A book that changed me
I thought I was too different to see myself in a novel – but Sayaka Murata got me
Reading Convenience Store Woman helped me to have confidence in myself as an autistic writer
by Naoise Dolan- Naoise Dolan is the author of Exciting Times
Two years ago in Dublin, I read the English translation of Sayaka Murata’s 2016 novel Convenience Store Woman. The first paragraph described a Japanese supermarket’s cacophony – tinkling door chime, voices, scanner beeps. I’d been to Tokyo and loved those sounds; and there it was, that embrace.
I kept reading, and kept seeing myself in the narrator. All her life, Japanese convenience store worker Keiko Furukura has had to teach herself how to behave around others. She’s relieved when her head office trainer guides her: “It was the first time anyone had ever taught me how to accomplish a normal facial expression and manner of speech.” She pretends to share co-workers’ petty irritations, and is serenely oblivious to gossip. When patronised, she only really cares about the logic: yes, yes, that was rude, but was it well argued? I’m autistic, and this is all very me.
I’d thought my brain was too different to appear in a novel, but there I was. I smiled whenever I recognised an experience, which meant I basically smiled for the whole book.
Keiko never clocks off from acting “normal”. For her and for me, socialising isn’t “leisure”. It’s more work, and there’s no manual. Employers are narrow-minded (“If I ever became a foreign object, I’d no doubt be eliminated.”), but so are most people, or they’d stop requiring us to mimic them. Keiko feels lonely in the way I often do: not because we lack company, but because praise for a persona that we cultivate for others suggests that no one loves our real self.
This sentence floored me: “She’s 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.” That’s why I squash my emotions in public. I can’t be happy, because if I do then my voice will go monotone and I’ll forget to make the right faces. I can’t get excited because then I’ll start flapping my hands. I need to really trust someone before I can let myself feel anything around them, since I know from robust trial and error that many people will mock my spectrum traits. Keiko’s words made me feel that in my throat: the repression, and some of what I use to cover it.
It’s easy to see Keiko as a late-capitalist stooge, but I don’t read Convenience Store Woman as an interrogation of alienated labour. To me, the novel says that if one play-acts everywhere, it’s freeing to have a script. I’d never seen that in fiction: no schmaltzy girl-boss pipe dreams, just bald awareness that all human integration requires pretence if society finds you weird. I loved Keiko. She got it.
Then I read the reviews. Apparently Keiko is “chilling”, “an oddball” and “latently psychopathic”. The book is “depraved” and a form of “horror”, this last because our heroine has a low-paid job. Warn the townspeople.
For my part, I was entirely Team Keiko. Yes, as a child Keiko bashes two boys with a spade to stop them fighting; but she’s using the boys’ own tool – physical force – to achieve a desired outcome. Yes, Keiko sees a dead bird in the park and is confused by her family’s mawkish desire to bury it when they could simply grill it for dinner; but what distinguishes this bird from the other birds they eat? Yes, Keiko muses that despite the hassle of soothing her infant nephew, it would be easier to stop his cries by stabbing him with a cake knife; but she’s only observing. Is she wrong? Can you think of a quicker way? Leave Keiko alone!
I was with her through hell and yakitori. Our thoughts were so similar that no other difference mattered. I’m in my 20s and Keiko’s in her 30s, I’m Irish and she’s Japanese, I like sex and she doesn’t; but we were as one on the cake knife question.
It puzzles me when people complain of not having “connected” with a protagonist. I can’t speak for anyone else on the spectrum, but I don’t always need to see myself in books. I’m not saying that I never side with characters. I feel close to Jean Rhys’s bad women, Evelyn Waugh’s fractured Catholics, Helen Oyeyemi’s escapists, Oscar Wilde’s caustic queers. But while I’m pleased when I relate, I’m not dissatisfied if I don’t. Characters usually think and act in ways I find alien. If I needed to bond with them then I’d rarely enjoy fiction. That’s not because I “lack empathy”. Non-autistics would feel as I do about “identifying” if most books were about me and not them.
Still, I loved Keiko for those “Me!” moments.
I try to read generously, and Convenience Store Woman has helped me to approach other novels on fairer terms. When you recognise an experience in a book, an experience you had been looking for everywhere else to no avail, then it becomes easier to accept that most books weren’t trying to depict that experience in the first place. They’re still worth reading, those books, but the rewards lie elsewhere.
Better yet, Convenience Store Woman has given me confidence in my own work. I write to allow myself one place, just one, where I can use my mind as it is instead of corseting it to look like other people’s. My debut novel, Exciting Times, isn’t about my life; but it came from my brain, so it reflects how I process the world. I needed Keiko, and I never would have found her if her creator had pandered to “universality”. So I’ll keep writing from my interior, and other authors can write from theirs. Some books teach us about ourselves. Others teach us that not everyone’s the same.
- Naoise Dolan is the author of Exciting Times