Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata review – sublimely weird
Not all novel titles manage so very literally to describe the contents, but this one – unapologetically deadpan yet enticingly comic – absolutely does. Keiko has been a worry to her family all her life, bullied and friendless, her behaviour sometimes even chilling. At school she bashes a boy over the head with a shovel to stop him fighting. Another time she asks her mother if she can eat a dead budgie found in the park.
Her salvation appears when, aged 18, she secures herself a job at the local Smile Mart convenience store and, paying conscientious attention to the training video, realises “it was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech”. Discovering that she excels at the daily monotone of restocks and product promotions and difficult customers, Keiko finds contentment and self-respect among the brightly lit aisles and hot food cabinets. Now part of the “machine of society” and revelling in the newfound safety and comfort of her job, she reckons she’s at long last “pulled off being a ‘person”’.
But now Keiko is 36 years old and her family still isn’t happy. Concerned that she’s hurtling towards a childless middle age in a dead-end job, they hanker to “fix” her, begging her to get some therapy or, better still, find a husband. Enter Shiraha, a lazy, feckless and resoundingly truculent convenience store colleague who is soon fired, only to be rescued by Keiko who takes pity on him.
It's the novel’s cumulative, idiosyncratic poetry that lingers
He tells her that he wants to find a wife to finance him. “You lot have a cushy time of it,” he says, adding that in his view nothing has changed since the stone age: “people who don’t fit into the village are expelled: men who don’t hunt, women who don’t give birth to children”.
Nothing about Shiraha is attractive and his arguments don’t remotely add up, but nevertheless Keiko has an idea that might help them both “fit in”. She tells him he can move in with her and she will provide his “feed” and keep him “hidden from society” and all its demands. In return, his very presence in her home will encourage people to view her as normal. “It appears that if a man and a woman are alone in an apartment together, people’s imaginations run wild and they’re satisfied regardless of the reality,” she observes.
Shiraha is quick to see her point. “Everyone will assume you’re a sexually active, respectable human being. That’s the image of you that pleases them most. Isn’t it wonderful?” Though he is charmingly quick to reassure her that “there’s no chance of me ever penetrating a woman like you”.
This, Murata’s 10th novel, has been a big hit both in Japan and worldwide, and it isn’t hard to see why. It’s not flawless: Shiraha seems to be more of a plot enabler than fully realised character and, though Murata’s gloriously nutty deadpan prose and even more nuttily likable narrator are irresistible, I’d have liked more on her latent psychopathic streak. The moment when, as her sister comforts her crying baby, Keiko eyes the cake knife on the table and thinks “if it was just a matter of making him quiet, it would be easy enough” is sublimely weird but, for my money, never really earned or followed up.
But these are minor quibbles and perhaps even missing the point. For it’s the novel’s cumulative, idiosyncratic poetry that lingers, attaining a weird, fluorescent kind of beauty all of its own. The world of the store with its dented cans and rice balls and barcodes and scanners, and Keiko’s shivery, unashamedly sensual response as a “convenience store animal” who can “hear the store’s voice telling me what it wanted, how it wanted to be”. The book’s title is more than perfect, for this, you soon realise, is a love story. Keiko’s love story: the convenience is all hers.
• Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori) is published by Portobello Books (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
