Dear Convenience Store...

The feeling of when you don’t wear pants to a pants-required event, or don’t have a viral meerkat when all of your friends own house pets with 20,000 Instagram followers, or opting out of playing the trendy game of pin-the-tail on the depressed mule is the common feeling of being different from everybody else. It’s said that humans tend to gravitate towards “strength in numbers,” making it more difficult to be the one who stands out. For Keiko Furukura, her whole life has been a struggle of trying to conform to society’s expectations. 

Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, is the story of 36-year old Keiko, who has always been perplexed by the world around her, and the world has found her just as confounding. She has been a loyal worker for 18 years at the Japanese convenience store, Smile Mart, where most of the story is set. At a young age, her parents realized their elder daughter was, well, strange. In primary school, for example, two boys had started fighting, and the other kids didn’t know how to stop them, so Keiko got a spade and hit one of them on the head. Her mother was called in, and there was a meeting with the teachers. Keiko couldn’t understand why the adults’ reactions were of shock and bewilderment because to her, her action seemed quite reasonable: it had quickly and efficiently solved the problem. It took Keiko a few more incidents before she realized that she had to go unnoticed and blend into her surroundings. Then, at 18, she began working at Smile Mart, and she finally felt she had found her place. There was a set routine for everything, from greetings, to displaying food, to interacting with customers. Being a convenience store worker helped her feel like a normal person, or as she put it, “a cog in society.”

Author, Sayaka Murata, in a Japanese convenience store

To be completely honest, I did not love this book, but I didn’t hate it either. Rather, I found it a bit unsettling, and dare I say, a little creepy? After first introducing the reader to the convenience store as “a world of sound,” Keiko later expands her depiction of the store: “I couldn’t stop hearing the store telling me the way it wanted to be, what it needed. It was all flowing into me. It wasn’t me speaking. It was the store,” and “The voice of the convenience store won’t stop flowing through me. I was born to hear this voice.” In times like this, when the convenience store becomes more than a place, I felt Keiko’s relationship with the store was a bit disconcerting; her connection to the store had intensified, and it made me uncomfortable.

While Convenience Store Woman is not categorized as an autobiographical work, I have my suspicions that many aspects of the book and Keiko herself are based on Sayuka Murata, the author, who also worked at a convenience store for 18 years. In fact, at the end of the book, she included an essay that she had written in the form of a letter addressed to a convenience store. Her words expressed such amorous feelings towards the store that if she hadn’t started the letter with “Dear Convenience Store,” I would have thought she was writing to her romantic partner. Before having read the letter, I had thought Keiko was only a character of the author’s quirky imagination. After reading the letter, however, I found that it added to the weird factor when I sensed that Keiko’s character was a reflection of the author herself.

Despite my minor discomfort towards the book, there were some aspects that I did like. There is a part in the book where Keiko attempts to become a more “normal” 36-year-old and gets together with a former convenience store worker, Shiraha (a surly, lazy man). Shiraha was facing the same problems as Keiko. According to society’s rules for men, he should have been married by now, yet he was a single, middle-aged man without a steady job. Keiko and Shiraha agreed to live together because it was beneficial for both of them: Keiko having a “boyfriend” made her friends and sister happy, and Shiraha had a place to stay that was isolated from the judgmental eyes of the world. They had an odd relationship that wasn’t really a relationship at all. I mean, Shiraha essentially lived in Keiko’s bathtub for most of the time, and Keiko thought of feeding Shiraha as feeding a dog...But I found their relationship not only peculiar but also understandable as to why they chose to get together; they were stronger with each other when facing society.

I would still recommend Convenience Store Woman even though I didn’t love it. I think the concepts are presented in an unusual and unique way, which can expand your experience as a reader. I would encourage you to give it a try.