Shelf Awareness Book Review: Convenience-Store Woman and I Want to Kick You in the Back
Last year, I moved my reading data from Goodreads to The StoryGraph, a platform that allows you to not only curate your reading experience by dates, ratings, and reviews, but also by genre and mood. The platform also has reading challenges geared towards pushing readers out of their comfort zone. I signed up for the “Read More Women” challenge a few months ago. Categories include books “featuring Afrofuturism or Africanfuturism”, “written by a woman with a disability”, “translated from an Asian language”, and “about or set in Japan”,
The latter two bring me to my actual reviews. Convenience-Store Woman and I Want to Kick You in the Back are Japanese novellas written by witty women who incisively capture some of the absurd, often darkly funny facets of trying to navigate modern society.
My brother’s English class has been reading Catcher in the Rye, which is probably why themes of adolescent alienation and loneliness came so readily to my mind while reading the Aktugawa prize-winning I Want to Kick You in the Back. The story follows Hatsumi Hasegawa, who is filled with enough frustration, confusion, and feelings of isolation to give Holden Caulfield a run for his money. The difference? She is a Japanese girl living in the midst of twenty-first century idol and celebrity culture. Oh, and she is really, really bored in biology class. To the point where she starts to obsess about kicking her even more awkward classmate Ninagawa in the back. What devolves from there is a study in schoolyard politics by a narrator whose pretensions to objectivity and acerbic condemnation of her peers reveal her own subjectivity and aching loneliness. It is a study in the ways unfulfilled human needs for connection and relationships can become twisted into obsession, as reflected in Ninagawa’s fixation on the idol Oli-chan, and Hatsu’s own preoccupation with kicking him. There are moments of grotesquery that unsettle the reader. But it is also filled with curious metaphors and narrative quirks that provide stunning insight into the minds of teenagers trying to figure out who they are and what exactly they want from life.
Convenience-Store Woman is another Aktugawa winner. It is also another study in incisive, at times uncomfortable, comedy. The deadpan tone of the narrator, who seems a bit overly preoccupied with describing the seemingly mundane details of the convenience store where she works, draws the reader into what quickly becomes a rollicking commentary on disability, marriage, parasocial relationships, and what it means to be considered an “outsider”. If Hatsu is the epitome of a self-styled outsider, Miss Keiko Furukara is much more a product of her circumstances. She has spent 18 years in the same “dead-end job” – working as a part-time convenience store employee. She is unmarried and uninterested in the thought of marriage. She makes her shopping decisions based on a careful study of the brands and styles worn by other women in her age group. But not out of vanity or competitiveness. Furukara does it because she has literally no idea how to be “normal” outside of very scripted behaviors and studied mimicry. Which makes her the perfect store employee, but a less than adept daughter, sister, and friend.
Things take an interesting turn when a gangly, ghoulish man named Shiraha shows up. The character is a clever deconstruction of men who appropriate misunderstood bits of Marx and Malthus culled from internet message boards as a justification for their own rather awful behavior. He is very fond of complaining that “things haven’t changed since the Stone Age” – a phrase that makes many evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and historians want to beat their head against a wall. To say more about him would be tantamount to spoiling a good chunk of the wryly subversive plot.
If you are looking for something to provide moments of levity between episodes of NBC’s Superstore, this might be it. The dark observational humor and exploration of convenience store dynamics as a microcosm of society at large combine to create a book that frequently startled laughter out of me and kept my eyebrows in a permanent state of suspension.
The thing about reading translations is that you cannot help but wonder if some nuance, some witticism or turn of phrase was lost in the conversion process. You are left thinking about what words or concepts might have been edited out for the American and English audiences, the way chocolate manufacturers subtly adjust ingredient ratios in their exported products to make them more palatable to foreign tastes.
But the way the wit, themes, and comedy has carried over is a testament to the skills of the women who translated these books. They are short, substantial reads that are worth checking out if you want to broaden your horizons beyond our shores and the more well-known Japanese media found in the American cultural consciousness.