This is a very Japanese book, and I enjoyed it all the more since I spent a good part of June feeding my children onigiri from Japanese convenience stores.
Ever since she was a child, our protagonist Keiko Furakura has had trouble with social cues. Her part-time job at a convenience store gives her days a structure, and has for the past 18 years. She lives and breathes the convenience store, although she recognizes on some level that she is but a cog, she likes being a cog. She never misses work, doesn’t have a boyfriend, and isn’t particularly interested in making new friends. She’s a really good employee.
Another store employee starts work and is quickly fired for creeping out women patrons and generally being a slob. His line is that you are only respected in society if you check the boxes, if you are a normal person. As soon as you are abnormal, you are an outcast:
“This society hasn’t changed one bit. People who don’t fit into the village are expelled: men who don’t hunt, women who don’t give birth to children. For all we talk about modern society and individualism, anyone who doesn’t try to fit in can expect to be meddled with, coerced, and ultimately banished from the village.”
Keiko thinks this guy is a boor who is also a bad employee (he is) but she also thinks he’s kind of right. She is 36, unmarried, and working at a “dead end” job, but she’s happy; her family thinks something is wrong with her.
Keiko and this dude come to a practical arrangement: he lives with her and gives her “respectability”; she lets him loaf around her house doing literally nothing, which is really what he wants. To her amazement, her family and friends are *happy* for her, the most happy they have ever been, even when they find out that her boyfriend is an unemployed loser.
[Keiko’s sister] is far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine.
This is an easy read but the topic is difficult – why do we put such pressure on “normalcy” and “milestones”; why can’t we just let people fit where they fit?
It’s 9:30 pm on Dec 31, so with that…Cannonball!
