. She becomes hypersensitive to the needs of the store, being attuned to details like the patron’s behaviour, soundscape, shelving logic… Keiko is immersed in her work because it provides her with anonymity, away from the scrutiny of society’s gaze and expectations. She self-objectifies herself as a bodily extension of the convenience store, and through this relinquishment of autonomy, she is reproducing the ideological preferences of the store, the franchise, and society writ large. Keiko’s oscillation between being a foreign object and a non-human is interrupted by her encounter with Shiraha, a coworker of the same age range who is bitter about the societal expectations imposed on him as a man in his thirties and his inability to escape this involution. He is by all accounts lazy and irresponsible and ends up forming a mutually parasitic relationship with Keiko when he is expelled by society. Shiraha wants to be hidden from the judgmental gaze of ‘normalcy’ and Keiko's supposed next step forward as a functional member of society requires/should result in her cohabiting with a male partner. However, an ideological divide exists between the two: Shiraha is aware of the unspecified values and requirements to be normal, and is simply unable to meet those standards; whereas Keiko is fundamentally unaware and indifferent about those standards, and she is only playing the part to not cause a scene.


 

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