Shelf Life
"Convenience Store Woman," a novel by Sayaka Murata
As a child, Keiko is told she doesn’t fit in. On the playground, her schoolmates find a dead bird and sniff sadly about “the poor thing.” Keiko says to her mother, “Let’s eat it! . . . Daddy likes yakitori, doesn’t he?” When two boys are fighting at school, Keiko ends the dispute by taking a shovel to the boys’ heads. And when, for no known reason, a teacher bursts into hysterical tears in front of the class, Keiko pulls down her knickers and her skirt. Problem solved.
Keiko goes silent. Better not to speak than say the wrong thing. She’s on permanent probation, a spy in the house of normal. At 18, she falls in love, not with a person but with a convenience store in Tokyo, where she lives. She’s hired to work there. The bar is low. There is no bar.
At the store, she feels the nothing that is her something. There’s a time clock to punch and rituals and routines to observe. Ah, joy! Hour after hour, day after day, Keiko lives inside the pings of the cash register, the whoosh of doors opening and closing, the rattle of cellophane wrappers on lunch boxes, the code language exchanged with customers and coworkers—at once empty and consoling. Irasshaimasé, she calls out in welcome: a smiling, alert emoji.
Eighteen years pass, and still she works at the part-time job, feeling no desire for love, sex, marriage, children, money, or other kinds of work. This does not depress her. It depresses everyone else she knows: her sister, who is married and has a child, her parents, her co-workers, the friends whose lives she has drifted into. On her days off, when she visits these people, she feels poked at and seen as a freak. The pressure on her mounts to take some form of action and stop being an irritant, and just at this moment a man comes to work at the store.
The man feels the job demeans him. He shirks his tasks. He believes males should hunt and that females should stay at home and gather fruit. He stalks female workers and customers in hopes of having sex with them. Really, he hopes a woman will marry him and support him.
Keiko sees a use for him, the way, as a child, she saw a use for the dead bird. The man is fired from his job and winds up homeless. He smells bad. He has debts. Keiko takes him in. He’s a man in the form of an ill-tempered pet, and she takes him in. She sleeps in the closet while he sleeps in the bath tub. When the people in Keiko’s life learn of this arrangement, they are thrilled for her. They know what he is, and they are thrilled for her! She knows this will be their response.
Convenience Store Woman, published in Japan in 2016, is cunning, seductive, hilarious, and mean, laughing at the pressures on women in Japanese culture (and everywhere else) to conform. Keiko narrates the story, and as with all great monologuists, she turns the reader into her accomplice. “My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me,” she says. “I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from the past colleagues such as Sasaki, who left six months ago, and Okasaki, who was our supervisor until a year ago.” While other people see her as a blur or a ghost, we see her as a detective, turning over clues about the hoaxes other people fall for.
In telling a story that will hold the reader, you can either make the strange ordinary or the ordinary strange. Or both, maybe, as Hitchcock does? In Murata’s short story “A Clean Marriage,” published in Granta (2014), a man and woman marry in order not to have sex with each other. When they decide to have a child, they momentarily consider the obvious means to conception, only to reject it and feel “reassured by this evidence of shared revulsion.” In Convenience Store Woman, when Keiko hears her nephew crying in another room, she eyes the knife she’s just used to cut a cake and thinks how easy it would be to end the noise. Each day, she rises early so she can walk to the store through changing neighborhoods—“The sensation that the world is slowly dying feels good,” she tells us.
Convenience Store Woman is the first novel by Sayaka Murata (44) to be translated into English (in 2018). Ginny Tapley Takemori deftly captures the author’s sly, wide-eyed wit here and in a series of books Murata has published subsequently, including, Earthlings (2018) and Life Ceremony (2022). Convenience Store Woman has sold 1.5 million copies in Japan and in 2016 Murata earned the Akutagawa Prize, Japan’s most prestigious literary award. In a video of her at a press conference, she sits stunned, her hands folded neatly on her lap, listening more than speaking and saying yes more than any other word. Asked why she, herself, still works part time in a convenience store, she says she gathers material. To anyone who has entered the theater of service work, with its soothing routines and freeing masks, the truer answer might be: “Because I like it.”
Convenience Store Woman joins the literature of refusal, radical passivity, and underground women, along with Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (the clerk who “prefers not to”), Beckett’s minimalist characters who live in trash bins and sand heaps, and Lucy Snowe, the central character in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Villette (1853), who prefers doomed love to no love and whose inner life is almost entirely kept secret from other people. Lately, I’ve been writing about the novels of Constance Debré that fit this lineage as well, portraying a female character who boxes up her life as a lawyer with a husband and basically leaves it out on the street—paring down her body to a slim arrow, with a t-shirt and a shaved head, and limiting her activities to swimming, fucking girls, writing, and regaining custody of her son.
What is being opened up in these works about being human? That it’s a farce composed of imitations? To blend in, Keiko mimics the phrases and facial expressions of other people. Her narrative is a version of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy,” in which a captured ape learns to behave like a human being.
To survive among his captors, Kafka’s ape acquires language, a transformation from which there is no going back. Language ushers in the knowledge of how he is seen. In a sense, we all learn to become human by learning the language of a group with the power to define us. With the word comes the lie. “I am not who you say I am,” we think. “This is a case of mistaken identity,” we say, as parts of ourselves go into hiding. Keiko says she takes “the utmost care not to cause the customer any discomfort by observing him or her too closely,” but observation is precisely what she does in secret, just as, in secret, everyone devises their own private Keiko.
How to become free? By failing the test of being human, as Keiko does, because she’s unable to lie? Will she surrender to social pressure and keep her demanding man-pet? You will have to read the book to find out. Murata’s comedy brilliantly reverses the notion that we lose ourselves in anonymity. In anonymity, Keiko slips the knot of convention. For her, the rescue is in the catastrophe.
More Freaks
In this week's New York Times Book Review podcast, Gilbert Cruz and Dwight Garner discuss THE FREAKS CAME OUT TO WRITE: The Definitive History of The Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture, by Tricia Romano.
Garner is a super cheerleader for the thing that needed this crazy head and that crazy head in a room together for 40 years or so, in order to be the thing that depended on all its parts. The parts could change. The force kept going. It needed people arguing and falling in love. The paper was sex.
Garner mentions many people who worked there. Wayne Barrett, Jack Newfield, Sylvia Plachy, Richard Goldstein, C. Carr, M Mark, Guy Trebay, Fred McDarrah, James Wolcott, and lots more. He also mentions me and compliments “Everything is Personal,” as a way of saying some of us are still writing for the Voice. Thanks so much, Dwight! What a long strange trip it still is.
A Zoom with a view
The monthly Zoom conversations hosted by Richard Toon and me are growing more joyous and interactive with each session. Our goal is opening up more freedom to write sentences that stir emotions in readers. That stir joy in unexpected forms and prompt questions—whether you write posts or books, whether you don't write at all but want to expand the ways you read.
This past Saturday, we got so involved with people who arrived early, we forgot to press the record button! No one said we aren't also idiots. Sorry!
The next Zoom conversation will take place on Saturday March 23 from 3 to 4pm EST. If you would like to be placed on the list to receive a link (they go out a few days before the event), please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com.
Things sometimes go wrong with emails from Substack. Once I receive your email, I will write back to confirm you are on the list. If you don't hear from me, it means I didn't receive your RSVP, and in that case, please let me know in a FB message or another means.
As we approach the Zoom, I will offer possible topics for the session, and everyone with a place is welcome to send ahead a specific question about their writing practice and projects.
Also, you can write to me to arrange a one-on-one session to talk about your writing. The first conversation is free, to see if I am a good fit for your needs. lauriestone@substack.com.
A prompt to play with.
Isolate a dramatic moment from a narrative you are working on or thinking about. Narrow it to a sentence such as “The doctor came in and told me the results.” or “The first time I saw the wolf.” Or, “I didn’t see the crack.”
Write one paragraph set in the moment it happened.
Then write a paragraph each, set in these different time frames. You don’t need to do all of them. Try hard not to do them in chronological order. Pick the time frames randomly and write each paragraph in the imagination of its time.
Maybe each paragraph highlights a different sense memory. In one, there is a smell, in another the look of the light in a space that’s described, etc.
Remember to layer each paragraph with “It happened,” “It reminded me of something else,” “It stirred a feeling back then,” and “It’s making me think this now, as I am writing to you, reader.”
After you have written the separate paragraphs, experiment with ordering them. Try not to anticipate where this is going. Let unconscious images and associations rise to the surface. They will come, right there, in the moment.
A year before.
An hour before.
Five minutes later.
A week later.
Six months later.
Five years later.
Fifty years later.
Thanks for restacking!
I loved your take on Convenience Store Woman. I thought it about for weeks after I read it and now I want to read it again along with her subsequent books. I thought of the lead characters a woman who might be on the spectrum. I realize now that if the was, it doesn't matter .My take was simply the result of trying to make sense of her reactions and choices even as I cheered her on. It said more about me than her. I look forward to going back to this book and this author s voice.