Title : Convenience Store Woman
Author : Sayaka Murata
Narrators : Nancy Wu
Genre : Contemporary
Publisher : Blackstone Audio
Listening Length : 3 hours 21 minutes
Rating : ⭐️
Narrator Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️
This was a pretty “meh” book. I’d been looking forward to reading it after seeing it recommended on a sub-Reddit thread, but this was a disappointment.
Keiko Furukura is a hard-working convenience store worker, doing her job diligently. She loves her job, finding it a comforting place – a place where she almost knows the rules, where she knows how to act and behave and pass herself off as a “normal” person. Keiko in her own words is not quite the norm. She doesn’t fit neatly into society’s “well-adjusted functioning adult” bracket. It is not that she cannot function on her own – she can, and does live independently – but she does not follow or need society’s unwritten rules. She does not have close friends, a partner or the desire to get married and form her own family unit.
“This society hasn’t changed one bit. People who don’t fit into the village are expelled: men who don’t hunt, women who don’t give birth to children. For all we talk about modern society and individualism, anyone who doesn’t try to fit in can expect to be meddled with, coerced, and ultimately banished from the village.”
Life changes for her when she encounters Shiraha, a lazy worker who joins the store, and who like her does not follow society’s diktats. But there the similarity ends – he is shifty, has little integrity, and is quite content to criticize everything without actually doing anything.
I imagine Keiko as a placid, emotionless automaton. She seems to be a decent person, rather straightforward and incapable of ulterior motives, but that image gets dented when she makes the seemingly cynical choice of adopting the worthless Shiraha, who very overtly and to her face criticizes everything about her – her looks, age, poverty, skills etc.
The novel continues quite tepidly, without much happening besides Keiko and Shiraha, getting together, if one can call it that. I didn’t quite care about either. Keiko at least elicits sympathy, with her constant pain-staking efforts to fit in, and her having to bravely listen to everyone telling her to move one – get a better job, marry, etc. etc. But I quite disliked Shiraha. Neither had any redeeming qualities, or did enough to move the narrative forward.
The book does bring attention to society’s superficial nature, and how one is regarded by how well one follows the “rules of normalcy”. But other than being a rather listless commentary on that, this book achieves little else. I’m not sure if the book’s brilliance (per the reviews) was lost in translation, but I did not enjoy this one.
