well, that's keiko.

stars hollow would've been nicer to her.

---

i think kirk gleason would’ve fixed Convenience Store Woman

or at the very least minded his own business about keiko furukura’s marital status, which frankly puts him ahead of every single character in the novel.

i just finished reading Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata and spent most of it thinking about kirk from Gilmore Girls. which is probably not the intended reading experience, but neither is spending eighteen years happily working in the same convenience store, and yet here we are.

the book is weird but surprisingly relaxing because it’s set in such a mundane place. there are books where people cross oceans, survive wars, solve murders. meanwhile furukura is thinking milk cartons and i was completely locked in. for most of the novel you’re either inside furukura’s head or inside a convenience store, which are almost the same thing.

i kept thinking about kirk because on paper they’re nothing alike. we never hear kirk’s inner monologue. we have no idea what’s happening in there. for all we know it’s just circus music and a running tally of stars hollow’s population.

but neither of them is socially unaware. if anything they’re socially too aware. furukura spends half the novel studying human behaviour with the concentration of someone cramming for a final. she observes speech patterns, copies reactions, memorises acceptable responses. she encounters society and thinks, okay clearly everyone knows something i don’t, i better start taking notes.

kirk encounters society and thinks, interesting. anyway.

he moves through stars hollow with the confidence of a man who has never once considered that somebody might find him strange. which is particularly impressive because every single person in stars hollow finds him strange.

they’re also judged for completely opposite things. kirk gets side-eyed for changing jobs every other week. furukura gets side-eyed for staying in the same one for eighteen years. one can’t settle, the other has no desire to leave. yet somehow both seem significantly less stressed than everyone around them.

they're both incredibly precise (maybe not kirk). they're both embarrassingly sincere. neither possesses the social smoothness that everyone else seems to have.

but both seem fine, actually. more than fine. is that making everyone else nervous? we don’t know.

what makes them so endearing is that they genuinely don’t understand why everyone is making such a big deal out of things. marriage. promotions. appearing normal. furukura’s feelings stay buried beneath observation and routine. kirk’s get immediately redirected into a new venture involving homemade merchandise or some elaborate community service project. neither gives grand displays of emotion. they just keep doing their thing while everyone around them convenes to discuss what’s wrong with them.

the biggest difference is that everyone in furukura’s life wants something from her. her family wants to cure her. her coworkers want her to change. random men who should absolutely mind their own business want her to change.

every conversation arrives at the same conclusion: there is a correct way to be a person and she is failing.

kirk gets the opposite. nobody understands kirk either, but at some point the entire town collectively shrugs and goes, “well, that’s kirk.”

i spent half the novel wishing somebody would do the same for furukura.

just look at her and say, “well, that’s keiko.”

instead everyone keeps trying to rescue her from a life she didn’t ask to be rescued from.

people in the novel talk about the convenience store like it’s a dead-end job. furukura talks about it the way religious people talk about finding god in a parking lot. to her the store and being a store worker is her religion. it gives her structure, purpose, a place where she knows exactly where things belong and more importantly, where she belongs.

if someone told me they’d worked in the same convenience store for eighteen years i’d assume breakdown was imminent. furukura sounds genuinely content. she’s not counting the days. she likes it there. the store makes sense to her in a way the rest of the world doesn’t and she has long since stopped pretending otherwise.

which is what makes the ending so sad. or hopeful. or both.

when she walks into another convenience store and immediately starts noticing what needs restocking, what’s out of place, what sounds are missing i couldn’t decide how i felt. part of me thought, oh thank god. part of me thought, oh no.

the novel kept asking whether the convenience store was too small for furukura. by the end i wasn’t sure. the more uncomfortable question is whether the rest of the world is.

anyway. kirk would get it. everyone else in the novel wants to diagnose furukura, fix furukura, optimise furukura, or marry furukura against her will basically. kirk would ask if she wanted coffee, tell her about his latest business idea, and then spend twenty minutes genuinely listening to her explain inventory management.

that would probably be the healthiest relationship in the book.

and the bar, as furukura discovers repeatedly, is on the floor.