Over the past two years I’ve been enjoying the pleasures of East Asian books. There’s something about the writing style that speaks to me, and Convenience Store Woman by Japanese author Sayaka Murata continues this trend.
What fascinates me about this book is how dual-layered it is in terms of the reading experience. Convenience Store Woman tells a surface level story about a mid-aged woman, named Keiko Furukura, who has worked at the same convenience store for eighteen years. Every waking moment in Keiko’s life is about serving the convenience store and she prides herself at being the most loyal and dedicated worker there.
Keiko’s friends and family begin to wonder about her mental wellbeing because she has no desire to find marriage, pro-create or upgrade to a better career. Keiko often has difficulty dealing with the evaluations from other people who meddle in her life, and it gets to the point where she invites a man to live with her just to stop people lecturing her.
I say this book is dual-layered because for those who simply want an easy read, you can get through this book pretty quickly and feel satisfied at having read a complete story that’s essentially a character study. But on the flip-side, for readers like myself who like to extract deeper meanings from their books, Convenience Store Woman allows the reader to delve deep and come up with a number of metaphors about modern society.
The book made me think about how everyone has a preconceived expectation placed upon them. From the day you’re born, people expect you to grow up and go through a set path. But Convenience Store Woman is all about rejecting these expectations and being self-aware about who you are and what you’re best at.
At 176 pages, Convenience Store Woman can be finished in one or two sittings. And although the book is short, it’s packed full of depth. The book is translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, who does a spectacular job making the text easy to digest. I noticed that some British slang is used, but British or not, there’s nothing that will get lost in translation. Even Americans can enjoy this.
I rated this book 5 stars on Goodreads, because with Convenience Store Woman being such a short book, there’s no reason not to read it and I feel everyone will identify with the story on some level.
