#Cure for freeter series#

Her motive is to try to make her friends, relatives, and co-workers more accepting of her life, but still, she just doesn't get it. To do so, she decides to take in a man, who is even more of a social misfit than she is. The plot of the novel involves Keiko's effort to seem normal. When I think that my body is entirely made up of food from this store, I feel like I’m as much a part of the store as the magazine racks or the coffee machine. I drink about half the bottle of water while I’m at work, then put it in my ecobag and take it home with me to finish at night. Like much humor, it's hard to tell just what makes this book funny, but there it is:įor breakfast I eat convenience store bread, for lunch I eat convenience store rice balls with something from the hot-food cabinet, and after work I’m often so tired I just buy something from the store and take it home for dinner.

#Cure for freeter series#

She is in some way one with her store, loving the way it's lit up at night, and adapting to a constantly changing series of managers and other employees. The result of her clueless efforts is highly amusing - but disturbing. Above all, she has to cope with how they view her. Over time, other workers come and leave the store, but she stays. Keiko is highly aware of how she is judged, how friends and family are unable to see why she feels so comfortable as a 'convenience store woman.' They don't understand her commitment to a life of greeting customers, running the till, anticipating their demands, and keeping products ready and available for sale. Throughout her life she continues to suppress her own reactions and thoughts, relying on her sister to provide tips on what she should say to people whose lives are more socially conventional, people who form relationships and families, but her sister is also always mentioning that she hopes Keiko will be 'cured.' In order to fit in, Keiko tries to imitate the way that other people speak and dress, which never quite convinces anyone that she's normal, including herself. I couldn’t understand why should we bury the bird instead of eating it.' (Kindle Locations 94-96). Utterly puzzled by the appalled reaction of her pre-school friends, their mothers, and her own mother, Keiko suppresses her idea, but still wonders: 'My father was always saying how tasty yakitori was, and what was that if not grilled bird? There were lots more there in the park, so all we had to do was catch some and take them home. “Daddy likes yakitori, doesn’t he? Let’s grill it and have it for dinner!” (Kindle Locations 78-87). “What’s up, Keiko? Oh! A little bird … where did it come from I wonder?” she said gently, stroking my hair. One girl started to ask: “What should we-” But before she could finish I snatched it up and ran over to the bench where my mother was chatting with the other mothers. It lay there with its neck twisted and eyes closed, and the other children were all standing around it crying. It was small, a pretty blue, and must have been someone’s pet. There was the time when I was in nursery school, for example, when I saw a dead bird in the park. But everyone thought I was a rather strange child. I was born into a normal family and lovingly brought up in a normal suburban residential area. The time before I was reborn as a convenience store worker is somewhat unclear in my memory. The narrator, Keiko Furukura, realizes that other humans have both social needs and social awareness that she can't share. The human condition in present-day Japan couldn't be more different than the conditions in the pre-war Shtetls of Yiddish lit - but this short novel seems to me to use the same kind of approach: it's both very funny and very tragic. Laughter through tears was a term for the methods of certain Yiddish writers who used humor to express a kind of existential horror at the plight of certain individuals in society. This expressive Japanese term refers to 'people who lack full-time employment or are unemployed' or who refuse the types of jobs society expects them to take (according to Wikipedia). She's never 'hooked up with society' - she's always been a freeter. The narrator of Convenience Store Woman is a mid-thirtyish woman who has been a part-time worker in a convenience store called 'Smile Mart' for 18 years. But subsequently everyone started hooking up with society, either through employment or marriage, and I was the only one who hadn’t done either. 'When I was in my early twenties it wasn’t unusual to be a freeter, so I didn’t really need to make excuses.