“Forcibly Normalized Environments”: Precarious Japanese Female Worker in Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman

Abstract

This paper contends that Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Women offers a perceptive and critical examination of the impact of the economic recession of the 1990s on the social character of labour and every­day life in contemporary society. Through the lens of the novel's protagonist, Keiko, a freeter who has spent eighteen years in a part-time job at a konbini, the novel illustrates the precarious living conditions and lack of job security experienced by young, unmarried individuals in post-recession Japan. Mura­ta employs a deft use of an alien metaphor and dark humour to illustrate the dehumanizing effects of Keiko’s machinic enslavement to the demands of recognizability under capitalism. Through her persistent attempts at mimetic conformity in search of a sense of belonging, the author exposes the dismal disillusionment of precarity in late capitalist society. The novel also draws attention to the toxic and affective attachments to gender-oppressive norms that exacerbate the exploitative effects and uneven distribution of precarity. Murata contrasts Keiko's experience with that of an unemployed male character, illuminating the ways in which misogyny and patriarchal ideals contribute to the normalization and disregard of female precarity. The novel offers a surrealistic affectsphere for its readers to foreground the oppressive nature of capitalist patriarchy and the prevalent, problematic yearning for the restoration of traditional family-corporate systems in Japan. The textu­ality of her workspace highlights the intersectionality of precarity and gen­der, as women are doubly marginalized due to the expectation of being house­wives and child bearers, combined with a significant wage gap. The novel's portrayal of Keiko's alienation and disillusionment, in the context of neoliberal precarity, serves as a metaphor for the larger human experience under the yoke of late capitalism, where individuals are reduced to mere cogs in the machine of a profit-driven system. Using contemporary research on precarity and vulnerability, this study examines the narrative strategies used by Murata to foreground Keiko’s failure to understand her cruelly optimistic attachments that deny relationality and interdependence, which ultimately trap her in oppressive gender norms and the negative consequences of neoli­beral precarity.