This novel (or, more accurately, novella), was another Five Books recommendation.

Written by Sayaka Murata, it was published in Japan in 2016. I listened to the German translation by Ursula Graefe (2018), which was ably read by Bettina Storm.

The convenience store referred to in the title is the multi-purpose konbini (manifestations of which we are currently using almost daily), and our narrator is Keiko Furukura, a 36-year-old woman whose life revolves around her job as assistant in the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart.

Murata, note, knows the konbini world inside out, because she herself worked in one until comparatively recently (when her increasing popularity made her too much of a fan-magnet).

It's an excellent little book, one of those stories that makes you step back, and look at life with fresh eyes.


Nagasaki konbini, January 2023

Keiko has always been aware that she is "different". (The book gives her no specific label, but observers have speculated that she is somewhere on the autism spectrum.)

Ever since childhood, she has had the impression that she doesn't quite fit in, and has only the slimmest understanding of what it is to be "normal". But it's not really all her problem, of course. True, she lacks empathy. But her straightforward and unvarnished views on life very acutely skewer the false sentimentality, hypocrisy, and ambiguity of the society around her. All the way through this book, you find yourself reassessing what exactly "normal" is.

At any rate, Keiko learns early on that her best defence is to keep herself to herself. She survives by trying to avoid attention.

In 1998, when she is still a student, she starts a casual job in a konbini. And it is here that she discovers her real element. It is an environment in which she's told exactly what to wear, what to say, what to do, how "to be". This tightly-determined framework takes all the difficult decision-making out of life, and makes it manageable. She feels as though she has been reborn.

Increasingly, the aquarium-like world of the konbini is not only her work, it's her life script. So, when she leaves university, she doesn't try very hard to find a "graduate-appropriate" job, but rather opts to stay on at the konbini. And there's no denying that she's good at what she does. We see her pre-empting problems, diagnosing weaknesses, pro-actively fixing things...

Socially, she grows confident enough to ape the speech and manners of those around her (tricks she uses to great advantage when she has her occasional meetings with her sister or friends from uni).



When we first encounter her, she has been working at the konbini for 18 years already, and things might have continued that way indefinitely, had it not been for two things. One is the continued probing of said sister and friends. (Why is she still a temporary worker at the konbini? Why isn't she married? Why doesn't she even have a boyfriend? Doesn't she realize she's getting older? Etc.) The other is the eruption into her world of someone even further off the antisocial scale. Feckless, charmless, and utterly unable to provide for himself, Shiraha (who starts work at the konbini only to get himself fired in short order) is full of stories about the Stone Age proclivities of contemporary society, according to which people have to conform, and be strong -- or face being identified as "foreign bodies" and driven out. Shiraha is sexist, entitled, and full of his own victim story, but he plants the worry in Keiko's mind that she, too, will sooner or later be flushed out... She feels she needs to take protective steps.

So she invites the ghastly Shiraha to share her tiny flat, on the grounds that such cohabitation will fend off questions for both of them. And it works. Her sister is rapt to hear she has a "boyfriend". Even when she meets him, and can have no illusions, the idea that Keiko has a partner is enough to trump all his inadequacies. The world is full, it seems, of people who are far happier if they think you're a normal person with a lot of problems than an abnormal person who is doing just fine...

But when the konbini workers find out about this new partnership, they treat it as just a juicy and weird piece of gossip. It distracts them from their konbini duties in a way that for Keiko is unfathomable and destabilizing.

Shiraha has by now pretty much taken up residence in Keiko's bath tub, where he spends his time discoursing on the Jomon period, waiting for her to feed him, and urging her to find a "proper" job so that she can provide for him adequately...

So she resigns from her womb-like konbini, and after a period of complete disorientation, sets out on the job trail. On the way to her first interview, though, Keiko succumbs again to the powerful call of the konbini... This is her world, and she wants back in.



I think the book starts to lose focus a little towards the end. But it's a wonderful little meditation on our social conventions, and the ruthless way we impose them on each other. Why, actually, should you automatically be expected to love your sister's baby? Why, if your job supplies your material and emotional needs, should you constantly be pestered to find something else? Why, when you see no evidence around you of warm and fulfilling marriages, should you too be herded in that direction?

When you start out on the book, you think it is going to be a satire on the kind of capitalist working practices that grind everyone into uniformity and predictability. The inversion here is that these characteristics are PRECISELY what Keiko likes about the job... As Joerg Magenau says: "Outside the konbini, Keiko is nothing. And what is the most amazing thing about that? It's that it's exactly what makes her happy and content."

Murata has made Keiko, with all her limitations, and -- let's be honest -- her occasionally slightly worrying proclivities, admirable: "The fact that Keiko doesn't break, but knows how to help herself, makes her a 'heroine' in the eyes of her author. However, Sayaka Murata conceded that it's female readers in particular who recognize a happy ending here; with men the interpretation is sometimes different."

The novella is also, of course, a fabulous picture of the konbini... I think the corporate instruction booklet has relaxed a bit since then, but everyone still sings out "welcome" when you arrive and "thank you" when you leave, and at the counter, they'll offer to heat stuff up for you, and pack your hot and cold separately, and supply any chopsticks you might need. The woman in the konbini round the corner from us is so hyper, and bows so deeply, that she really does call Keiko to mind...



Two linguistic features to note:

Contrary to my normal practice, the title at the top of this post is roughly the English equivalent of the original Japanese (which is konbini ningen -- well, that's actually Convenience Store Human, which sounds way too weird in English). The English version of the title adds gender-specificity (Convenience Store Woman), and the Italian and French translations also go down this route, although both use the word "girl", rather than "woman". The Spanish version chooses the somewhat anodyne La dependienta (the shop assistant).

But the German version is called "Die Ladenhueterin", a rendition that is double-meaning-stuffed and utterly untranslatable...

Quick German lesson: The verb "hueten" means to guard or look after. So a Ladenhueter (Ladenhueterin in the feminine version) can mean someone who looks after a shop. (Der Ladenhueter, for example, was the German title chosen for Jerry Lewis's Who's Minding the Store?) But a "Ladenhueter" also means an article that is unsaleable or slow to sell -- something that sits on the shelf for way too long. And by extension, then, it means a person who is deemed to have sat on the shelf for way too long (ie, is unmarried). Such a person is also a Ladenhueter -- a slow seller.

As the word is used with both these meanings at different points in the book, and both could potentially be applied to Keiko, it's a really, really clever title.

This reader puts it very well: "I liked the title for its ambiguity. For one thing, Keiko really does look after this business. She constantly thinks about what improvements would make sense, how certain products can be sold in a more targeted manner, etc. She completely identifies with her shop, and knows it better than any of the other employees, since she has worked here the longest. On the other hand, the derogatory term 'slow seller' applies to her too. As a single woman, she is viewed by the rest as someone whom nobody wants. The term itself also occurs in this sense in the novel: 'Miki, the other unmarried woman, whispered in my ear: "We're the slow sellers here."'"

Another reader agrees on the aptness of the title: "Through its ambiguity, it combines Keiko's self-perception and the way others perceive her in one word."

I can think of absolutely no expression in English that adequately conveys those two senses... Kudos to whoever thought that up...



The other interesting issue is the "konbini-language". The script that workers learn and use all the time sounds a bit weird if translated directly into other languages and contexts.

Commenting on her translation of the English version, Ginny Tapley Takemori notes: "In Convenience Store Woman..., you have the stock phrases used by store workers -- these are absolutely formulaic, set out in the manual, and practiced daily. I decided to keep one of the phrases in Japanese -- irasshaimase -- which anyone who comes to Japan will hear every time they go into a shop or a restaurant. It means, basically, 'welcome,' but it would sound just too weird to translate it as that in English, and we really don’t have any equivalent. Store workers might call out hello, but not every time somebody comes into the store, so I decided it would be more natural to keep the Japanese word. [For] other phrases I came up with something more or less equivalent in English, keeping the formulaic feel, but making it sound more or less natural. 'Yes madam, certainly madam,' and so forth."

The German version uses similar strategies.

But what is this "manual" of stock phrases? It all has to do with keigo, or honorific language, which is an important element of Japanese: "Normally to be polite Japanese people will use keigo. Keigo tends to be quite long and the longer it is the more formal it is... This is all very good when working in an office environment and dealing with professional guests, but when you’re working in a store and saying the same things over, and over, and over, the longer keigo becomes a bit of a mouthful. So in the early 00s baito-keigo or konbini-keigo formed as a commonly used polite way to say things without them being too long [baito means part-time job]. There are also books called manual-keigo, which are manuals given to people looking for part-time work so they can learn this baito-keigo."

The problem, though, is that many Japanese people don't use keigo correctly, so the keigo used in shops is often not correct either. All of which causes not a little concern: "Anxiety in Japan about the decline of honorific language and the inability of young people to use it correctly regularly spills out into the media. From one perspective, the next generation is not learning keigo as it should -- or worse, it is being taught garbled forms that break traditional rules through the manuals and training of major corporations that hire young workers for part-time positions... If huge convenience-store and fast-food chains teach employees across the nation to use prescribed set phrases [that purists would disapprove of]..., then it is not surprising that these ways of speaking permeate into wider society."

But all that is a digression. The bottom line is that this insightful and darkly amusing book is well worth reading.