‘Convenience Store Woman’ Casts a Fluorescent Spell

If you feel strange, strange things will happen to you. So said Rita Dove in a poem called “Best Western Motor Lodge, AAA Approved.” In Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman,” a small, elegant and deadpan novel from Japan, a woman senses that society finds her strange, so she culls herself from the herd before anyone else can do it. She becomes an anonymous, long-term employee of the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, a convenience store, a kiosk for her floating soul, where she finds it easier to shout “Irasshaimase!” (“Welcome!”) and “Hai!” (“Yes!”) all day than to have more complicated human contact. On certain days, one understands this impulse.

“Convenience Store Woman” has touched a chord in Japan, where it has sold close to 600,000 copies. Its heroine, Keiko, is 36, essentially friendless, a virgin and contented. She has worked in the store for 18 years, which is about 17 years longer than the average Smile Mart employee hangs around. She is a sort of wimple-free nun, the Smile Mart her convent. (“Oh thank heaven,” ran the U.S. ads for 7-Eleven.) It’s a Pop Art kind of convent, as if designed by Jeff Koons and lit 24 hours a day by the strobe flashes of a bank of Weegees.

Keiko is a blank slate; she holds the world at prophylactic remove. She thinks: “I want to be a useful tool” and “Good, I pulled off being a ‘person’.” A thumb drive in human form, she tells us: “It feels like ‘morning’ itself is being loaded into me.” Keiko eats most of her meals at the Smile Mart. (The food at Japanese convenience stores is miles above the Hot Pocket cuisine in ours.) “When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store,” she says, “I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine.” If you are what you eat, Keiko is a vegetarian wonton, minus the vegetables.

How did she get this way? It seems Keiko had an average middle-class childhood. (The details are scant.) She trained herself to put a lid on her individuality after she was criticized for it, at school and elsewhere. An issue Murata leaves hanging, tantalizingly, is how deranged Keiko might or might not be. Clearly she longs for an authoritarian hand on her shoulder; she wants to know, at all times, what to do. (“Hai!”) But in delineating her, Murata flirts with genuine darkness.

At school, other children found Keiko spooky for good cause. When a pretty bird was found dead on the schoolyard, her first impulse was to bring it home to skewer and grill it for her father. She ended a fight between two boys by clouting one of them on the head with a spade. When a teacher became hysterical, Keiko sought to distract her by yanking down the teacher’s skirt and knickers.

“Convenience Store Woman” is Murata’s 10th novel, and her first to be translated into English. This work has been done adroitly by Ginny Tapley Takemori. She makes any number of good decisions, such as stetting the Japanese term “freeter,” which essentially means “slacker” or barely employed. Still, one can’t help but wonder how many of the subtleties of Murata’s stance toward this material are simply untranslatable.

“Convenience Store Woman” is short, and it casts a fluorescent spell. Like a convenience store, it is chilly; it makes you wish you had brought a sweater. At the same time, it’s the kind of performance that leaves you considering the difference between exploring interesting topics and actually being interesting.

A dissident comes to work at the Smile Mart, this novel’s bemusement park. (He clashes with the store’s “Manager #8,” who, like R.E.M.'s Driver 8, has been on his shift too long.) Shiraha is a rumpled and defiant if aimless young man who refuses to be a cog. Before long he and Keiko are living together in a sexless relationship that’s a boon for both. They’re each other’s beards. Keiko can pretend to be in a relationship and so not be pitied. Shiraha can hide from Japanese society’s cruel opinion of men without high aspirations. Shiraha treats Keiko abysmally. He says to her things like, “To put it bluntly, you’re the lowest of the low. Your womb is probably too old to be of any use, and you don’t even have the looks to serve as a means to satisfy carnal desire.” Thirty-six in Japan must not be, as it is in America, the new 26. The scenes of Shiraha spending time in Keiko’s bathtub, watching movies on a tablet, are wonderfully dark and strange; this misogynist loser is like a bawling little Michel Houellebecq in there. She brings him not food but “feed,” as if he were a pet.

I have mixed feelings about “Convenience Store Woman,” but there is no doubt that it is a thrifty and offbeat exploration of what we must each leave behind to participate in the world. Another loner, Emily Dickinson, put it this way:

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“Convenience Store Woman,” by Sayaka Murata

Translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori

163 pages. Grove Press. $20.