Is Sayaka Murata’s heroine the antidote for societal expectations?

First published in English in 2018, Convenience Store Woman has become a world-famous novel by author Sayaka Murata. Its main character, Keiko Furukura is a 36-year-old woman who has been working as a convenience store for 18 years now, part-time, living alone and perfectly content with her life. However, her environment, friends and family are not content with her state of being and want to cure her, “normalize” her: she should either look for a better job and earn more, live better, or get married to a guy who earns well and have children.

Keiko sees the world in a different way (it has been so from early childhood) and has no desire for any of what is expected of her. She senses how her environment is disappointed and sad about how not normal she seems, so she works hard to mimic normalcy: she buys the same clothes and shoes that most women of her age wear, she communicates the opinions that she thinks are expected of her (what others communicate) and she does that in tones and voices she has been learning from interactions as adequate reactions to situations. Her way of thinking, her logic is different from the majority, so she tends to just fake it all to be left alone.

In truth, Keiko’s only calling, the one thing that makes sense is the convenience store that welcomed her 18 years ago and has been a true friend and place of comfort since. Everything makes sense here, the noises of the store comfort her and her job motivates her to stay healthy, clean, well-rested and punctual – it provides an agenda by which Keiko can exist. As societal pressure increases on her though, she becomes unsure whether she should change her life to better fit society’s expectations, when a man turns up in her life: a bitter, loud, cynical opportunist male, a weird representation of failed masculinity, who seeks a wealthy wife who would support him, constantly blaming society for his own shortcomings. While Keiko finds her place in the convenience store where she can feel as normal as possible, Shiraha seeks to escape the “Stone Age” pressure of being a provider. They start a made-up relationship to satisfy expectations, but while Shiraha uses Keiko to his own goals, the girl figures out that the only way of her to exist is as a convenience store woman – that’s the place and role she feels comfortable in, content with and happy to be part of this world.

Keiko actually lives a life without passions: she’s been experiencing that the world does not work according to the same logic a hers. The cruel question is whether Keiko has shaped this dispassionate, neutral life to her own liking, or whether society has forced her to shape her life this way. At some point she confesses that for her a lot of things don’t really matter, they can be either way. And since she doesn’t have her own goals, but the “village” wants the a certain way, she might as well let them be.

But Keiko finds her place in the convenience store, because here everything goes by the rules: the store’s rulebook has clear instructions that cover all aspects of existence in this store: how to welcome customers, what to say and do at all times. What seems as soulless and supressing individuality for some, means comforting order and predictability. What feels as restriction to others, frees Keiko. She would be more than happy to get a manual like this for life as well, full of rules for every eventuality, telling her eactly when to do what, how to behave, so everything would be clear. Where the majority society (the “neurotypicals”) relies on intuition and unwritten social rules (which Keiko doesn’t understand), the store provides clear, binary codes to rely on.

The prose is impressive: it tells the sory from Keiko’s point of view with cold simplicity, thus bringing the not usualy, non-normative perspective closer; and while reading it, I kept having the typical astonishments of Europeans: why is everything so polarizing, why the judgement from Keiko’s environment so loud and intrusive, why can’t her family at least accept her the way she is? And a thousand other, similar questions raced through my mind. I was also really expecting a catharsis at the end, that didn’t come: that Keiko stands up and fights to be accepted. I was almost angry with the text not prividing it. But in hindsight I can now see that an even more happens: instead to fighting to be accepted, Keiko accepts herself as she is, despite the criticism she receives from society and the pressure to conform.

Chick-lit? Single-girl narrative? I don’t think so. Maybe if keiko actually wanted an intimate relationship, but accoridng to her own addmission, she is not attracted to the idea at all. The essence of such a book would be the transition towards a relationship, but in Keiko’s case being single is a permanent and conscious state of being. So it is more of an asexual manifesto or a sociographic satire.

Horror? Well, in the sense how society is tries to cruch her mercilessly because she’s not an average woman with average goals: it pities her, looks down on her, speaks poorly of her, and everyone feels they have every right to judge her. The intrusive questions, the family§’s desire to “cure” her – make it look like a lifestyle horror: it’s not monsters chasing her, but compulsion of “normality”.

It is indeed a social criticism – sharp and strong, holding up a mirror showing how hypocritical and blind we are and how much we like to put everyone in a box.

A neurodivergent identity novel – very much so! Keiko does not “suffer” from her own condition, the plot is not driven by the desire to “become normal”, the text is rather a presentation of individual identity and its own logic. The reader directly experiences how the character filters the stimuli of the outside world, social codes or communication, which often highlights the absurdities of the “majority society”.