Convenience Store Woman

[halfcactus]

Recently finished Convenience Store Woman by Murata Sayaka (tr. Ginny Tapley Takemori), which is a satirical little novel about the absurdities of societal expectations told in the PoV of a woman who's considered an anomaly: Keiko is thirty-six years old, unmarried, ace/aro, probably neurodivergent, and works at the same part-time convenience store job she's had for eighteen years. She is content with the life she has, but the people around her treat it as a problem to be solved. Abstractly recognizing that to be human is to perform in accordance to the rules of the majority, she nominally enters a relationship with a universally disdained incel and observes her social standing improve. As the plot progresses, Keiko faces the question of what it means to be "normal" and whether or not it's worth it.

I really wish this book had a better English translation so I can gauge it more properly. It reads stiff and unnatural and othering in a manner that's quite typical for translated Japanese litfic, and the story suffers so much for it as one of the major characterization points is in Keiko observing and imitating distinct speech patterns, all of which are invisible to me; as far as I'm concerned, everyone talks in the same, flat, translated-from-Japanese-to-English way, indistinguishable from each other.

It's really a shame that the translation style and quality made the reading experience so irritating because I'm currently in a headspace where the book's themes resonate and hit hard. There's a certain amount of comfort to be had in the way Keiko finds meaning and satisfaction and humanity in the things she does even when no one else understands, but also envy.

Comments

[octahedrite]

Ooh, this sounds super relevant to my interests. *adds to TBR*

[halfcactus]

Oh yes, definitely relevant to your present interests!

[nnozomi]

Very interesting review, thank you. Remind me in August when I'm back home to look for it in the bookstores and I will try to look up how the actual Japanese text comes off. I wish all (many of) the books translated from Japanese didn't tend to be either gloomy existential litfic or sappy fluff.