Reading heterotopian spaces in Murata Sayaka’s Convenience Store Woman

Murata Sayaka's Convenience Store Woman (Konbini ningen, 2016) portrays Keiko, an unmarried, childless thirty-six-year-old woman and long-time convenience store employee. Aware that her behavior and deviation from the social norms of marriage, motherhood and the family profoundly disturb her friends and family, Keiko takes refuge in the convenience store, where she can minimize social friction. A distinguishing feature of the novella is precisely its capacity to disturb, defamiliarize and unsettle, processes which occur both at the level of the plot and at the level of the text. Taking this unsettling aspect of the novella as its focal point, this article reads Convenience Store Woman through the lens of Foucault's 'heterotopias', sites which draw us outside of ourselves, sites which are somehow 'other' within society and which both mirror and disturb the society they reflect (Foucault 1967 1984). In Murata's novella, the convenience store functions as a 'heterotopian space', reflecting and refracting social norms by presenting Keiko's internally focalized narrative. Locating the reader squarely within Keiko's narration unsettles the reader, who experiences the world – thoughts, perceptions and ideology – through her eyes. The article traces this unsettling feeling, enabled by the heterotopian space of the convenience store and by Keiko's narration, to the novella's dramatic and disconcerting final vignette, with an extended analysis of that closing scene.