2019 read #20: Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
163 pages
Published 2016 (English translation published 2018)
Read from November 18 to November 19
Rating: 4 out of 5

Alternately hilarious and infuriating, Convenience Store Woman examines the dysfunctions and dissociations of late capitalist society from the viewpoint of someone who feels happiest as an efficient cog within the machinery of a convenience store. Keiko Furukura has never been able to process social cues or understand people's expectations. Work at a convenience store provides her with a literal manual of how to behave and perform her duties, instructions she adheres to with gusto. Social expectations pressure Keiko: Date! Quit your go-nowhere job and pursue a career! Marry and raise a family! Happy in the convenience store, satisfied with a role she understands, Keiko wonders if she should be doing more to conform to the social role others seem to expect of her, that of a "human woman" instead of a reliable convenience store worker—concerns that reach a desperate level just as she crosses paths with a petulant, sniveling manbaby of an InCel.

Shiraha whines about how society hasn't changed since the Stone Age, how the best hunters still get the prettiest girls, how the village will chase you out if you don't conform—and how men have it so much worse than women. He is one of the most infuriating characters I can remember from any of my recent reads, so vividly realized that I wanted to wring his neck every time I turned the page.

Shiraha serves as a sort of warped mirror to Keiko's own inability to satisfy the social expectations of those around her. Keiko has no trouble seeing Shiraha's bullshit for what it is, for the most part, but sees bits of truth in his tantrums. My own reading is that both characters are reacting to the malaise of capitalist culture in different ways, neither one of them understanding the structural dysfunctions underlying their respective inability to "fit in." While Shiraha becomes a self-pitying grifter who bewails his constant victimhood, Keiko realizes of her own sister, "She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine."

Convenience Store Woman is a brief and breezy little novel that packs in so much insight into modern human life within its short length.