“Convenience Store Woman”: Life by the Book

Convenience stores have embedded themselves in the fabric of everyday life in Japan. They are part of the social infrastructure and high-visibility sites for everything from language evolution to the increased prominence of foreign labor. They have even colonized the literary world. Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman, which won the Akutagawa Prize in 2016, portrays an unconventional employee’s perspective on life under these new standard-bearers of consumption. The English edition arrives courtesy of Ginny Tapley Takemori, a seasoned literary translator based in rural Japan.

A Normal Cog in Society

As the novel begins, our narrator Furukura Keiko has worked at the same convenience store for 18 years. She has virtually no life outside of her job. The employee manual, with rules for everything from customer service to proper sleep patterns, has become her world. In fashion sense and conversational style, she surreptitiously mimics her co-workers. Even her diet is mostly food from the store. But the irresistible hook of Murata Sayaka’s novel is this: Furukura does not find this existence the least bit dissatisfying. The ominous rumbling undertone is not Furukura’s suppressed individuality longing to breathe free but the growing social pressure that threatens to render her position untenable.

We do not get a specific diagnosis, but it is clear that Furukura is not neurotypical. Her childhood is deftly sketched in the book’s early pages as a constant struggle to avoid unsettling others, and particularly to spare her family the negative repercussions of her actions.

Her solution as a child is simple: freeze. “I would no longer do anything of my own accord,” she recalls, “and would either just mimic what everyone else was doing, or simply follow instructions.” As she grows older, though, those around her begin to view this quietness as “a problem in itself.”

Finally, in college, she stumbles (almost literally) on the solution: a newly opened Smile Mart is seeking employees. Furukura finds her calling at the convenience store.

At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.

The terminology here is carefully chosen. Furukura does not see her position as an act or a persona to be worn over a real, secret self. She has become the person the convenience store manual describes.

Furukura also draws on the personalities and behavior of her coworkers to maintain her newfound acceptability. “My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me,” she muses at one point. “I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues.” 

Growing Tensions

Furukura’s sister, an ally since childhood, helps her come up with vague stories about sickly parents and ill-fated love affairs to explain her extended tenure at the Smile Mart and unmarried status. But as she grows older, these become less convincing to those around her. One suspects that Furukura herself would have been content to work at the convenience store for the rest of her life, but this would be an unacceptably conspicuous violation of protocol. (“If finding a job is so hard, then at least you should get married,” sputters a classmate’s boyfriend at a reunion she attends.)

As the tension builds, a new employee starts work at Furukura’s store: a man named Shiraha. He lives outside of social norms as well, although in his case it is by choice. He knows exactly how he is expected to behave, but refuses on the grounds that he deserves a better deal. “If you ask me, this is a dysfunctional society,” he says at one point. “And since it’s defective, I’m treated unfairly.” Of course, this position is based more on his opinion of his own potential than actual effort. “He seemed to have this odd circuitry in his mind that allowed him to see himself only as the victim and never the perpetrator,” Furukura observes. In her calm, dispassionate eyes, Shiraha is a grotesque figure, all skin and bones and wire.

In another novel, Furukura’s meeting with Shiraha might be the inciting incident that sets the plot in motion. But here, too, Murata subverts our expectations. Shiraha’s reason for joining the store was, as he freely admits, “marriage hunting,” and he has no more interest in Furukura than she has in him. His sour, self-righteous sense of entitlement quickly gets him fired for harassing female staff and customers, and he seems about to pass out of Furukura’s life entirely—until she realizes that he might be useful to her as a means of satisfying society’s demands that she at least go through the motions of conformity.

A New Take on Conformity

The character of Furukura is a delight. She is original and charming but never gimmicky or twee. Her interactions with her sister in particular were some of my favorite scenes in the book, with Murata skillfully balancing fundamentally misaligned worldviews with a sense of genuine warmth. When Furukura is—inevitably—cut off from the convenience store of which she feels “as much a part of [. . .] as the magazine racks or the coffee machine,” her sense of dislocation is almost palpable. Murata deserves credit for creating this voice, and translator Ginny Tapley Takemori for successfully transferring it to English. 

The theme of struggling to find and maintain a place in a world that demands conformity is obviously not a new one, particularly for Japanese literature, but with Furukura as her lens, Murata is able to turn it inside-out. Rather than celebrating the individual or extolling the virtues of belonging, Convenience Store Woman lures us into a reexamination of the assumptions that underlie this opposition in the first place.

Shiraha is less original as a character. His obsession with just-so stories about “Stone Age” society and aggrieved sense of victimhood are all too familiar. Paradoxically, perhaps, he also feels less rounded. Particularly after he and Furukura begin their negotiations, he almost seems to become a kind of yōkai, lurking malevolently in the space they share and slowly poisoning the atmosphere there until the crisis arrives.

Translating the Konbini

As noted above, Takemori’s recreation of Furukura’s voice is a real achievement, but the translation does have a few seams that show, particularly around the details of the convenience store itself. The industry was transplanted from the United States, but it is thoroughly Japanese now, and interactions with customers follow scripts that stubbornly resist easy rendering in English. A conversation that would seem quite natural if about “fifties” and “hundreds” comes out oddly labored when transposed to “five-thousand-yen notes” and “ten-thousand-yen notes.” On the other hand, some of Takemori’s choices are sublime, such as “heat treatment” for the indifferent premeal processing Furukura applies to her vegetables.

Some of these issues come together in the book’s title: Convenience Store Woman for Konbini ningen. Literally, ningen is “human” rather than “woman”: the structure evokes such terms as kaisha ningen, a person who lives only for their company (kaisha), or even kaizō ningen, a “remodeled human” or cyborg. There’s certainly a case for surfacing the book’s sexual politics in the title—it can’t be accidental, for example, that the female characters tend to enforce norms with concern and solicitude while the men use ridicule and bluster—but it also seems to undermine Furukura’s own stated position: “Here in the convenience store we’re not men and women. We’re all store workers.”

A Higher Calling

Furukura shows no interest in tastes, smells, or sights, but she is highly attuned to sound. The book begins by describing a convenience store as “a world of sound”; elsewhere, it is the sound of the water in the shower—not the shower itself—that washes the echo of the convenience store from her ears. As the crisis in Furukura’s life heightens, sound becomes an almost mystical presence. There are voices that only she can hear.

Convenience Store Woman is too accomplished to boil down to a single message, but this seems to be one idea that runs through it. People say a lot of things—some true, some misguided, some calculating and cruel. This is an unavoidable part of living in a society. The challenge is to listen past those voices and balance their demands with whatever higher calling we hear beyond.

Convenience Store Woman, written by Murata Sayaka and translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is published by Grove Atlantic on June 12, 2018.