#10 CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN (4/10)

by Sakaya Murata (村田沙耶香)

I picked this novel up because two people looked at me funny before telling me to read it. One was my best friend over the telephone (hi Dwina) and the other was Masaru of bar Nightingale over his homemade shōchū. I had just admitted to both of them that I’d spent most of my meals in Japan at the convenience store... oh dear.

Dear Convenience Store,

I hope you don’t mind me getting straight to the point. We’ve known each other for 17 years, but I guess this is the first time I’ve ever written you a letter.

I was 18 when we met. I thought you were really scary to begin with.

The letter Sakaya Murata (村田沙耶香) wrote for online magazine Literary Hub “Love Letter to a Convenience Store” is far superior than the novel it went on to inspire. The letter is quietly perfect and surreally, eerily, erotic. In the letter Sakaya Murata (村田沙耶香) author herself talks to a convenience store as if it were her lover so she talks about entering it, dressing up for it, asking it to dress up for her…

Make sure you’re super clean, even inside your backroom refrigerator, okay?

And don’t worry, the convenience store talks back…

I’ve been recommended the novel a few times because I’ve been spending so much time in the convenience store. As an English person with complicated dietary requirements it’s hard for me to walk into a restaurant in Tokyo and be anything but a cliché… but at the convenience store I can be exacting without interfering with the ambiance, or anyone else for that matter.

The narrator of this novel has worked in a convenience store for 18 years and when Shihiro (an intolerable character and new employee) asks her,

“Anything I don’t understand? About a part-time job at a convenience store?”

I, lover of the convenience store, wanted Shihiro to be proved wrong... very, very, wrong. I, faithful customer of the convenience store, was waiting (very patitently) for Sakaya Murata (村田沙耶香) to make him (and all the other non-believers) believe, in the rich complexity of the convenience store—which she did (kinda…) but for me, personally, not hard or convincingly enough.

For me it’s the fact that every product has its own unique history before arriving here. Consider the fresh food for example. OUT an excellent novel by Natsuo Kirino is set in the factory which makes the curry bowls for convenience stores and if you read that then you become very aware of the entire world and large workforce behind just one option at the convenience store. So this is what I’m thinking then when I reach for my rice ball: where did you come from and how did you get here? If you then multiply that across every single product in the convenience store it is enough to give you the wordly tingles. (Unfortunately supermarkets are too huge to create this feeling that somehow the products are part of the elect.)

Besides that missing element there were technical reason the novel didn’t “work” for me.

Sakaya Murata included a few elements which made me very intrigued… which then ended up forgotten by the wayside.

There was, for example, the delicious suggestion of violence in a few places, and as a reader, in the scope of a purposefully banal novel, I became gently excited. For example:

The baby started to cry. My sister hurriedly picked him and tried to soothe him. What a lot of hassle I thought. I looked at the small knife we’d used to cut the cake still lying there on the table: if it was just a matter of making him quiet, it would be easy enough. My sister cuddled him tightly to her. Watching them, I wiped some cream from the cake off my lip.

That is seriously foreboding so bend please forgive me if I start to expect more but that suspense never paid off nothing dislodged or broke off and that is cruel—actually no. That is wrong. That is not Storyteller as Urchin Dragging You Away From the Main Drag (Tanizaki) that is Storyteller as Liar or Storyteller as Trickster and that is no good. As readers we have to have standards and whilst we’ll generally allow ourselves get twisted or turned we don’t want to be tricked or lied to. So that’s an unreliable narrator from a trustworthy storyteller, if you will.

This book does make some brilliant points about normality though. And weirdness. One of those cat-slick words. When the narrator finds a dead pet-bird as a child for example she wants to take it home and grill it for daddy. She is not sad whereas all the other kids are crying (this is the “normal” response):

Everyone was crying for the poor dead bird as they went around murdering flowers, plucking their stalks, exclaiming, “What lovely flowers! Little Mr. Budgie will definitely be pleased.” They looked so bizarre I thought they must all be out of their minds.

Sometimes then whatever is considered “abnormal” or weird is just deeply philosophical or logical or unphazed by the nuanced dictates of society… like placing un-related sentences together. This is spooky. Even though thoughts aren’t ducklings in a row people will love to catch you out like er sorry how did that relate? Hence the disgusting proliferation of “segue". You’re fired. I’m generally glad that Sakaya Murata (村田沙耶香) took the convenience store seriously I just wanted more coupled with a few sexy flights into fantasy—just like the letter did.

I hope you understand.

Tilly