Convenience Store Woman

I’d never experienced sex, and I’d never even had any particular awareness of my own sexuality. I was indifferent to the whole thing and had never really given it any thought. And here was everyone taking it for granted that I must be miserable when I wasn’t. Even if I had been, though, it didn’t follow that my anguish would be the obvious type of anguish they were all talking about. But they didn’t want to think it through that far. I had the feeling I was being told they wanted to settle the matter this way because that was the easiest option for them.

“After all, things haven’t changed since the Stone Age, have they? Men go hunting and women keep the home and gather fruit and wild herbs while they wait for the men to come back. This type of work is more suited to the way women’s brains are set up.”

“Shihara, we’re in the twenty-first century! Here in the convenience store we’re not men and women. We’re all store workers.”

When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so I always think: that’s what a human is.

After we hung up, I looked at myself in the mirror. I had aged since the day I’d been reborn as a convenience store worker. That didn’t bother me, except that I got tired more easily than before. I sometimes wondered what would become of me if I got too old to work here. Manager #6 had to quit his job when he hurt his back and was unable to work. To ensure that didn’t happen to me, I had to keep my body in good shape, for the sake of the store.

So that’s why I need to be cured. Unless I’m cured, normal people will expurgate me.

Finally I understood why my family had tried so hard to fix me.

“Don’t make it sound so easy! We men have it much harder than women, you know. If you’re not yet a fully fledged member of society, then it’s get a job, and if you’ve got a job, then it’s earn more money, and if you earn more money, it’s get married and have offspring. Society is continually judging us. Don’t lump me together with women. You lot have a cushy time of it[.]”

These past two weeks I’d been asked fourteen times why I wasn’t married. And twelve times why I was still working part-time. So for now I’d decide what to eliminate from my life according to what I was asked about most often […]

Deep down I wanted some kind of change. Any change, whether good or bad, would be better than the state of impasse I was in now.

So the manual for life already existed. It was just that it was already ingrained in everyone’s heads, and there wasn’t any need to put it in writing. […] If it had been that simple all along, I thought, I wish she’d given me clear instructions before, then I wouldn’t have had to go to such lengths to find out how to be normal.

I looked at the screen to see a group of male customers coming in. All at once the store was busy. Tuan, the new guy who’d started only last week, was alone on the cash register, so I thought I’d better get out there right away to help.

“Hey, hey, not so fast. You can’t get away that easily!” the store manager yelled, amused.

“I always did want revenge, on women who are allowed to become parasites just because they’re women. I always thought to myself that I’d be a parasite one day. That’d show them. And I’m going to be a parasite on you, Furukura, whatever it takes.”

I’d thought the rest of the staff was made up of the same cells as me, but in the current strange atmosphere a village mentality was taking over and they were fast reverting to ordinary males and females. Now only the customers still allowed me to be just a convenience store worker.

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. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.

I looked at the security camera monitor out of the corner of my eye and thought to myself that I would never be shown on it again.

“More than a person, I’m a convenience store worker. Even if that means I’m abnormal and can’t make a living and drop down dead, I can’t escape that fact. My very cells exist for the convenience store.”