Sayaka Murata's CONVENIENCE STORE WOMAN (tr Ginny Tapley Takemori, narr Nancy Wu)

I've met more than a few people who, at a certain point in their careers, look back fondly on an early job they had in which they earned less but also had much less responsibility and didn't "take the job home with them." Maybe they weren't yet truly on their own and dependent on those low wages for survival so much as for pocket money; maybe they were enjoying the advantages of youth and health and single-hood and didn't have as many needs. 

Of course, at the time they were actually holding down these starter jobs -- newspaper delivery, fast food clerk, temporary office worker, gopher, apprentice in a trade, etc -- they probably didn't appreciate it as an idyll their older selves might one day be nostalgic for. They dreamed of proper career jobs in the field in which they majored in college, or one in which they weren't at the bottom of the hierarchy, or, yes, one in which they actually made enough money at to live on because, while the work paid and made physical demands on them as though they were still 18 and healthy, time had gone by and circumstances had changed and capitalism's many cruelties were making themselves felt (if indeed one had been privileged enough not to have always felt the lash).

Keiko, the heroine and narrator of Sayaka Murata's gem-perfect Convenience Store Woman, isn't like that, though, would not relate. She has taken that entry-level job and held on to it, for a myriad of reasons the novel explores with a deadpan tone and a perfect eye for detail, just like the probably-neuro-divergent Keiko herself employs.

 

In her pre-convenience-store life, Keiko displayed childhood tendencies toward a certain psychopathy, breaking up a playground fight by bashing a combatant over the head with a shovel because it was the most efficient means available of achieving an end to the scuffle, as her classmates were clamoring for, for instance. Loving parents doted and fretted and sent her to a counselor but to little actual avail --  the effect wound up being to persuade her that she needed to learn to perform humanity better, rather than to help her develop empathy. She then used her superior observational skills to build a repertoire of normal-seeming behaviors and reached university-age without causing anybody to feel they Need to Talk About Keiko ever again...

Until she settles into her first job at age 18, as a worker at a newly established convenience store, at which the new employee training takes no social skills or work habits as given and even trains her how, for the first time in her life, to affect a genuine-looking smile. At last Keiko, as she repeats to us many times in the telling of her story, feels she is "a cog in society" and is content...

For 18 years...

When the action (such as it is) properly picks up, Keiko is 36 years old and has not changed a bit apart from committing that great sin we all do, of getting older. She is, therefore, still unmarried, childless, and has not advanced a bit in her career, not even to be a shift supervisor or third key person. She knows exactly what is expected of her, performs her duties perfectly, and never lets the mask slip. The convenience store is her perfect little world and she is fine with things as they are, living the reality those nostalgiacs wishing for simpler times dream of, but actually content with it in a way they wouldn't be if they got their half-assed wishes.

But of course, this means she is actually Not Normal. So people start fretting over her again. Sure, she's not scooping up dead birds in the park and suggesting they get grilled up into parakeet yakitori, but she's still single. Oh noes!

Her solution to the problem is as deadpan funny as she is (only intensified by audio narrator Nancy Wu's bright delivery of each razory observation). I won't spoil the delight of this very short read (just over three hours as an audio book) by elaborating on it, though it's not really the point of the book; the point of the book is Keiko and her blunt clarity about what she sees, her minute analysis of what makes the people around her tick and the wildly successful strategies she adopts to keep them from seeing her as anything apart from the perfectly reliable, perfectly normal person she seems to be, a grown-up Wednesday Addams who has chosen to keep wearing her Halloween disguise. Remember that psycho killers look just like everyone else. 

Is just that some murder with wit -- intentional or un- -- rather than with a conventional, physical weapon. 

Veteran translator Ginny Tapley Takemori made some fantastic choices in bringing this Japanese story to westerners, starting with the decision to leave some words in the original, notably the greetings the store's workers diligently practice and energetically repeat when interacting with customers, notably irasshai, which I've always just seen translated as "welcome" in movie subtitles, but delivered by actors as sounding more like a command.* Leaving this term in the original, delivered by a narrator who has a lot of experience with words in Asian languages like Wu (rather a lot of my audiobooks by Asian authors, or authors of Asian decent, come to me in Wu's voice), lets the reader -- or especially the listener -- experience the word and absorbing its context, its subtle difference from just "welcome" in a way that just using the English word with all the other English words doesn't. We remember, even if we've never been to one, that a Japanese convenience store, home of the tamago sando, isn't quite the same as a Kum & Go or a Loaf & Jug. As Keiko describes it, it is a haven of order and cleanliness and expectations being exactly understood and met by all parties (or at least most of them), a bright white box in which the world makes sense. 

I might stay in such a place, too.

*From the University of Pennsylvania's language website: Both irasshaimase and irasshai mean, more or less, “Come on over!” or “Come on in!” In its modern incarnation, used primarily to greet customers who have already entered a store or restaurant, the nuance of irasshaimase is closer to “Welcome!”