As I wrote yesterday, I had a book I had to finish ahead of a book club meeting this morning. That book was Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata, which was this month's selection for the Idlewild Books Women in Translation book club. (As it happens, August is Women in Translation Month. Go read some women in translation!)
This is a slim book (160 pages, but smaller than standard trade paperback size) that I read in a couple hours yesterday. The narrator, Keiko, is a 36-year-old woman who has been working in a convenience store for half her life. It's never spelled out, but Keiko is likely neuroatypical. Her job at the convenience store comes with training and a manual that serve as a model for being for Keiko. She recognizes that she is not what other people consider normal, but she learns to appear normal by mimicking them, with a deep understanding of what she's doing. She borrows other people's patterns of speech, but will combine different patterns to suit the occasion. Her deep self-awareness makes her aware of this behavior in other people too, where they probably don't even see it themselves. For instance, she observes that her sister has changed after she has a baby, and she attributes it to the time she is likely spending with other parents. Her observation of other people was, for me, one of the most interesting aspects of the book.
Convenience Store Woman shared certain similarities with a book I read earlier this year, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Like Keiko, Eleanor devotes much of her own attention to appearing normal and generally going unnoticed. But Eleanor suffers from PTSD, and her story is one of recovery and entering "normal" society. Keiko goes some length toward trying to take a path that would seem more typical for a woman her age, but her self-discovery is that she belongs in the convenience store.
