Convenience Store Woman

I automatically read the customer’s minutest movements and gaze, and my body acts reflexively in response. My ears and eyes are important sensors to catch their every move and desire. Taking the utmost care not to cause the customer any discomfort by observing him or her too closely, I swiftly move my hands according to whatever signals I pick up.

It is the start of another day, the time when the world wakes up and the cogs of society begin to move. I am one of those cogs, going round and round. I have become a functioning part of the world, rotating in the time of day called morning.

Everyone was crying for the poor dead bird as they went around murdering flowers, plucking their stalks, exclaiming, “What lovely flowers! Little Mr. Budgie will definitely be pleased.” They looked so bizarre I thought they must all be out of their minds.

It was fun to see all kinds of people—from university students and guys who played in bands to job-hoppers, housewives, and kids studying for their high-school diploma at night school—don the same uniform and transform into the homogenous being known as a convenience store worker. Once the day’s training was over, everyone removed their uniforms and reverted to their original state. It was like changing costumes to become a different creature.

At that moment, for the first time ever, I felt I’d become a part in the machine of society. I’ve been reborn, I thought. That day, I actually became a normal cog in society.

When I first started here, there was a detailed manual that taught me how to be a store worker, and I still don’t have a clue how to be a normal person outside that manual.

My present self is formed almost completely of the people around me. I am currently made up of 30 percent Mrs. Izumi, 30 percent Sugawara, 20 percent the manager, and the rest absorbed from past colleagues […] Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.

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.

I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality—all simply store workers.

“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.”

A convenience store is a forcibly normalized environment where foreign matter is immediately eliminated.

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.

Until now I had always needed to make sure I got enough sleep before work the next day. All I had to do was recall how I had to keep in shape for the sake of the convenience store and I would fall asleep right away, but now I didn’t even know why I needed to sleep at all.

“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.”

I thought of the window in the hospital where I first saw my newborn nephew. Through the reflection a bright voice resembling mine rang out. I could distinctly feel all my cells stirring within my skin as they responded in unison to the music reverberating on the other side of the glass.