Convenience Store Woman Celebrates Self-Erasure, Not Non-Conformity

Everywhere I go I keep reading that this book is a story about non-conformity, about neurodivergent representation, about a woman who refuses to fit the mold society has made for her, and so on and so forth. But today I actually read the book, and I’m shocked that anyone could say any of this about it. The way I read it, Furukawa doesn’t reject conformity at all. Furukawa IS conformity. She is conformity taken to such an extreme as to erase her entire sense of self, dressed up in language celebrating her for ostensibly finding her place in the convenience store. Like, in all the discussions I read about it I kept seeing people say this was such an “eye-opening” and “representative” work to them—and I’m sitting here with my mouth open thinking “did we read the same book?”

I’ll do a quick rundown of it in case you haven’t read it in a while, and then I’ll get to what I really came here to discuss. Furukawa is different. She likes stacking things on shelves and cares more about making sure the chicken skewers are being properly displayed on sale as they should be that day than gossiping about the love lives of her colleagues and friends. She is detached, emotionless, mechanical, uninterested in the lives of others, and exists so far out from the boundary of expected social behavior that her own sister thinks she is a mistake. She’s been likened to someone on the autism spectrum, and while the comparison can seem obvious from reading the mechanical way she narrates everything, it’s a comparison that I’m ultimately hesitant to make. But more on that later. Anyway, what the author has done is create a character and a perspective that is fundamentally incompatible with the perspective we “normal” people tend to take for granted. Furukawa is so striking, and the prose is so distinct and memorable, because we read her narrate everything with a voice that is completely uninterested in anything beyond her own affectless experience of it—an experience that definitively does make her and this book unique.

There is a charm to this, but really only when you get near the end of the book. Furukawa finds herself keeping a petulant and misogynistic manchild (Shiraha) as a pet she feeds in her house because it’s a convenient fiction for those around her to believe that she really is married like they keep pressuring her to be, and it’s funny in the novel kind of way that telling a story about a person like this could only allow. But until you get to that point everything else in the book is basically one of two things. Either she’s narrating about how much she belongs in the convenience store, or she’s narrating about how everyone around her keeps pressuring her to get married for some reason she is functionally unable to understand. And part of what the author was trying to do with this book, I imagine, was to show how this social “performance” that people take for granted—that manifests in them expecting Furukawa to be a certain way, for her to meet certain social expectations and to fit a certain social mold that they’ve boxed her in as a single woman working part-time in her 30s—can seem absurd and disrespectful when they’re being applied to someone as fundamentally incompatible with those expectations as she is.

And here lies the start of my problems with the book, because the whole conceit of Furukawa’s character is that she is not a person. She is not an individual. Her sole existence is dedicated to operating the convenience store because it’s the only thing that makes sense to someone like her who thinks in such a mechanistic way. You read again and again about how it’s the only thing she enjoys and thinks about and how dysfunctional her life feels whenever she’s not working in it. And… she is being used as the character to show how arbitrary the social conventions of “normal” people can be. How “absurd” it is for people to keep pressuring her to get married because that’s what they expect a woman of her age to want to do. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe this is making a very compelling case against that. Furukawa is the one observing all of this, but Furukawa is also unable to be affected by any of it by virtue of who she is. She can’t be upset or feel bad by her failure to conform to their expectations because she can’t feel anything. This whole book was like reading how the author wanted to say something about how suffocating the pressure to socially conform is, how you are so quickly ostracized for not doing what others constantly expect of you, while using a character who is literally incapable of caring to say it. Then so what? What are the consequences for not conforming supposed to be, exactly? Her only response to it is confusion because she can only process their pestering and her sister’s tears in terms of whether it makes sense or not. Then what is the problem supposed to be?

“But if it’s that hard, there’s really no need to go overboard. Unlike you, there are many things I don’t really care about either way. It’s just that since I don’t have any particular purpose of my own, if the village wants things to be a certain way then I don’t mind going along with that.”

What this allows Furukawa and the author to do is to observe. And that’s all this book is ultimately about. Observation. Furukawa observes the social practices of the ordinary people around her that they take for granted that can be seen as a form of unwanted pressure when those same practices are applied to someone who is incapable of ordinary sociality. She observes how these social practices, like gossiping about the love lives of her colleagues and whatnot, can spread like a social performance that others start to do just because everyone else seemed to be doing it at the time. She observes how even Shiraha can start to make a point when he’s describing how quickly people in “society” ostracize those who don’t do the same thing as everyone else, who don’t play the part they’re expected to play given the mold others have defined them as, because he’s someone who ostensibly also exists so far out from the boundary of expected social behavior that he’s able to “see” how society really works from the outside.

“If I go out, my life will be violated again. When you’re a man, it’s all ‘go to work’ and ‘get married.’ And once you’re married, then it’s ‘earn more’ and ‘have children’! You’re a slave to the village. Society orders you to work your whole life. Even my testicles are the property of the village! Just by having no sexual experience they treat you as though you’re wasting your semen.”

And I say ostensibly, because even though his logic is surprisingly sound and thematically relevant for this book, and you can tell the author intended for him to make a genuine point in his moments of rare clarity when he’s not raving about the Stone Age and how unfairly he’s being treated in modern society, he is still a completely indefensible person. The very fact of who he is makes you unable to ever truly take seriously any “criticisms” of social conformity that the author tries to write from his mouth, just like how all those times we see the people around Furukawa “pressuring” her to get married never amount to any real consequences for her because Furukawa doesn’t even have the capacity to understand that she’s being pressured in the first place! It’s not “Look how annoying they are, pestering her to get married like that all the time even when she doesn’t want to”. It’s “Their pestering keeps falling on deaf ears because she’s incapable of caring”! So how exactly are you building a case against how ostracizing the social conformity we take for granted can be that this entire book is ostensibly about???

These past two weeks I’d been asked fourteen times why I wasn’t married, and twelve times why I was still working part-time. So for now I’d decide what to eliminate from my life according to what I was asked about most often, I thought.

Is the point just to show us how someone like Furukawa could exist without the people around her noticing? How a “strange” person like her could exist among us without anyone the wiser, because the social pressure to conform to those around her forced her to wear a mask to be like everyone else? And that you can’t take for granted who someone is just by the social mold you’ve put them in?

Probably, because this is the only real “point” this book is able to make. Because the rest of this book is just so noncommittal about everything. She’s different, and she might be MODELLED off of autism, but I can’t see her as an empathetic portrayal of an autistic person because the entire point of her character is that she’s not a person at all. She is completely devoid of empathy, completely devoid of the ability to see the social consequences of her actions, and completely devoid of any meaning in her existence outside of working in the convenience store where people like her supposedly belong. And she’s constructed this way not because the author had anything to say about autism, but because the author wanted to use her perspective as a “complete outsider” to highlight how annoying and unhelpful certain social conventions we tend to take for granted can be. And those two pieces just don’t add up to a valid critique. You can’t observe the world with Furukawa’s emotionless perspective—as novel and occasionally funny as it is—while also using it to construct a compelling case against the pressure to conform that those around her have boxed her in, because the case just isn’t compelling.

“You’re still in a dead-end job at your age, and nobody’s going to marry an old maid like you now. You’re like secondhand goods. Even if you are a virgin, you’re grubby. You’re like a Stone Age woman past childbearing age who can’t get married and is left to just hang around the village, of no use to anyone, just a burden. I’m a man, so I can still make a comeback, but there’s no hope for you, is there, Furukura?”

“Shiraha, if all you want is a marriage of convenience, then how about getting together with me?” I broached as I put my second cup of warm water on the table and took a seat.

“What the—” he exploded.

“If you hate people interfering in your life so much and don’t want to be kicked out of the village, then the sooner you get it over and done with the better, surely,” I persisted. “I don’t know about hunting—I mean, getting a job—but getting married will at least remove the risk of people sticking their noses into your love life and sexual history, won’t it?”

She offers to get married to Shiraha to show how she’s the type of person to follow his vitriolic nonsense to its logical conclusion, and even then it’s mostly played as a joke. Everyone around her keeps badgering her to get married all the time because they think there’s something wrong with her if she’s not, and her only response is to say that she doesn’t care about it either way, which is exactly why she offers to get married to Shiraha in the first place. She just doesn’t care! The book doesn’t care! You might care, because you can read yourself into lines like

You eliminate the parts of your life that others find strange—maybe that’s what everyone means when they say they want to “cure” me.

And think the author is trying to speak to you when Furukawa makes pointed observations like that about the people around her in a way only she supposedly can being who she is. But you can’t divorce reading observations like that from the fact that Furukawa as the vehicle for the author’s argument does not care. She’s completely unaffected by it, just like she’s completely unaffected by anything besides the thought of not being able to work in the convenience store, because she was designed to be an affectless, emotionless void—a complete non-person. It’s like the book wants to simultaneously observe all of this because it’s the only thing it can do from her perspective, and somehow package her observations to also be read as a viable critique at the same time if you want it to be? I’m sorry, but that’s just not how it works. Furukawa’s detached perspective is unique, original, and occasionally puts her in situations which are legitimately funny. But, as “clever” as this book is, it can’t have its cake and eat it too.

You could argue that I’m being unreasonable because Furukawa does have a kind of personhood that I’m just not willing to acknowledge. She doesn’t “seem” like a person, and thus undercut the entire critique of this book, but she is! She has a thing she likes, which is the convenience store. She has something in her life which she thinks about all the time, which gives her life meaning, and which she can’t seem to be apart from for any extended period of time without making her feel wrong in some way, which is also the convenience store. She makes choices, such as forging a fake marriage with the misogynistic manchild to give people a reason to believe they can stop pestering her to get married and just leave her to work… in the convenience store. She has an emotionless perspective that is completely devoid of empathy for others and for herself, occasionally thinks thoughts that show she can pose a credible threat to other people as she has demonstrably proven she is capable of in the past, and wants nothing more in life than to devote herself to being a perfect cog in the machine—in the convenience store. You know, personhood!

I’m sorry if I find it hard to take this reading seriously, because, again, this “personhood” Furukawa has is to not be a person at all. Her singular obsession in life, the only thing that gives her meaning, is a role defined by how much it strips her from the ability to be anything else. Like, come on, guys. She’s not just “really into trains” or whatever. She wants to devote herself to a role that actively encourages her own self-erasure. She wants to BE the convenience store. People who are autistic and really like trains (for example) like them because they’re complex in a way that rewards them for learning more about it. Through the process of playing with and learning about trains (or whatever), they come to learn the mechanical details of the trains themselves, how each train can be different from each other, why they differ from each other, how trains connect to other trains in a system, how that system expresses itself as a logical mapping in a railway network, how the network is run and coordinated, the function each part plays in a larger whole, and so on. In the process of learning they accumulate knowledge that is useful, that is complex, that has the potential to be infinitely rich and rewarding as proportional to the complexity of the system, and in a way that constitutes a distinctive, if mechanical, inner world.

But what Furukawa wants is not this. She’s not just devoting herself “to” a thing. She’s devoting herself to BEING a thing. She’s devoting herself to being an interchangeable worker who submits entirely to the servicing of other people, who possesses no agency, no individuality, no reason for existence other than to be exactly what the store wants her to be. Trains don’t control you, and you can learn about them at any time. But being a convenience store worker—or any other job that no one wants to do that this book could’ve been about—isn’t just you learning about trains in your free time. It’s about being trained to be a goddamn robot. Every function a convenience store worker like her has is dedicated to the service of a machine that thinks she’s as interchangeable as everyone else. And not just every shelf she restocks, or every item she double-checks is properly displayed on sale, but her entire body, soul, and functioning—all for the store.

We were so short-staffed over New Year’s that I ended up working every single day of the holiday. The convenience store is open 365 days a year, and many of the staff couldn’t come in—housewives were busy with their families, and international students had gone back to their home countries. I’d wanted to go see my parents, but when I saw how desperate the store’s situation was, I chose without hesitation to stay and work.

You could say I’m reading into this too cynically because Furukawa just enjoys the predictability of the convenience store as certain neurodivergent people might, which is a reading most people seem to have about her. The convenience store has clear rules, a defined role for her to play, and interactions with other people that don’t require her to do anything besides read off the script she’s given as part of playing that role. “Irasshaimase!” she says, as all convenience store workers do, with mechanical gusto and routine because she’s happy to play her part in a role where that mechanical performance is exactly what’s expected of her. But the whole reason I’m writing this is because this reading is not what the text gives us. Again and again, Furukawa doesn’t just describe the convenience store as a place that gives her predictability in her life. She describes it as the only place she has a life. She only exists when she’s functioning as a store worker. She enjoys assembling her personality from her coworkers. She enjoys structuring her entire mind and body for the sake of being a more perfect extension of the convenience store.

I pulled myself up straight and faced him squarely, the way I did when uttering the store pledge in the morning ritual, and I said, “No. It’s not a matter of whether they permit it or not. It’s what I am. For the human me, it probably is convenient to have you around, Shiraha, to keep my family and friends off my back. But the animal me, the convenience store worker, has absolutely no use for you whatsoever.”

I was wasting time talking like this. I had to get myself back in shape for the sake of the store. I had to restructure my body so it would be able to move more swiftly and precisely to replenish the refrigerated drinks or clean the floor, to more perfectly comply with the store’s demands.

How, exactly, does this make her a valid person? She is only ever happy when she is as little of herself as possible and as much a part of the convenience store as she can be. Her interiority is to have no interiority. Her sense of self is to not have a sense of self. And this is something the book celebrates! I’m sorry, but does this sound like a positive portrayal of autism to you? Does this sound like someone with a rich inner world who just struggles with expressing herself to neurotypical people? It’s not like she cares about the complexity of convenience store logistics or find intellectual richness in supply chains. She doesn’t care about the history of convenience stores in Japan, or how 7-Eleven is different from FamilyMart, or the design philosophy behind store layouts and how it influences the psychology of consumer behavior, or even the raw economics of the convenience store and why certain products succeed or fail. She just cares about being a drone. She cares about being the perfect worker in a perfectly dehumanizing role.

Sure, this is played as a joke. It’s novel and funny to read the interiority of a person whose entire existence is dedicated to something so unglamorous and alien as working in a convenience store. But this doesn’t make her a “person”. There is nothing “valid” about her. And I certainly can’t believe anyone can say with a straight face that this is a book for people who “feel at odds with the world” like friggin’ Ruth Ozeki does on the front cover. Furukawa’s only worthwhile and valuable place to exist in this world is as a cog in an economic machine, a place she occupies unquestioningly and without complaint because she was designed to be a person with no individual agency of her own. She is a void that wants to remain a void. Does that really sound like someone who just “doesn’t fit the mold” to you? Does it sound like someone who is able to make a compelling case against how hypocritical the “social conformism” we take for granted can be? Someone like that, whose entire purpose is to take that social conformity to its logical conclusion and amount to nothing more? Is there something secretly so daring and revolutionary and transformative about this book that I’ve completely missed?

Because ultimately, I don’t believe this is a book that is worth more than the sum of its parts. Before reading it and after reading it your life will be exactly the same. There are people—lots of people—who do not give a flying **** about that, and that’s totally fine if you’re one of them. This book can be a breezy and occasionally funny read for you if you are. But for people like me, who do care to see authors at least put some thought into what the purpose of the reader reading their story is supposed to be, this book is almost a complete waste of time. I say almost because, again, there is novelty to reading the style of narration of a person who is completely incapable of understanding the social consequences of her own actions. There is novelty and some intrigue to reading about a person whose mind cannot comprehend why no one else can comprehend her, and who cannot comprehend why she should submit to being who they want her to be when she is fundamentally different to other people in a way that makes them and her incompatible. There is even novelty that this book is set in Japan and written by a Japanese author if you have a particular preference for that.

And that’s all this book is. Novelty. Because underneath that novelty is a book with very little substance or meaning, and every perspective I tried to take otherwise, that I tried to think that this book might actually be about more than a woman who is different for the sake of being different, is subverted and undercut by the book itself. If you don’t mind that, then more power to you. And whether this is even the author’s fault or not, or if this is just how people “chose” to read this book and talk about it (and bestow it all their money and glowing reviews), I don’t know enough to say. But either way, the result is ultimately the same. I said it before and I’ll say it again: this book has nothing to do with “being yourself”, and just as little to do with “non-conformity” or “not fitting the mold” or even “authentic neurodivergent representation” or what have you. In the end, Convenience Store Woman is just a book about how certain social expectations to do things might not make sense and seem arbitrary from a certain emotionless perspective—a perspective that, by taking it, the author acknowledges that what little of her argument exists does not apply to almost anyone on earth.