convenience store woman by sayaka murata

Yes, Keiko sees a dead bird in the park and is confused by her family’s mawkish desire to bury it when they could simply grill it for dinner but what distinguishes this bird from the other birds they eat? Yes, Keiko muses that despite the hassle of soothing her infant nephew, it would be easier to stop his cries by stabbing him with a cake knife but she’s only observing. Yes, as a child Keiko bashes two boys with a spade to stop them fighting but she’s using the boys’ own tool – physical force – to achieve a desired outcome. Warn the townspeople.įor my part, I was entirely Team Keiko. The book is “depraved” and a form of “horror”, this last because our heroine has a low-paid job. Apparently Keiko is “chilling”, “an oddball” and “latently psychopathic”.

I’d never seen that in fiction: no schmaltzy girl-boss pipe dreams, just bald awareness that all human integration requires pretence if society finds you weird.

To me, the novel says that if one play-acts everywhere, it’s freeing to have a script. It’s easy to see Keiko as a late-capitalist stooge, but I don’t read Convenience Store Woman as an interrogation of alienated labour. I’d thought my brain was too different to appear in a novel, but there I was Keiko’s words made me feel that in my throat: the repression, and some of what I use to cover it. I need to really trust someone before I can let myself feel anything around them, since I know from robust trial and error that many people will mock my spectrum traits. I can’t get excited because then I’ll start flapping my hands. I can’t be happy, because if I do then my voice will go monotone and I’ll forget to make the right faces. This sentence floored me: “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.” That’s why I squash my emotions in public. Keiko feels lonely in the way I often do: not because we lack company, but because praise for a persona that we cultivate for others suggests that no one loves our real self. Employers are narrow-minded (“If I ever became a foreign object, I’d no doubt be eliminated.”), but so are most people, or they’d stop requiring us to mimic them. For her and for me, socialising isn’t “leisure”. Keiko never clocks off from acting “normal”. I smiled whenever I recognised an experience, which meant I basically smiled for the whole book. I’d thought my brain was too different to appear in a novel, but there I was.

Convenience store woman by sayaka murata