The employees gather before their shift starts. They practice their customer greetings.
“Irasshaimasé!” one says. “Irasshaimasé!” the others shout.
They’re ready. Keiko is ready. Stepping from the office to the floor of the immaculate, brightly lit convenience store is her favorite time of day.
“It feels,” she tells us, “like ‘morning’ itself is being loaded into me.”
In Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman, a job can offer a framework for human existence—but maybe not forever.
As a child, Keiko was different from the other kids. When she saw a dead bird, she brought it to her mother: “Let’s eat it!” She didn’t understand her mother’s horror. What was yakitori if not a dead bird?
And when a fight broke out between two boys at school, everyone yelled for someone to make them stop. So she got a spade from the shed and hit one boy on the head. They stopped, didn’t they?
As an adult, she finds the rules of convenience-store behavior are clear. A customer who picks up a cold beverage is about to approach the register; a clink of coins means she’s needed at the counter, quickly, to ring up someone who came in just to buy a newspaper.
She has been trained on what to say to the customers in all situations. The shop’s rules of etiquette govern her days, its needs govern her dreams. Her very body has become part of the store. She eats only its food, she drinks its water. She consumes it, she secretes it.
But she’s in her late thirties now, neither rich nor married, and her job may no longer be enough to shield her from other people’s expectations of her. PLEASE READ
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, from Grove Press, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori
