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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:
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| 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.
