Sayaka Murata’s Parable of Alienation

“Convenience Store Woman” and the post-human.

Let’s settle something first. Is it weird that Keiko Furukawa, the 36-year old narrator of “Convenience Store Woman”, is satisfied with her life after having worked 18 years in a Smile Mart, for which she’s never gained a substantial income nor been offered a promotion? Is it concerning that Keiko lacks intimate relationships, that she readily accepts incel-stalker Shiraha as her sham boyfriend, or that she casually wonders what would happen if she murdered her nephew?

And doesn’t it feel discomforting, as a reader, to belong to the society that constantly haunts her daydreams with judgement and expectation? Didn’t we wish that at the novel’s end, after Keiko frenetically unspools at the sight of disorganized pasta and chocolate displays, that she would be “cured” in some way? The way Shiraha reduces Keiko to her reproductive abilities is repulsive, but how much better is it to be a cog in the machine, not to reproduce yourself but to reproduce some 2-D human facsimile in yourself?

“When I can’t sleep, I think about the transparent glass box that is still stirring with life even in the darkness of night. That pristine aquarium is still operating like clockwork. As I visualize the scene, the sounds of the store reverberate in my eardrums and lull me to sleep.

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.” (21)

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway also incorporates this kind of circular character arch. In that novel the protagonist, a high-society housewife living in post-WWI London named Clarissa, spends a whole day planning a party. She has a social role, and despite the numerous memories of her free youth and opportunities to defect from the social order detailed throughout the novel, Clarissa returns to her party at the story’s end out her own conviction.

The question remains the same — is this a happy, or hollow ending?

An argument for the happy ending is that throughout both novels, the main characters actively affirm their social roles rather than passively occupy them. That is, Keiko becomes aware of how society looks down on her through Shiraha, and returns to the convenience store of her volition. Affirming the meaning of their work by emphasizing the value of choice is the same as these women affirming life.

The hollow ending camp sees this as self-delusional since, just looking at the facts, both characters never escape their respective systems of oppression. Clarissa remains jailed in her dying marriage and the patriarchal expectations of a housewife. Keiko flees society and shelters herself in the gears of modern capitalism and commodification. The idea of “choice” then, is merely subterfuge, a tool to make women feel like they’ll never truly belong.

Maybe the progression is one of alienation, rather than self-actualization. After all, the difference between the Keiko at the end with Keiko at the beginning is that the former no longer feels ashamed of her work, and can immerse herself fully into the rhythms of the convenience store without external influences. Clarissa too, both inhabits and breaks the bonds of her social situation by showing care to everything and everyone in her life.

Despite the many reviews emphasizing the fact that Convenience Store Woman draws from its author’s real-life work experiences, I shy away from interpreting the story as primarily a personal one. No, I don’t think the novella’s awkward and plastic dialogue was a unintentional translational misstep. I think it was satire.

From Kate Julian, in The Atlantic:

This brings us to fertility-challenged Japan, which is in the midst of a demographic crisis and has become something of a case study in the dangers of sexlessness. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, 43 percent of people in this age group were, and the share who said they did not intend to get married had risen too. (Not that marriage was any guarantee of sexual frequency: A related survey found that 47 percent of married people hadn’t had sex in at least a month.)

For nearly a decade, stories in the Western press have tied Japan’s sexual funk to a rising generation of soushoku danshi — literally, “grass-eating boys.” These “herbivore men,” as they are known in English, are said to be ambivalent about pursuing either women or conventional success. The new taxonomy of Japanese sexlessness also includes terms for groups such as hikikomori (“shut-ins”), parasaito shinguru (“parasite singles,” people who live with their parents beyond their 20s), and otaku (“obsessive fans,” especially of anime and manga) — all of whom are said to contribute to sekkusu shinai shokogun (“celibacy syndrome”).

So, why doesn’t Keiko, among Japan’s growing generation of hikikomori, want to have sex? A boyfriend? Normalcy?

Murata seems be saying that is the wrong question. What is at issue is alienation, a pervasive culture of judgment, heteronormativity, standardization, and commodification. As we all crawl towards that pure, ideal society more and more outliers shut themselves out.

That’s not just hurt feelings, that’s lives.

The people in my book club, all fellow medical students, were quick to diagnose Keiko. We saw only a disordered personality, a developmental pathology in her struggle to emotionally connect with others, her strained system of copying the ways people spoke and dressed, and her delusional attachment to the convenience store.

I feel like this story is in some ways the opposite of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. This is not a story of trauma, nor of overwhelming internal suffering. Rather than exploring new forms of friendship and connection in a “post-human” New York, Murata is more interested in why someone could be ambivalent towards friendship. Both, I think, through the idea of stasis, habits, and unstoppable recurrence.

Food has become not only an overabundant product, but a technology in itself. Organic material ingests organic material, only to reproduce itself on the shelves the next day. What Keiko commits herself to is an admirable devotion to serving others by sacrificing the parts of self that society rejects. Whatever we considered “disordered” was a mode of being we’re not used to.