Convenience Store Woman - Sayaka Murata

Fiction

Rating: 7/10

This book centers on a woman in her mid-thirties who struggles with puzzlement at the demeanour of the people around her.  Exhibiting odd behaviours, to put it mildly, in order to fit in, she is blithely unaware of how others perceive her. Somehow she must navigate the narrow social slots people, particularly women, are expected to occupy.

Single and childless, she has spent the last twenty or so years working at a convenience store. There she has received a uniform and a manual that outlines exactly how she is supposed to conduct herself, right down to the scripted phrases approved for interactions with the customers.  Her obedience to these rules and application of them beyond the walls of the store is eerily cheerful and we as readers never quite know what to make of her. The deadpan delivery of her narration will have the readers opinion of the character swinging from adorably quirky to appallingly deranged.

Footnote: As much as this novel is deeply perturbing and uncomfortably peculiar, there is a dare to interpret it as a happy story about a woman who has managed to craft her own good life, on her own terms.  Social “norms” be damned!