Let’s skate over the fact I haven’t posted here for aaages and move on to this odd little novel, which I have just finished reading. I picked it up entirely because of the cover, which struck me as sweet but faintly unsettling too, and that cover sums up the novel itself extremely well. The protagonist, Keiko Furukura, has a narrative voice that is sweet and naïve, affectless almost, but this voice seems to suppress a sharper one, really quite dark, which surfaces now and again.
After eighteen years, Keiko is the longest-working member of staff at the Smile Mart convenience store at Hiiromachi Station in Tokyo. She has always felt herself to be an outsider, and she tells us of two incidents when she was a child which proved to her that she didn’t understand other people at all, and that she needed to be ‘cured’, somehow:
My parents were at a loss what to do about me, but they were as affectionate to me as ever. I’d never meant to make them sad or have to keep apologizing for things I did, so I decided to keep my mouth shut as best I could outside 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.
This is how she lives and for her, working in the convenience store is liberating. When it first opens, she says:
At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.
Being a normal cog in society means memorising the store manual, mimicking the other members of staff and taking everything about the workplace culture absolutely seriously. Every day she is the most enthusiastic participant in the morning practice session, when the staff line up and shout out the phrases they use with customers (‘We pledge to provide our customers with the best service and aim to make our store the beloved choice of store in the area!’; ‘Certainly! Right away sir!’; ‘Thank you for your custom!’). She checks the weather forecast to see how that will influence the lunch choices of the store’s clients. An untidy display upsets her deeply, and she will always do her best to reach the sales goals of the latest promotion.
It is ironic that Keiko finds herself and her freedom in the mindless platitudes and corporate rules of the convenience store. A new employee, Shiraha, sneers at the morning practice session and tells Keiko it’s like a religion. ‘Of course it is,’ she replies. Her days are an endless round of performing services, care even, for the store: replenishing the stock, tidying the shelves, serving the customers and fretting for its well-being. It is a sort of organism.
Keiko’s relationship with the store goes further. When she says she is reborn there, she means it almost literally. The food and water she consumes come from the convenience store. Her speech, behaviour and clothing are all copied from the other members of staff there:
My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues […]
My speech is especially infected by everyone around me and is currently a mix of that of Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara. I think the same goes for most people. […] Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.
This idea of infection between the members of the store staff is not really repeated in Keiko’s discussion of wider society. But it reinforces the idea that they are simply cells or smaller organisms serving a larger host. One day a disruptive customer is ejected from the store by the manager:
A wave of relief passed through the store, and the morning atmosphere returned to normal.
A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated. The threatening atmosphere that had briefly permeated the store was sept away, and the customers again concentrated on buying their coffee and pastries as if nothing had happened.
When Keiko cannot sleep, she thinks of the convenience store ‘the transparent glass box that is still stirring with life even in the darkness of night’. She keeps fit and healthy so that she can work efficiently and well at the store. She hears its voice in her head.
It is conformism. But we are shown Keiko’s society outside the store – her family and friends – and they are increasingly putting pressure on her to conform to their ideals. Working in a convenience store when you’re thirty-six and a graduate is demeaning, in their eyes. She should either get a ‘proper’ job, or marry. Towards the end of the book, Keiko realises something about her sister Mami:
She’s far happier thinking her sister [Keiko] is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.
‘I’m a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person,’ Keiko says. Normal people have social codes she doesn’t understand; the store’s rules are clear for her to follow. For eighteen years she is able to successfully repress herself, pass herself off as a ‘normal’ person and find a sort of freedom. Some religious regimens are like that: you rise through the repeated practices to a spiritual liberation. Yet now the rules have changed and her ‘normal’ act is itself perceived by her family as not acceptable any longer. They want a different normal for her, but one that she cannot give them. Thus, weirdly enough, Keiko’s choice to continue working in a convenience store becomes in the end not quite an uncomplicated act of defiance, but at least a conscious choice of the kind of conformism to which she wishes to adhere.