Talking Location With … Emily Freud – THAILAND
Short novel set in Japan (a heartfelt story of alienation)
14th January 2019
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, short novel set in Japan. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards 2019 – Fiction, with a sense of place
Keiko Furukura has clocked up 18 years working part-time in a convenience store. She is now 36, unmarried and actually quite content. The rhythms and sounds of the store pacify and cocoon her. She is autistic and has found her sense of purpose in her regular, daily routine of going to work and returning home.
She does not neatly fit into society, yet with a few helpful indicators from her sister she manages to adequately run a friendship group, although hovering on the edge. She observes and copies others in order to try blend in. She attends some social functions but because she doesn’t conform to societal norms – she is not married (a crisis situation at her age!), she only has a part-time job and she has never had a man in her life – she is eyed with more than a little suspicion. She manages life by subsuming herself to the needs of the store.
Shiraha is a new employee at the store who doesn’t last long. In a different way he too is an outsider, with narcissistic tendencies, which largely pass her by, and the two form a plan of living together. That is deemed to be a more ‘normal’ situation for people of their age and they leave it to society to make assumptions about them and fill in the jigsaw pieces of their circumstances as they see fit. He eventually persuades her to leave the store and with that her crutch to be able to live contentedly is removed.
This is a deadpan, quirky book of only 163 pages that shows the world through the eyes of Keiko. It is firmly set in Japan where capitulation to the greater good (whether someone has autism or not) is often the mantra that Westerners perceive and is probably more true than we know, from the outside looking in on their very different culture.
Location per se is clearly Japan but setting is more nominal than actual. The feel of the storyline and writing is very Japanese and credit goes to the translator Ginny Tapley Takemori (American English).
It is a neat, stylish and poignant little book, with the feel of a novella, that will appeal to some (especially those who have travelled to Japan) and not to others. A “marmite” book for sure.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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Good review, as succinct as the book reviewed which I’d like to read, as I’m now deeply into a marvelous non fiction “The Lady and the Monk” by Pico Iyer that gives such a great sense of place, certainly a book for anyone traveling to Japan.