She’s given a training to become a convenience store worker, a manual which clearly indicates how she should behave, a set of rules which she has to follow and most importantly a new life as her job allows her to act as a normal person. Keiko seems to find a kind of liberation at 18, which symbolically could also be interpreted as the age of freedom, when she joins the Convenience Store, the Hiiromachi Station Smile Mart, the catalyst which changes everything for our main character.

The relationship between Keiko and the Convenience Store Believing that, Keiko stops expressing herself and by blocking her own individuality, she loses her identity and grows up as a social misfit, a very strange character which almost seems robotic. Yet rational thinking is considered to be strange and unacceptable. In this instance, Keiko represents rational thinking while her mother and the other kids represent social conventions, how society shapes our way of thinking and our behaviour. Why murdering flowers for a creature which is already dead? How can Budgie the bird be pleased when it is already dead? Who is the normal one here, Keiko or them? Through this one incident, Keiko really pushes the reader to question normality vs rational thinking. While everyone cries and goes on ‘murdering flowers, plucking their stalks, exclaiming “what lovely flowers! Little Budgie will be pleased,” Keiko observes that they all looked bizarre and must be out of their minds. Her mother, obviously taken aback by her daughter’s behaviour and lack of empathy tries to reason with Keiko and kept pushing the idea that ‘the bird is dead, everyone is sad and so should be Keiko, that was the normal thing to do in such a tragic situation’.

While the other kids surrounded it and cried, she took the bird to her mother and exclaimed “let’s eat it!”. For instance, when she’s in nursery school, she and other kids found a dead bird in a park. Yet, despite her very young age, she offers the readers a different and interesting way of seeing things through her perspective. Keiko is a strange character who from her childhood behaves differently, weirdly even, from other kids her age. Told from the perspective of the protagonist, Keiko Furukura, the Convenience Store Woman really pushes the readers to question social conventions, normality and rational thinking. Introduction – Keiko, a strange character.

Sayaka murata convenience store woman