CBBC Week One: Convenience Store Woman, pages 1-81

Welcome to our first week of reading Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori. 

While this is called Cool Bloggers Book Club, you don't have to be a blogger or cool to participate, although anyone who does participate is automatically cool. I'm happy you are here and making this journey with all of us. As always, the ground rules for CBBC are:

1) Don't apologize. Don't apologize for having a lot or a little to say in the comments. Don't apologize because you're not an expert on something. Don't apologize because you don't have a doctorate in English literature. Don't apologize if you fall behind or can't keep up. Have fun and say what you have to say. You and your thoughts are important. 

2) Feel free to come back and respond to comments more than once! I love it when there's a dialogue in the comments.

3) Have fun reading, thinking about the book, and discussing it! Don't feel limited to my discussion prompts - talk about whatever you feel like talking about.

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Who is Sayaka Murata?

Murata is a Japanese writer best known for the international bestseller Convenience Store Woman (2016) which has been translated into more than thirty languages worldwide. Murata has won many major literary prizes in Japan, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 2003, the Noma Literary New Face Prize in 2009, the Mishima Yukio Prize in 2013, and the Akutagawa Prize for Convenience Store Woman in 2016. In addition to Convenience Store Woman, the novels Earthlings and Vanishing World, the short-story collection Life Ceremony, the short stories "Faith," "Survival," and "A Clean Marriage," as well as the New York Times published opinion piece "The Future of Sex Lives in All of Us" have all been published in English. 

Murata was born in Japan in 1979. Her father was a judge and her mother was a housewife. Murata has said she did not have a happy childhood - "I was starved of love, and that my brain was numbed and anaesthetised. But I was able to play the role of a normal girl." She started writing stories at age 10. As a child, she often read science fiction and mystery novels borrowed from her brother and mother.

Murata worked part-time as a convenience store clerk in Tokyo for eighteen years until 2017. She has lived in Shinjuku, Tokyo since she was a student.

Murata's writing explores the different consequences of nonconformity in society for men and women, particularly with regard to gender roles, parenthood, and sex. Many of the themes and character backstories in her writing come from her daily observations as a part-time convenience store worker.

Murata often places challenging taboos at the forefront of her most popular works. Earthlings focuses on an 11-year-old girl named Natsuki, with her boyfriend and cousin, Yuu, who believe themselves to be aliens due to their tumultuous relationship with their family. The story quickly develops into a harsh tale containing themes of "sexual abuse, murder, and cannibalism." Murata believes that the more she writes about the questioning of these taboos, the closer she will come to the "real truth of things."

If you're want to read more about Murata, this Guardian article is full of revealing statements about her. Consider these two quotes:

Murata herself considers marriage to be “a kind of hostage situation” and motherhood “a curse” that would put an end to her life as a writer. Much of her writing involves imaginative attempts to resolve the biological fatalism of being female with humanity’s need to procreate. Her outlandish near-future fictional worlds are all rooted in the reality of Japan’s declining birth and marriage rates, an increase in young people choosing celibacy, not to mention deeply entrenched misogyny.

For many, Murata has become a left-field feminist icon. “Feminism is desperately needed in Japanese society today,” she says, describing “a hell soup” in which fathers have been given lenient sentences for raping their daughters and feminists receive death threats. “Some say that the worlds I write about are dystopian, but a lot of people think that actually reality is worse.”

AND

“I’ve been told by my doctor not to talk about this too much, but ever since I was a child, I’ve had 30 or 40 imaginary friends who live on a different star or planet with whom I have shared love and sexual experiences.”

I feel like I'd want to go see Muraka do a talk and a reading, but I wouldn't want to have dinner with her afterwards. 

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What happened in these pages?

We meet Keiko Furukura here. She's never really felt like she fit in, like when she was a child and people wanted to bury a dead bird instead of her suggestion of eating it or how horrified people were when she brained a kid with a spade to stop a fight instead of going to get an adult to help. Her parents were good parents, but they didn't really know how to help Keiko. Eventually she developed her own coping strategies for dealing with a world she didn't understand.

...I decided to keep my mouth shut as best I could outside home. I would no longer do anything of my own accord, and would either just mimic what everyone else was doing, or simply follow instructions. (page 10)

"We've got quite similar tastes, haven't we? I like your bag too," Mrs. Izumi said with a smile.

It's only natural that my tastes would match hers since I'm copying her. (page 27)

I'd noticed soon after starting the job that whenever I got angry at the same things as everyone else, they all seemed happy. If I went along with the manager when he was annoyed or joined in the general irritation at someone else skiving off the night shift, there was a strange sense of solidarity as everyone else seemed pleased that I was angry too.

Now, too, I felt reassured by the expression on Mrs. Izumi and Sugawara's faces: Good I pulled off being a "person." (page 29)

Cut to eighteen-year-old Keiko who starts working at a brand new convenience store, Smile Mart. She is SO GOOD at this job. She greets customers, she does market analysis while walking around the neighborhood (construction means more people are going to come to the store, higher temperatures mean they'll sell less soup, etc.), she shows up, she follows instructions, she uses sound cues to figure out what's happening in the store even if she can't see it, and she uses customers' body language to figure out what they need or what they're going to do. This is Keiko's jam. 

The store is short-staffed and hires an awkward, misogynistic, and lazy young man named Shiraha who is quickly fired for shirking work and stalking a customer. 

Despite Keiko's satisfaction with her job, she's been at this store for eighteen years now and the social conformity to get married and/or have a full-time job is real. Since she's never been in a romantic relationship, her friends sometimes think she's gay or asexual. Her sister tries to coach her into responses for what to say when people are shocked that she's still at the convenience store, relying on an excuse that she's somehow too ill or frail to hold a "proper" job, but at a barbecue at her friend Miho's house when Keiko's seeing people she hasn't seen in quite some time, it all boils over.

"You can't go on like this, and deep down you must be getting desperate, no? Once you get past a certain age it'll be too late."

"I can't go on like this? You mean I shouldn't be living the way I am now? Why do you say that?" (page 79)

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Things I looked up:

Irasshaimase (page 2 and many more) - a formal Japanese greeting that means "Welcome" or "Please come in"

Suica (page 3) -  a prepaid, contactless IC (integrated circuit) smart card for public transportation, vending machines, and shopping in Japan

casual worker (page 5) - an employee hired on an as-needed basis without a long-term contract or a guaranteed, fixed schedule

freeter (page 35) - a Japanese term for young individuals—typically aged 15 to 34—who lack full-time employment, work low-paid part-time or temporary jobs, and are not students or housewives

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Lines of note:

Also on the day shift are Iwaki, a tall and lanky university student, and job-hopper Yukishita, who's now found a proper job and will be leaving soon. (page 25)

As much as Keiko likes and as good at her job, she still doesn't consider it a "proper job." The internalized idea that her job is somehow improper is buried deep. 

...I wondered how all his internal organs could fit into such a skinny body. (page 63)

My friend WKR always said this about my husband. She's a very tall lady, well over six feet, and she'd laugh and wonder how they had all the same organs!

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Questions to ponder:

1) Quote #1: I was good at mimicking the trainer's examples and the model video he'd shown us in the back room. It was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech. (page 15)

Quote #2: The sensation that the world is slowly dying feels good. (page 39)

Quote #3: The baby started to cry. My sister hurriedly picked him and tried to soothe him. What a lot of hassle I thought. I looked at the small knife we'd used to cut the cake still lying there on the table: if it was just a matter of making him quiet, it would be easy enough. (page 57)

Is Keiko neurodivergent and/or a psychopath? Does she lack empathy, or does she just follow a logic that is different from most people? Do you feel sympathy for Keiko or do you find her unsettling?

2) There are some strange undercurrents at the store - chanting phrases before shifts start and phrases like "we existed only in the service of the convenience store," (page 47) and "I was a faithful disciple to the store" (page 63) - that spring to mind cults or religions. Do you feel like modern organizations (corporations, governments, non-profits) that hire people try to indoctrinate people into a certain belief system? Who does this benefit? Why is Keiko so susceptible to it? 

3) Do you think this is last we've seen of Shihara? Seems crazy to spend so much time on a character who we won't see again. 

4) What do you think is going to happen to Keiko? Do  you think she's going to stay at the store? 

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Homework for you:

How are you reading this book? Paperback, ebook, audiobook? Where are you reading it? If you have a photo of your book (maybe you're reading it on the beach!) you'd like to share with the rest of the group, send it in and I'll make a collage for next week.  Deadline for sending it in to make next week's post is 10/24 by noon central. dominique 100 at hotmail dot com

mbmom11 already did her homework and sent a photo of Iris LOVING the book!

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Upcoming schedule:
Monday, 10/26 - Page 81- end
Monday, 11/2 - Wrap-up