Eat, Sleep, Bow, Sell, Repeat

Convenience Store Woman by Sayana Murata, the short novel and winner of Japan’s most prestigious literary award, the Akutagawa prize, was for me a captivating and compulsive read but ultimately lacked the emotional clout of similar Japanese novels like I Want to Kick You in the Back by Risa Wataya or, in particular, The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami which shares many of the Convenience Store Woman's quirky and eccentric qualities.

The heroine is a 36-year-old woman, Keiko Furukura, who, as a child, stopped two classmates from fighting by bashing them over the head with a shovel. Later Keiko stopped a female teacher’s hysterics by pulling down the woman's skirt and knickers, behaviour that alarmed the authorities and her parents. 

By adulthood, it was quite clear that Keiko was a little odd and in an effort to appear normal she got a job at a convenience store. Here, Keiko's carefully crafted veneer of normalness only emphasised her abnormalness as she created a stripped-down, pure version of Japan’s conservative society around herself. 

In her world, Keiko exists inside but also outside of Japan's preordained life plan of work, marriage and children. She has no partner, no husband or interest in having one, no interest in sex and no life or interests outside of The Smile Mart, the convenience store she has worked at since it opened in 1998 when she was 18 years old. She eats food bought from the store and keeps herself fit and healthy in order to work well and defines herself proudly as a 'cog in the wheel' and as long as her particular cog keeps turning she is happy.

To allay suspicion and avoid finger pointing Keiko adopts the style of speech and phrases of her co-workers and often repeats the same phrases back to them. She shops where they shop and buys dresses and handbags by the same designers but is careful enough to select ones in different colours or with similar designs so not to be thought copying or, perish the thought, displaying abnormal behaviour. Her sister also devises a number of phrases that Keiko can use to dispel criticism and divert probing questions about her private life, or rather her complete lack of life outside of the convenience store. 

This charade works well until the arrival of Shiraha, a part-timer who looks down on his co-workers at the convenience store who he regards as losers. Aside from this and being especially lazy his speciality is stalking female customers in the hope of finding a woman rich enough to look after him so he doesn't have to work anymore...

Funny and impossible to put down Convenience Store Woman is as much a clever attack on Japan's work and marriage ethic as it is on our concepts of normality. It is also a radical championing in praise of the hidden eccentrics and nonconformists that lurk in the most normal of places, even convenience stores. Highly recommended.

Convenience Store woman

Sayaka Murata

Grove Press

Hardback 

$20.00

UK, Portobello Books

Paperback, £9.35

162 pages

BREAKING THE GIRL - PIECE BY PIECE

Such Small Hands by the Spanish writer Andrés Barba is a truly disquieting tale of a young, newly orphaned girl, called Marina, whose parents were both killed in a car crash, or rather her father was, her mother died in the hospital - a statement of fact that Marina repeats again and again almost mechanically to the child psychologists that question her. Marina herself was ripped open in the accident with a wound that ran from her shoulder on through to her sternum, exposing her white ribs, tearing her young flesh, and leaving her with spectacular scars.

At times the book reads almost like a ghost story or a dream, so strong is the writers sense of the child, of the etherial, and of Marina’s presence, a presence that we are never sure is of her dead, or of her remembered life, or of her now, with her little dolly that she clings to:‘Because dolly was the only one who didn’t lie’.

Marina is, after her wounds heal, taken from the hospital to an orphanage where she seems almost

invisible amongst the other little girls who she thinks are all alike and whose faces blur into one. Yet 

at night while they sleep, Marina wanders around the dormitory and looks at them, at their faces:

She’d slip out of bed feeling the cold floor tiles beneath her feet and creep over to one of them. She’d 

get so close her lips would brush against her. She’d think, “If she woke up now she’d see me,” and that thought frightened her. She’d rest her head very carefully on the pillow, inhaling the girl’s breath.

                Just like pain. Exactly like pain.

Marina tries to fit in and to be loved, to make the other girls love her. She is odd one, the girl from

a nice, middle class home who was taken to Disneyland and had her picture taken with Mickey Mouse, and who went on a rollercoaster ride three times. Then when the adults weren’t looking the other girls would hit her, “Never very hard, usually just softly”.

This is a story that doesn’t so much build but rather envelopes you in a world of child-like menace and loneliness and when Marina stops eating to try to win the other girls love and shows one of them her scars with a mixture of ecstasy and trepidation, we feel her pain, not just the physical but the emotional as well:

…The skin around the scar contracted in a fleeting spasm and the girl opened her mouth, as if she she wanted to devour everything: the air, the feel of the fig tree, Marina’s arrogance, her own fear. It wasn’t the same scar she saw in the bathroom every day when they took their showers; this one was crying out to be touched, to be admired, nothing made it hide now.

One day Marina’s beloved dolly is taken, later the girls return a leg…

This is a short story and at just a 100 pages can be read in one sitting but for such a compact novel it packs a big punch that will stay with you long after the book is finished. It is also, apparently, based on actual events which makes the story even more unsettling . Exquisitely written, macabre and beautifully atmospheric this is a really moving and very unnerving take on childhood innocence, loss and cruelty that for no particularly reason reminded me in places of films like Sixth Sense and What Lies Beneath. 

Such Small Hands

Portobello Books, London 2017

Hardback, 101 pages

£9.99

© Nigel Wingrove 2017

Life, Love and Keeling Over

Hiromi Kawakami’s first English language book was called Strange Weather in Tokyo and published in 2014, (in Japan it was titled The Teacher’s Briefcase) and was a gentle, touching, almost surreal and dreamlike story of a thirty something woman slowly falling in love with an unassuming retired school teacher in his seventies who she sees in a café where she eats regularly. The Nakano Thrift Shop treads a similar path. only more so.

In The Nakano Thrift Shop, Hiromi’s narrator is again a young woman, this time one who kind of, hesitantly, tentatively, possibly, falls in love with the twenty something Takeo, her co-worker at Mr Nakano’s thrift shop. Called Hitomi, our heroine and narrator, drifts, not so much through life but rather life drifts through her, as Kawakami’s small cast of characters; Mr Nakano, the roguish womanising thrift shop owner, Masayo, his artistic, doll-making, older sister, Sakiko, Mr Nakano’s sensual and beautiful lover, and the awkwardly shy Takeo, all gently impinge on Hitomi’s consciousness.

Kawakami has an extraordinarily way of drawing you into her etherial world, where, although nothing really happens, when they do, little transgressions or events cause ripples that spread seamlessly throughout the whole book and stay with you long after the story has finished. In Strange Weather in Tokyo it was the descriptions of food and the cherry blossom that heralds the arrival of spring that permeated, whereas in The Nakano Thrift Shop it is the inconsequential bric-a-brac and the minutiae of life that you eventually cherish. Until, as Mr Nakano’s sister says, we keel over;

Masayo wrapped up by saying, ’That’s why, when I haven’t heard from someone 

for a while, the first thing that occurs to me is that they might have just keeled over.’

Keeled over. I repeated Masayo’s phrase, in the same tone she had used.

‘You know?’ Masayo suppressed a chuckle as she peered into my face.

I-I don’t think he’s dead, I replied, shrinking into my seat.

Beautifully written and faultlessly translated by Allison Markin Powell, both Strange Weather in Tokyo and The Nakano Thrift Shop are a poignant, funny and effortless reminder of the pleasures to be found even in the banalities of modern life. 

The covers to both books are by the Japanese photographer Natsumi Hayashi who specialises in taking slightly spooky and etherial pictures of Japanese girls levitating and floating and whose imagery seems the perfect visualisation of Hiromi Kawakami’s novels. See more of her work here: yowayowacamera.com

© Nigel Wingrove 2016

The Nakano Thrift Shop

Hiromi Kawakami

260 pages, Paperback

Portobello Books

£12.99

2016

Strange Weather in Toyko

Hiromi Kawakami

176 pages, Paperback

Portobello Books

£7.99

2014