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A famously strange Japanese novel about a woman obsessed with convenience stores. I read this largely because I love Japanese convenience stores, forgetting that it's famous for being strange, not famous for being an ode to convenience stores. It is, indeed, quite strange.
Keiko Furukura was always odd. She doesn't see the world the way other people do, and this was extremely noticeable from when she was a child. Adrift in a world she didn't understand and which didn't understand her, she found her niche when she started working at a convenience store. There she found that she could fit in by imitating other employees in a way carefully calculated to make her seem normal and likable, and has a rather regimented but happy life. She eats all her meals from the shop, and ponders how her entire body now consists of the shop.
Despite disapproval and side-eyeing from her family and childhood friends, who think she should get married and be normal, she's basically content with her life until a horrible incel starts working at the store at the same time that social pressures on her reach a peak.
Keiko seems very obviously autistic, but also, well, odd. Or possibly it's just the author writing an odd book. Keiko has a unique way of describing ordinary things in a defamiliarizing manner, so they seem creepy or gross; I was uncertain whether I was supposed to think that was just Keiko being Keiko, or if I was supposed to think that actually, modern life is bleak and horrifying. I liked Keiko and rooted for her to get rid of the incel and spend the rest of her life unmarried and working at the convenience store, but I'm not sure if her staying at the convenience store was supposed to be good (she defies social pressure to conform and instead lives in a way that suits her) or bad (she's still masking and possibly the convenience store is a symbol of modern consumerist emptiness and her wanting to merge with it shows how inhuman society is?)
There's something about the way the book is written that makes a reader feel on uncertain ground, and wonder if they're either missing something or interrogating the text from the wrong perspective. I went on Goodreads to see how other people interpreted it, and found an interesting split between people who enjoyed the dark comedy aspects and people who thought it was bleak and depressing and that anyone who found it funny was mocking autistic people. I did often find it funny. Keiko dissing the mango-chocolate buns and making the incel sleep in the shower with his feet sticking out was hilarious.
I gather that Murata's other books are exponentially weirder.
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One of Maho’s friends got food poisoning at a life ceremony and therefore can’t stand the taste of human flesh - a fact that he apologetically explains at the ceremony, so that no one thinks he’s one of those killjoy weirdos who think it’s wrong to eat the dead.
LOLOLOL.
Some of the stories explore this idea with less cannibalism. In “Two’s Family,” Yoshiko and Kikue bought a house and raised children and grew old together - and people assume they are a lesbian couple, and grow very uncomfortable upon learning that they’re best friends who have never had sex with each other. (Yoshiko has never had sex at all; Kikue has lots of lovers.) It’s not that these people necessarily approve of lesbianism, even, but at least then Yoshiko and Kikue’s relationship would fit the established pattern of “life partners are supposed to have sex with each other.”
Also LOL at the "less cannibalism," but that's a nicely nuanced take. I've seen that happen in reality.
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Oh those sound intriguing. I am making a note to look at your review to see how ell these ideas were accomplished!
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I find that most Japanese authors write rather darkly, and I have to wonder if it's something cultural about the Japanese. I'm not a fan of the graphic novels, but I have friends who love them. To me they seem unreadable.
But I've read some of the mystery writers, and their work is always full of odd characters and very tragic.
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Nonetheless, Keiko had picked a harmless way to go through life. So I too was rooting for her to just keep working at the convenience store.
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Is this supposed to make you give you at atmospheric sense of the confusion Keiko routinely feels (mutual confusion with the world), although perhaps not literally the specific things that confuse Keiko? (Did that make sense?)
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I did enjoy how much she enjoyed the convenience store, though. If the whole book had been her organizing food and cleaning things, I might have finished it.
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'Masking' in the sense that Westerners seem to use it is always portrayed as something bad, but I have never quite understood how it is any different from the obligation that all of us have to make the effort to fit in with the basic local norms of behaviour (especially in a densely-populated city). Some societies have more flexible parameters for 'normal' than others, and I can see that it's harder for some people, but everyone has to do it. It's intrinsic to the interdependence of being part of a society. An identity is temporary and conditional, anyway.