Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka MurataMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Early in this story, two schoolboys are fighting and everyone wants them to stop. Miss. Keiko Furukura, a schoolgirl, sees the situation clearly, takes a shovel, and hits one of the boys in the head. Problem solved; the fighting stops, right? But everyone is shocked as if something wrong has been done. Miss. Furukura is an intelligent, fully functional female human who sees the world with precise, logical reasoning but has only faint human emotions. What follows is her approach to the world of humans contrasted with the emotionally driven worldview of normal humans.
We human beings are amazing animals in that we have great abilities to look at the world logically, but much of our societal organization, motivation, and survival is driven by instincts and emotions that sometimes bear only indirect relationships to reality (read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman). While this novel is often interpreted as the struggle of an emotionally deprived individual in the normal human world, or as a satire on the norms of human society, I see the real value as a contrast between a purely logical view of society and the real-world complex view of ordinary people.
In childhood, Miss Furukura shocks those around her with her logical response to situations. After the shovel incident, there is strong backlash that mystifies Furukura.
They held a teacher’s meeting, and my mother was called to the school. Seeing her bowing to the teachers, apologizing over and over, her face strangely serious, I finally realized that maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did, but I still couldn’t understand why.
She gradually learns the reactions to some of her perfectly logical actions. While she still doesn’t understand them, to avoid the negative attention from society, she decides to quiet her actions to maintain an appearance of normality. She is coached by her younger sister on how to react to societal situations. She is able to avoid the reactions of society, such as after the shovel incident.
so I decided to keep my mouth shut as best I could outside the home. I would no longer do anything of my own accord and would either just mimic what everyone else was doing, or simply follow instructions.
She never really understands why normal humans have these illogical expectations, but she becomes quite proficient at acting the part of a normal person.
I stole a glance at Sugawara and tried to mimic the way she moved her facial muscles as she spoke, the same way I did in training, and parroted, “Really, he left us…
By chance she discovers the perfect environment for her highly competent, logical mind. The Hiromachi Station Smile Mart is a demanding but highly structured environment where Miss Furukura’s intelligence and energy can be channeled into a societally acceptable mode of existence. While the work is demanding, it is entirely scripted. There is no need for an emotional reading of customers and situations; the manual and the training prescribe all.
When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and still I don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside the manual.
The convenience store is a contrived environment that caters perfectly to the human rational/emotional public, but is easy to script and reproduce. Rather than use the full range of human interaction to sell products, it scripts the words and actions of workers down to every detail. As a business, it is successful because it can make low knowledge/experience workers productive quickly by scripting their every action. For Furukura, it is a perfect environment to hide in plain sight. By enthusiastically following the script, she can disguise herself as a highly functional human.
For eighteen years, the convenience store has been her refuge, but it is disrupted as she ages into her thirties. She starts to get negative attention from family and friends as they become alarmed that she has not proceeded like a normal person to get married and find more serious work. She has no interest in that normal life but wants to avoid negative pressure from those around her.
In addition, her interactions with a new character, Shiraha, affects her view of her situation. At first, we might see him as a fellow traveler, as he too has trouble fitting into normal society. But we soon learn that his problem is that he has all the emotional instincts of these normal people, but is just too lazy to succeed. He blames all his problems on society and Furukura, constantly trying to understand the world, sees some logic in his outpourings.
“This society hasn’t changed one bit. People who don’t fit into the village are expelled: men who don’t hunt, women who don’t give birth to children. For all we talk about modern society and individualism, anyone who doesn’t try to fit in can expect to be meddled with, coerced, and ultimately banished from the village.”
So perhaps seeming normal is even an existential issue. For Furukura, blending into the world takes on new urgency.
The normal world has no room for exceptions and quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone lacking is disposed of.
So that’s why I needed to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.
Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.
She explores new options to deal with what she is being told is normal now that she is in her thirties. She considers quitting the convenience store and getting a better job, faking a romantic relationship with Shiraha, maybe even a fake marriage, maybe even a real marriage and bearing children. But as she moves on at Shiraha’s urging, she feels lost.
Since I’d left the store, I no longer knew what time I should wake up in the morning. I slept whenever I felt sleepy and ate when I woke up. I didn’t do anything all day except fill out the resume forms, as ordered by Shiraha.
I no longer knew what standard to live by. Until now, my body had belonged to the convenience store, even when I wasn’t working. Sleeping, keeping in good physical shape, and eating nutritiously were all part of my job. I had to stay healthy for work.
One day Furukura is on the phone with Shiraha’s sister-in-law, who is trying to collect a debt from him. Furukura has a strange thought and asks a strange question:
In the background, I heard the sound of a baby crying. It suddenly occurred to me that no longer having the convenience store manual to follow, perhaps I should use animal instinct as the standard on which to base my judgments. I’m an animal of the human species so perhaps having children to make my species prosper would be the correct path for me.
“Um, may I ask you something? Is having children good for humanity?”
“What?”
She sounded so taken aback on the other end of the line that I thought I’d better explain what I meant.
“After all, we’re animals, so isn’t it better for our species if we multiply? Do you think it would be best for me and Shiraha to quickly get on with mating and play our part in making humanity prosper?”
For a while she was so quiet I thought she’d maybe hung up, but then I heard the sound of such a long, heavy sigh that I could almost feel her warm breath spewing out through the receiver.
“Give me a break! How do you think a store worker and an unemployed good-for-nothing are going to be able to raise children? Please don’t even consider it. You’ll be doing us all a favor by not leaving your genes behind. That’s the best contribution to the human race you could make.”
“Oh, really?”
“Keep those rotten genes to yourself for the course of your lifetime and take them to heaven with you when you die without leaving even a trace of them here on earth. Seriously.”
“I see,”
I said nodding to myself, impressed at her ability to think so rationally.
With her eyes opened by this enlightened advice, Furukua realizes the alternate paths she is looking at are not right for her. But what next?
I would carry my genes carefully to my grave, being sure not to rashly leave any behind, and I would dispose of them properly when I died. I was resolved on this, but at the same time it left me in a bit of a limbo. I understood the end point perfectly, but how was I to spend my time until then?
On the final page, Furukura throws off all the expectations of those normal humans and charts a return to her scripted world of the convenience store with its detailed manual and routines.
This novel is not a satire on Japanese or modern society, nor the story of a neurodivergent-coded consciousness struggling to fit in. By separating the human capacity for reason from our emotional drives, it examines the complexity of the human mind. We don’t usually think about it, but our survival depends on both functions of the brain. By inserting this divergence in a plausible story, we are treated to the reality of this contradiction.
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