Convenience Store Woman Review

Keiko has worked at the convenience store her entire adult life. But as she nears 40, the pressure to find a “real” job or get married is mounting – what sort of life awaits Keiko outside the comfort zone of the store and will she step out to meet it?

I feel like there’s a good novel somewhere in Convenience Store Woman but Sayaka Murata didn’t realise it. Her commentary on conformist society and the individual is inane and unoriginal though far worse is her muddled placement of the main character within that commentary.

It’s never explicitly stated but Keiko is obviously autistic. She doesn’t understand human behaviour, talks repeatedly about the mask/disguise she wears and takes her cues from her peers, mimicking their body language, speech patterns and dress to pass as “normal” – not that she cares all that much about being “normal” but she feels life is easier if that’s how people perceive her. She comes off as robotic and unemotional. She has no interest in sex or relationships in general. She works, thinks and lives mechanically. She even has her sister come up with lines for her to repeat in social situations to seem like a “normal” person.

She’s practical to a fault. An anecdote from her childhood (which also shows that her behaviour is not the result of working in a convenience store): two boys are fighting in the schoolyard, someone calls to break them up, so Keiko grabs a shovel and smacks one of the boys on the head, nearly killing him. She doesn’t understand – she broke up the fight didn’t she? Later on, her sister’s baby is crying and she briefly thinks that she knows a way to permanently stop it making noise and stressing her sister out. There’s no malice behind the thought of killing a baby, she’s just thinking practically without understanding appropriate social behaviour (though she knows enough not to act on it).

So I would definitely say that Keiko’s autistic, or at the very least somewhere on the spectrum. Not that anything’s wrong with that of course - but then what’s the novel’s point? Murata seems to be critical of a conformist society where certain jobs relegate people to cogs within a machine – dehumanised, essentially – in a society with far too rigidly-defined roles with no room for individual expression, leading to unsatisfied lives.

Except Keiko is happy to be a cog in a machine because of the way her brain is wired. And it wasn’t society that did this to her, she was simply born this way. She fully embraces the role of convenience store worker, as it’s clearly defined and therefore understandable. She could do without societal rules with its grounding in complex human behaviour, which she’s never understood.

Her character arc is non-existent. She knows her place in the world and she’s satisfied with it. She starts and ends as a convenience store worker. Something happens – which was completely arbitrary and never explained - along the way that takes her out of that setting but it only confirms her contentment with her lot in life and puts her back where she started. Is the point then that society should accept that some people are fine with/don’t care about “low” status? Or that the rules should be different for someone who’s autistic/on the spectrum, who clearly can’t handle/doesn’t want the complexities that come with more traditional ideas of success – high paying jobs, lots of material possessions, families, etc.?

I found Convenience Store Woman underwhelming as its ultimate message – you’ve got one life to live, it’s yours, don’t waste any time worrying about what other people think and live it the way you want – isn’t just a mundane, obvious observation but is something I took to heart years ago and I think is how most people live anyway. At least that’s what I took the meaning to be seeing as Keiko affirms her place in the world, regardless of what people think, and is more than ok with it. Unless it’s meant to be tragic as she tried and failed to “climb the social ladder” by getting a new job? But if she’s autistic, then she probably wouldn’t be able to handle anything else so isn’t she already doing the best that she can?

And that’s why I don’t think the conformity critique – if that was what Murata was going for – works well alongside an autistic character. Because conformity, regularity, mindless, repetitive labour, etc. actually fits an autistic person who can’t handle change. Maybe that message would’ve been more effective if Keiko had started out as a girl with hopes and dreams for a fulfilling career, a nice house, a husband and kids, and ended up a single convenience store worker. Except the novel is actually about how someone found their place in life right out of high school and has continued to be happy with it; it’s everyone else who has a problem with that.

So the novel is about a character who doesn’t change, a society that doesn’t change, and how both have found comfort in conformity, and the author’s conclusion to all this is… who knows? At any rate it doesn’t add up to much!

People seem to really dig autistic fictional characters these days – like the gay professor in that wildly successful yet desperately unfunny sitcom, and Don Tillman in Graeme Simsion’s bestselling The Rosie Project – so I can see why this would be popular. And Japanese convenience stores really are incredible. Their food culture is light years ahead of what we have in the west. Convenience store food is delicious and the selections are many and mind-bending – if you ever visit, you’ll be blown away with the treasures inside these ubiquitous shops.

Still, it’s generally a well-written book that’s easy to read and, for a novel mostly set in somewhere as ordinary as a convenience store and its day-to-day machinations, it’s never boring so credit to Sayaka Murata for that. Maybe it’s messaging is more relevant to close-buttoned Japanese society but I wasn’t impressed with it and found it left a confused impression. If it had been clearer and more focused, this would be a decent novel; as it is, it’s a jumbled mess.