The year 2020 has brought, along with the cataclysms of COVID-19, police brutality, and the U.S. presidential election, at least one consolation: a bento box full of translated novels by Japanese women. Mieko Kawakami’s Breast and Eggs dropped along with the cherry blossoms this past spring, and in October, Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are will infuse Japanese folktales with feminism while Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole tumbles down fantastical rabbit holes. I just finished another novel by Oyamada, The Factory, and Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, which both appeared last year in English after being published and celebrated in Japan earlier in the twenty-tens. Using different styles and tones, the two books take stock of one of the many things COVID-19 has altered, perhaps forever: the workplace.
An international bestseller, Convenience Store Woman welcomes the reader into the brightly-lit embrace of that revered Japanese institution: the 24-hour convini. Just glimpsing the title flooded me with nostalgia for my years spent in Japan. Whether you live in Tokyo or some backwater town, the local 7-Eleven or Family Mart is the neighborhood cynosure. When I first lived in Tokyo a quarter century ago, before the smartphone era, one of the few ways to navigate a city of 14 million that lacked well-planned streets and sequentially numbered houses was by detailed maps. Convenience stores took pride of place on them, guiding lost travelers like lighthouse beacons. Even today, any rental listing in Japan will include the distance to the nearest convenience store.
Murata frequently compares these glassy oases to aquariums, but when you’re stumbling home from the last train, drunk and world-weary, and are greeted by one of their tinny-voiced salespeople while you purchase your Pocari Sweat, they take on the status of something more elemental and comforting—the quick-stop as bear hug. All is right within them because, as one customer keeps commenting in Convenience Store Woman, “This place really doesn’t ever change, does it?” In this way, convenience stores are the antithesis of the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware, an appreciation of beauty that changes and decays, which has supercharged the literary canon for centuries.