A review by sararmn
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

3.5

When morning comes, once again l'm a convenience store worker, a cog in society. This is the only way I can be a normal person.

I'd noticed soon after starting the job that whenever I got angry at the same things as everyone else, they all seemed happy.

I'd never experienced sex, and I'd never even had any particular awareness of my own sexuality. I was indifferent to the whole thing and had never really given it any thought. And here was everyone taking it for granted that I must be miserable when I wasn't.

When something was strange, everyone thought they had the right to come stomping in all over your life to figure out why.

When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that's what a human is. And sometimes even those who are doing the same job are biased against it.

The normal world has no room for exceptions and always quietly eliminates foreign objects. Anyone who is lacking is disposed of.

When you do physical labor, you end up being no longer useful when your physical condition deteriorates. However hard I work, however dependable I am, when my body grows old then no doubt I too will be a worn-out part, ready to be replaced, no longer of any use to the convenience store.

She was getting carried away with making up a story for herself. She might just as well have been saying I was "cured." If it had been that simple all along, I thought, I wish she'd given me clear instructions before, then I wouldn't have had to go to such lengths to find out how to be normal.

She's far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.

I would carry my genes carefully to my grave, being sure not to rashly leave any behind, and I would dispose of them properly when I died. I was resolved on this, but at the same time it left me in a bit of a limbo. I understood the end point perfectly, but how was I to spend my time until then?

A convenience store is not merely a place where customers come to buy practical necessities, it has to be somewhere they can enjoy and take pleasure in discovering things they like.

I caught sight of myself reflected in the window of the convenience store I'd just come out of. My hands, my feet—they existed only for the store! For the first time, I could think of the me in the window as a being with meaning.