Convenience Store Woman

Convenience Store Woman

By Sayaka Murata

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Convenience Store Woman is the heartwarming and surprising story of thirty-six-year-old Tokyo resident Keiko Furukura. Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family, nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of "Smile Mart," she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction—many are laid out line by line in the store's manual—and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a "normal" person excellently, more or less. Managers come and go, but Keiko stays at the store for eighteen years. It's almost hard to tell where the store ends and she begins. Keiko is very happy, but the people close to her, from her family to her coworkers, increasingly pressure her to find a husband, and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action...

I was going to use this book for a happily single female protagonist but the plot of the book (such as it is) involves her getting together with a man in order to appease her family and co-workers. So I'm not entirely sure that either "happy" or "single" fit, since she is not really either. Except at the end, when she discovers that her true calling is working in a convenience store after all and leaves her ersatz boyfriend and job interview.

 

This was an interesting book, particularly at first, when we're getting the skinny on Furukura's life and all the ways she doesn't feel normal, but has found comfort and enjoyment in the rules and processes of working in her store.  

But her delicate peace is disturbed when a slacker, misogynistic co-worker is fired and she joins forces with him to find out if everyone would prefer that she "act" normal (i.e. have a boyfriend and have ambition) even if said boyfriend is a waste of space and clearly just a mooch taking advantage of her. And it turns out that people do prefer that! 

This part is where it goes off the rails a bit. It's clearly aiming for a satirical expose of the ways in which "performing" are more socially acceptable regardless of whether it's good for that person but Shiraha (aforementioned terrible co-worker) is obviously a dingbat, and everyone's reactions are so overblown (not one person is suspicious or concerned that Furukura has moved an unemployed misogynist into her bathroom and quit her job but instead immediately start inviting them both to drinks out) that it loses its impact by getting too cartoon-y too fast. 

I think the central premise is good and could offer a critique on societal expectations, but it feels like it could have been presented better. If for example we'd seen this scam develop over a longer period and get more and more involved as they see people buy in to it. Or if literally any one person was a little more skeptical, it might have felt more earned, more real. But instead it begins to feel thin and ridiculous. It also makes no sense that Furukura would be so intrigued by someone who is so terrible at working at the convenience store, which appears to be the only thing she values.

 

Luckily it's saved from complete failure by not dwelling too long on the relationship aspect of it and ending on the perfect note of Furukura realizing that the most important thing is her work in the convenience store, and she drops all pretense of a conventional life.

For some reason, maybe because of how Murata describes the store, it reminds me of the ending scene of House of Stairs, when the three brainwashed kids see a traffic light and start dancing, mindlessly, as they've been trained to do. You go on dancing your bad self to the light of the frozen foods section, Furukura.

 

 

 10: A Book You Got For Free

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

By Toshigazu Kawaguchi

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer's, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Oh man, I did not enjoy this book. I don't know if it was the translation or if the writing is just bad or if Japanese people interact like they have never met other humans before, but there were so many incredibly stilted conversations and weird tics that it was like reading a manual and not a book. It's extremely episodic too, basically four separate stories about specific "customers" going back in time, and some little bit of carryover with the employees from episode to episode. But since it was so episodic, I guess Kawaguchi decided that we needed to rehash all the intro stuff over and over again each time, which was the most boring and also the most bizarre parts of each story. 

These are some excerpts from the first story, about a woman whose boyfriend breaks up with her so he can go work in the United States:

“It’s possible to go back, right?” she asked, uneasily. 

It may have been prudent to begin with this question. But it was pointless to realize that now.

“Well, is it or not?” she asked, staring directly at Kazu on the other side of the counter.

“Hmm. Ah…” Kazu replied. 

Fumiko’s eyes once again lit up. She was not hearing a no.

An air of excitement started to surround her. “Please send me back!”

She pleaded so energetically that she seemed about to leap over the counter. 

“You want to go back and do what?” asked Hirai coolly, between sips of her tepid coffee. 

“I’d make amends.” Her face was serious.

“I see…” said Hirai with a shrug.

There's absolutely no sense that these two people are having the same conversation together. Here's another excerpt, from later in this same, interminable conversation about going back in time:

“Look. I want you to listen, and listen carefully. Okay?”

“What?” Fumiko’s body tensed up. 

“You can go back. It’s true… you can go back, but…”

“But..?”

“When you go back, no matter how hard you try, the present won’t change.”

The present won’t change. This was something Fumiko was totally unprepared for – something she couldn’t take in. “Huh?” she said loudly without thinking. 

Kazu calmly continued. “Even if you go back to the past and tell your… um, boyfriend who went to America how you feel…”

“Even if I tell him how I feel?”

“The present won’t change.”

“What?” Fumiko desperately covered her ears.

First of all, this reads like dialogue, not a book. You wouldn't write a script the way you would a story. There's so much repetition (not to mention the weird asides about body tensing, and ear covering that also feels false and distracting) that an already slow conversation feels even slower and more agonizing to read. Not to mention that apparently Fumiko is "totally unprepared" for the idea that the past can't be changed even though, like half a page later:

“Why?” Fumiko asked Kazu, her eyes begging for answers.

“Why? I’ll tell you why,” Kazu began. “Because there’s the rule.” There tends to be, in any movie or novel about time travel, some rule saying, Don’t go meddling in anything that is going to change the present. For example, going back and preventing your parents marrying or meeting would erase the circumstances of your birth and cause your present self to vanish.
This had been the standard state of affairs in most time-travel stories that Fumiko knew, so she believed in the rule: If you change the past, you do change the present.

So, Fumiko is aware that there's always rules about changes to the past and yet is totally unprepared for the idea that the past can't be changed? I mean, it's not the most annoying thing about the book. But here's another example, again, SAME CONVERSATION:

She wanted a convincing explanation for the existence of this unbelievable rule, that there is nothing you can do while in the past that will change the present. The only explanation Kazu would give was to say Because that’s the rule. Was she trying to tease her in a friendly way, by not telling her the reason? Or was it a difficult concept that she was unable to explain? Or perhaps she didn’t understand the reason either, as her casual expression seemed to suggest.

 We never find out!  Who knows! Leave a little mystery, I guess, because there's certainly nothing else worth reading on to find out. AND THE FUCKING CLANG-DONGS!! Every single time the door opens, we get a CLANG DONG. Here is a totally unedited two page spread from later in this SAME UNENDING CONVERSATION:

Fumiko 's attention returned to the cafe. Hirai seated herself opposite her at the table and proceeded to merrily explain the other rules. With her head and shoulders still sprawled on the table, Fumiko fixed her eyes on the sugar pot, wondering why the cafe didn't use sugar cubes, and quietly listened.

"It's not just those rules. There's only one seat that allows you to go back in time, okay? And, while in the past, you can't move from that seat," Hirai said. ''What else was there?" she asked Kazu, as she moved her count to her fifth finger.

"There's a time limit," Kazu said, keeping her eyes on the glass she was polishing. She mentioned it like an afterthought, as if she were merely talking to herself.

Fumiko raised her head in reaction to this news. "A time limit?"

Kazu showed a slight smile, and nodded.

Hirai gave the table a tap. "Frankly, after hearing just these rules, barely anyone still wants to return to the past," she said, apparently enjoying herself. And she was indeed taking great delight in observing Fumiko. "It's been a long time since we've seen a customer like you—someone totally set in your delusion of wanting to go back to the past."

"Hirai ... " Kazu said sternly.

"Life doesn't get served to you on a plate. Why don't you just give up?" Hirai blurted out. She looked ready to continue her tirade.

"Hirai ... " Kazu reneated. this time with a bit more emphasis.

"No. No, I think it's best to clearly put it out there, huh?"

Then Hirai guffawed loudly.

The words were all too much for Fumiko. Her strength had entirely drained from her body, and again she collapsed onto the table.

Then, from across the room ... "Can I have a refill, please?" said the man sitting at the table closest to the entrance with his travel magazine opened in front of him.

"Okay," Kazu called back.

CLANG-DONG

A woman had entered the cafe alone. She was wearing a beige cardigan over a pale aqua shirt-dress and crimson trainers, and carrying a white canvas bag. Her eyes were round and sparkling like a little girl 's.

"Hello." Kazu's voice rang through the cafe.

"Hi, Kazu."

"Sis! Hi there!"

Kazu called the woman sis, but actually she was Kazu's cousin's wife, Kei Tokita.

By the way, this is STILL not the end of the conversation with Fumiko about the rules about going back in time. And we get to hear them multiple times. Over and over and over, as they get explained to different people.  Grant me the patience to get through this "healing book" and the wisdom not to pick it up in the first place. The glacial pace and constant interjections and interruptions would make even the most interesting premise a rough read, and this is an extremely basic premise: you drink a cup of coffee, you go back in time to rehash a conversation. 

By the way, Fumiko's story is resolved because apparently her boyfriend tells her to wait for three more years and then he'll be back from the United States and they can pick up where they left off.  

 Seriously, that's how it ends. 

The other stories are about a woman whose husband has dementia and has forgotten they're married - after she goes back, she decides she's going to remind him about her instead of letting him think she's a stranger. One story is about a woman who goes back to talk with her estranged sister, who was in a fatal accident after leaving the cafe - she decides to go back and talk with her sister and later runs the family business as a "dying wish" kind of thing. And the last story is a woman who goes forward in time - Yes! Despite spending thirty pages on the rules about going back in time, never once is it mentioned until the last story that you can go forward as well! - to meet her child, since she fully expects to die after (if not before) she gives birth.

 The episodes themselves, Fumiko's aside, are all meant to be tear-jerkers too, but it's hard to feel anything except mild relief that after all the contortions people throw themselves into prior to going around in time, they've actually done it and gotten closure. 

Other things I found annoying:

We spend an inordinate amount of time reading about the fact that the cafe does not have air-conditioning but is never hot. This comes up multiple times.

There is a ghost woman sitting at a table. This is never explained beyond "she didn't finish her coffee fast enough." 

No one ever really addresses the fact that at one point, the daughter of the woman who dies giving birth comes back with futuristic tech to take a picture with her mother. 

A "key" plot point (in that there's any plot to speak of) hinges on the fact that somehow someone mixes up a date that is ten years away at 1500 hours with a date that is fifteen years away at 1000 hours. This is also unexplained beyond the following, which I swear I am not making up: "You planned to travel ten years into the future, but there was some kind of mistake and you traveled fifteen years. It seems ten years at 15 o’clock and fifteen years at 10 o’clock were mixed up. We heard about it when you returned from the future but right now, we are in Hokkaido for unavoidable reasons that I won’t go into because there’s no time.”

LOLOLOLOL. "We knew you had the wrong date and time and we had fifteen years to prepare for it but didn't and can't tell you why."

Well, I guess I am laughing now, remembering that. Maybe healing fiction does work!

23: A Book That Is Considered Healing Fiction