Book Review: Convenience Store Woman
29.10.2020
Book Review | Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
I do not know how to feel about this book. There I said it. Even while I was reading it I didn’t know how I felt. This week I popped into my local bookshop to talk to my pal Lizzie and she didn’t know how she felt about it. But it seems we’re both a little obsessed with it. Very confusing.
I’ve talked to people who love it and people who hated it and the thing I heard most was that people just felt kind of underwhelmed by the hype surrounding it. I think I felt a little bit like that perhaps. It was EVERYWHERE for such a long time. It, like Queenie, had numerous different coloured cover versions, prominently displayed in bookshops for months on end and was lavished by praise. By the time I got around to reading it I guess I expected to adore it. And I definitely didn’t adore it. But I also did enjoy reading it and sped through it in a couple of days. What a conundrum.
I’ll start with the things that bothered me because I do genuinely want to be able to focus in on what I did like about it! Simply put it’s quite a strange book. The protagonist Keiko is at odds with the rest of Japanese society both in her understanding of the world and her desires. I’ve seen people suggest that she has undiagnosed aspergers and perhaps that’s the case but nothing of this sort is explored in the novel. Keiko is just Keiko, but no-one else understands her. I enjoyed this facet of the novel, simply presenting the world from this character’s point of view. However, while I liked seeing the demands of Japanese society through her eyes and completely empathised with her, there are aspects of her past and her personality that are fairly terrifying. These are brought up and then never really dealt with, affecting my ability to quite get a handle on who Keiko is and how much I should applaud the decisions she ends up making. Perhaps because of this I should be kinder to the other characters but although, as I mentioned before, it’s very interesting to see the expectations her society in Japan place upon her, there were also times when I felt like her friends seemed a little like automatons rather than individuals able and willing to see Keiko for who she is. Finally, and most irritatingly, there’s a huge amount of repetition in the book. Conversations are rehashed with issues and arguments dredged up repeatedly. Again, much of this has a purpose in understanding Keiko and her viewpoint, but as a reader it sometimes felt like simply re-reading big chunks you’d already tackled.
Despite the above, and though it may seem otherwise, I mostly enjoyed Convenience Store Woman. I’ve passed my copy onto my Dad for a read (so far his feedback is: ‘quite bizarre’). I thought Keiko was a strange, unique character. I loved the clarity in her thinking in regards to how to create a life that balances society’s expectations of her with personal happiness. I loved the way in which her daily needs and desires were so so unusual and yet so clear. The more I learn about the author Sayaka Murata of course the more I wonder how much of herself is in Keiko and I think that’s what really elevated the book for me. This quiet understanding of the character. The insight into how Keiko thinks and feels is so articulate and I found myself both intrigued by her and also invested in her decision making process. So often I felt a sense of empathy when no-one else around her seemed to want to look past her surface and also pride at how she was forging her own path. It’s this rendering of Keiko that lead to what were, for me, moments of brilliance in the novel. In amongst all the other characters, the somewhat circular discussions and even the worrying aspects of Keiko herself, I felt myself consistently engaged by the insight I was offered into our protagonist’s mind.
So yeah, I have mixed feelings about Convenience Store Woman but you can be sure I’m going to read Murata’s newest novel Earthlings.