Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

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You haven't even finished restocking the cooler when you notice three customers standing in front of the register, your coworker is late again, and the store's front doors refuse to open. Each of those incidents isn't a massive issue for a retail worker, but piled together they create a frustrating frenzy—in the white-collar world there are layers and layers of bosses, but in retail every single person you meet is your boss and can treat you as they please.

Keiko Furukura, the main character of Convenience Store Woman, thrives in this environment. She's in her mid-thirties and has been working at the same Tokyo store part-time since opening day. An oddball since childhood (she once tried to attack a classmate with a shovel, and considered frying up a dead bird in a park for yakitori) Keiko doesn't know how to operate in the adult world and chose a dead-end job as a way to find her bearings. That was eighteen years ago—her friends have moved away, raised children, become career women. Yet she has stayed in the exact same place, clocking in and out at the same times, eagerly taking on extra shifts. She lives in a tiny, roach-infested apartment and, perhaps most alarmingly, sleeps in her closet.

Should we pity Keiko? Perhaps not, because she knows the needs of her Smile Mart store better than she knows herself—the store speaks to her. When Keiko closes her eyes at night she imagines the staff cooking frankfurters and creating new displays of rice balls. When she's inside the store, even on her days off, it whispers in her ear, telling her exactly what it needs to reach retail perfection.

This novel drives home the differing views Japanese and Americans have on work; I couldn't help comparing Murata's gentle prose about convenience stores, full of eager-to-please employees, to Kevin Smith's sneering Gen-X take on retail, Clerks:

Sass and flannel 

Of course I'm biased as a lifelong American, but I can't help but prefer the more honest “this job blows but I need it” attitude so many U.S. retail workers wear on their sleeve. Japan's world-renowned obsession with creating excellent customer service, with impeccable stores and Stepford Wife-robotic staff, has a downsides—employees work overtime knowing they'll never be compensated, and workers are expected to be cloyingly upbeat (Smile Mart has a morning staff pep rally reminiscent of Wal-Mart). Keiko muses at one point that “When morning comes, once again I'm a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person.”

The worst pressures in Keiko's life exist outside the store—because of her age and lack of a “real” job, her relatives and friends find every opportunity to match her with a husband and a real career. Keiko has excuses she's stockpiled over the years to explain away her life choices, but more and more she realizes that she is nothing without the Smile Mart: “'More than a person, I'm a convenience store worker. Even if that means I'm abnormal and can't make a living and drop down dead, I can't escape that fact. My very cells exist for the convenience store'.”

Convenience Store Woman is a skinny book, which is good; I think novels that are speaking directly to working men and women should be sized with employee lockers in mind. Some of the social awkwardness that Keiko feels about fitting in seems almost too quaint sometimes but, then again, societal pressure to find a husband and a domestic life is more intense in Japan than in this country.

Interestingly, as of this novel's publication in America (it was published in Japan in 2016) Murata is still working at a convenience store part-time, despite the book's massive international success. Maybe the store is whispering in her ear, too.