Convenience Store Woman Review

I just finished a book called Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.  According to her bio, she has written many books and won Japan’s most prestigious literary award for this book.  I recently came across Convenience Store Woman on either the BBC or the New York Times websites, but I don't recall which.  It is a quirky, bizarre, little novel.  It is about, as the title suggests, a woman who works at a convenience store.  The woman, Miss Furukura, is somewhat unusual in that she has little personality of her own and regularly finds herself copying her co-workers (everything from their speech patterns to their manners of dress) and enlisting her sister into helping her with stock excuses to regular social questions - like why have you worked part-time at a convenience store for 18 years, why aren’t you married, etc. - to avoid her appearing to not be “normal.” 

The book main theme is on what it means to be normal (or not) and how societies (even ones that talk about embracing difference) try to homogenize people and put them into neat categories.  Further, how the whole societal machine shutters when it encounters people it can’t neatly categorize.  Anyone who has ever felt out of place or felt like an “other” will definitely be able to identify with the characters in the novel.

Ultimately, I found it an enjoyable, quirky, and a quick (162 pages) read.  The fact that it is a Japanese language book translated into English added to the quirky feel because certain lines felt stilted and unnatural (undoubtedly an artifact of the translation process).  One thing that struck me was how similar retail work situations are in Japan as depicted in the novel are compared to real world work situations here in the States.  As I have worked a lot of retail in my time, I was surprised by the similarities - workers who don’t want to work, difficulty finding good employees, alienation of the worker due to the work itself, etc.  Somehow I imagined that in Japan’s hyper-modern, hyper-efficient culture fewer of these kinds of difficulties would exist. In reality, (at least as portrayed in the novel) Japan seems to have many of the same problems we do.   I guess that goes to show that people are the same all over; or at least more alike than we are different.  This a fun book and I'd definitely recommend it for anyone looking to inject a quirk and fun into their reading.